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The Bay to Breakers 12K is one of the largest road races in the world - with some 60,000 official entrants in some years, I believe the largest. On May 16th, 2004, I ran my first Breakers and I had the honor of running on the venerated Asics Aggie "centipede" - 13 men yoked together and cajoling, pushing and pulling each other up and down some nasty San Francisco hills, through Golden Gate Park and to the finish adjacent to the Pacific Ocean. The centipede division is a pretty big deal - seeded 'pedes are given starting slots right behind the invited elites - and for the Aggies, formerly a strong Reebok-supported group, a matter of club pride. I’d first heard about this phenomenon in the 80’s, not long after I started running, and at points throughout the intervening years had lazily imagined taking part, but of course assumed this would never happen. (I normally compete for the West Valley Track Club in regional events – more on this below – but run for the Aggies on a per-diem, arthropod-style-only basis.) Anyway, the Aggies centipede gave it a valiant effort against the heavily favored TranSports adidas team, the members of which were clad in light blue Autodesk singlets. The early pace for both 'pedes was conservative - about 5:40 at the mile, even allowing for the three- to five-second lag between the starter's gun and the crossing of the starting line by the 'pede captains. Both the TranSports and the Aggies - unlike the virtually-youthful-to-a-man TranSports, an eclectic mix of recent college grads and masters with long-ago 29:00 10K times - were firing up the crowd early on with "hang loose" signs and other shows of bravado and vim. The two-mile split was around 11:05, with the Asics squad, under the capable guidance of 'pede veteran, Aggies captain, and twinkie-feeler-wearing point man Kevin Pierpoint, who had run 15:02 at the Zippy 5K the previous Sunday. On the steep, half-mile-long hill up Hayes Street, both teams ran conservatively, but passed a lot of fast early starters whose asses were already toast. The three-mile split at the turn onto Fell was just over 17:00. The fourth mile alongside the Panhandle is a long, steady climb; some of the Aggie members were champing at the bit and wanting to surge past the TranSports 'pede here, and though this would have been a good idea, actually, it was not feasible with our two rearmost guys struggling and being virtually towed along by the 4' bungee-style cords linking team members together via carabineer-like attachments to custom belts. Some of the members had been along for the ride when a storied Aggie 'pede ran an incredible 37:39 (5:03 pace) on this course, each man, remarkably yet predictably, having hammered back a good 15 or so brews the night before. Others were 22-year-old 1:49 half-milers, 14-low 5K guys, cross-country standouts, and general troopers.
At four miles the race was still on and both 'pedes were still threading their way up through the field, with only one woman in front of us (one passed runner would later lament that being passed simultaneously by two centipedes was especially excoriating because it meant losing about 30 places at once). The four-mile split was around 22:30, the 7K 24:28. Worrisome was the close bunching of the entire TranSports squad, suggesting that their weakest runners, unlike the Aggies', were not yet struggling. The TranSports whickered by the lead female, a blonde Russian who, from behind at least, resembled Lundy (don't they all, though). Five miles passed in 27:50 and now, with the encroaching downhill stretch that begins at 9K, it was time to race. Whoops of encouragement shot up and down the chain of underdogs even as the TranSports began a programmed surge. Six miles brought thickening crowds, louder bands and a split of 32:50, so the Aggies had dropped a 5:00 mile yet lost a good 40 to 50 meters to the lead 'pede. The lead woman was stubbornly tagging along with the TranSports, and reeling her in was, barring a TranSports wipeout, clearly a better prospect than winning the 'pede division yet another time, but similarly unlikely. With one mile left the Aggies had been running for 35 minutes, 6 seconds. Breaking 40:00 seemed unlikely, but more likely than winning. The TranSports - two of them 2:17 marathoners at February's U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials - were not to be denied and put 15 to 20 seconds on the Aggies by the time the finish line on the Great Highway presented itself; with a finish time of (by one member's watch) 39:57, the Aggies had broken 15:30 for the final furious 5K, yet been gapped by 11 seconds and narrowly bested by the first woman as well. Nevertheless, racing hard in a crazy-as-hell city tethered to 12 other guys as well as a lot of history already stands as a career highlight for the younger and previously uninitiated members of the Asics Aggie centipede.
The Aggie women's 'pede ran unchallenged and finished in 48 minutes and change. Anyway, all of this talk about running clubs and the excitement of competition brings me to a more important point. I've interacted with the Central Mass Striders on many levels, serving as the newsletter editor and as an occasional assistant to the Web guy as well as competing consistently (if not consistently well) in USATF-New England Grand Prix events since 1998. I've worn my CMS racing singlet - actually, about twenty renditions of it, but that's another matter - countless times in the past half-dozen years. I’ve come to regard the Polar bear on my chest as not only a symbol of support of the CMS men's racing team, but an icon representative of race-day confidence and emblematic of unpretentious strength. Even after I began splitting my time between the Blue Ridge and New England almost two years ago, I remained a member of the racing team and wore the uniform virtually every time I competed. During this span, CMS remained my linchpin to New England. I commiserated (but I dare not say empathized) with cruel tales of winter I knew all too well. I raced only twice in Virginia, but perhaps a dozen times during return visits to Massachusetts and New Hampshire, usually with favorable results.
Taking all of this into account, it’s understandable that I never considered a day would come when I’d find myself slipping on the uniform of another club, or asking Steve Vaitones to kindly expunge me from the USATF-NE database so I could officially race and score in the Pacific Association Grand Prix series. Having exhausted my capacity to stave off the inevitable, in February I started a full-job that requires me to be somewhere besides behind my own computer. It’s great in that it calls on my curious mishmash of attributes and interests masquerading as “skills,” but accepting the position demanded that I hoist myself most of the way across the North American continent, to the San Francisco Bay Area. Given that my supervisor is a principal in an organization current CMS mountain maven Paul Low once belonged to, the West Valley Track Club, it was more or less a given who I’d be running for in California. So far, it’s been a productive stay. The combination of favorable weather, job flexibility, a competitive running community unmatched anywhere except possibly in New England, and continued good health since a hip problem that persisted into last fall has seen me assemble perhaps the best stretch of racing of my life, with PR’s at the half-marathon (1:08:22), 10 miles (51:33), 12K (38:35), 5,000 meters on the track (14:58.2) and 5K on the roads (15:16) in the three-month stretch leading into and including my relocation. The essence of joining is not a uniform or a finishing place. It is the opportunity to meld human striving with human emotion and to seek relationships - some fleeting, some deep - with people who share a special bond, one that manifests itself in myriad and often titillating ways. Some of my closest friends in the world are on the men’s open racing team, or MORT. When I think of some of the experiences I've had, whether or not I want to laugh or cry or simply reflect depends on what comes to mind first: Byrne Decker's interminable yet somehow wry grousing during a four-hour run on the Wapack Trial, Don Drewniak's limitless story-weaving, the Rocket City Marathon “reunion” in December 2002, the raucous club members encamped on Heartbreak Hill during my marathon PR in 2001, Dave Dunham and Dan Verrington picking me up by the shattered ego during a miserable stretch of overtraining, shoddy racing, and general malaise in the winter of 2002, and Alan Bernier’s…well, some of you know Al.
On top of that, there’s Brian Carroll’s ongoing and reciprocal expansion of both his marathon prowess and Brendan’s Buddies, Joe Alfano’s unmatched blend of volunteerism, marathon mania and cerebral humanism, and the prolific and shameless road-whoring of Heather Gardiner, the eyes-shut world record holder at several road distances. Where I sit today is proof that none of us, regardless of how or what we think, ever has a truly complete idea where life might lead. But given the whirlwind of memories I can’t and don’t want to forsake, I think I understand one thing: I'm not leaving CMS behind, but leaving it ahead. Kevin Beck |
