“Absolutely,” I said. “We’re a team.”
21
Go Barb Dolan on That Burro!
A few weeks later, I was in front of the house pounding fence posts for a new donkey pasture when a car whipped into the driveway. A woman with a frantic look in her eye waved me over.
“Chill the eff out,” I muttered, irked by the interruption but kind of pleased that I’d managed to stick with my recent F-bomb ban. “Never saw a freaking goat in the road before?” I added, blowing the streak because I’ve never actually said “freaking” in my life. I dropped the digging iron and headed over to the car. “Hang on, I’ll grab him,” I called, looking around for Lawrence before realizing he was traipsing along behind me. Whoever this stranger was, whatever upset her, this time Lawrence had an alibi.
“You’re Chris?” the woman asked.
“Yeaaah?” I answered warily.
“Paul sent me over.”
“Paul?”
“Tanya’s friend. She’s been in an accident. It’s serious.”
At that moment, an ambulance was speeding Tanya to Lancaster General Hospital. “She was helping me train my new carriage horse,” the stranger told me, “when the horse spooked and went berserk, flipping the carriage and dragging her.” The woman managed to grab the reins and stop the horse, but not before Tanya had been badly battered. Paramedics stopped the bleeding and immobilized her on a backboard, fearing she might have suffered a spinal injury. “I’m Shelley,” the woman finally mentioned. She had called Paul, who told her to alert me before heading to the hospital herself.
I ran to the house for my phone and heard it ringing before I got there. Somehow, my neighbor Amos had already gotten word of the accident and was looking for a ride to the emergency room. “Sit tight,” I told him. Mika happened to be in Lancaster that morning, so she could get to the hospital first and find out what was going on. I knew that the second Tanya opened her eyes, she’d be fretting about her animals, so she might get more peace of mind if she knew Amos and I were looking after her farm rather than crowding around her hospital bed.
I called Mika, who instantly sped to the ER. Tanya was conscious, Mika told me, but in a lot of pain. She had suffered a cracked skull, two broken vertebrae, and a badly gashed knee. Thankfully, the doctors were confident that Tanya would recover but warned that she was facing a long road back. She’d be in a body cast for at least two months before she could even begin to regain mobility.
* * *
—
Amos and I drove over to Christmas Wish Farm and found Tanya’s neighbors already at work. They’d fed and watered the Dobermans and horses, mucked out the barn, and even dragged the trashed carriage out of the paddock. Tanya’s place would be well cared for, they assured us, and her house would be clean and ready for her return. Once she was home, the Amish community would cook meals for her and mobilize a chicken potpie fund-raiser to contribute to her medical bills. Tanya might live in the middle of nowhere, but she wasn’t alone.
“How about you?” Amos asked as we headed home. “What are you going to do?”
I knew exactly what he meant but pretended I didn’t. Amos had helped us with Sherman from the day he arrived, even volunteering his younger brother to care for Sherman’s hooves when Tanya’s husband suddenly exited, so he’d witnessed firsthand how much we relied on Tanya and stumbled when she wasn’t around. Still, it felt monstrous to be already worrying about myself so soon after her accident—until I remembered that this was the way Amish farmers deal with tough breaks: As soon as they see a problem, they attack it. What other choice did they have? If you don’t have the luxury of tapping a few numbers on a phone to save your ass when you’ve ignored the drip under the sink or forgotten to shop for dinner, you learn you can’t put things off and hope they magically get better on their own. You’ve got to square up to the facts, and that’s why Amos was urging me to face this new reality right away: Tanya wasn’t coming back. As of that moment we were on our own, and we didn’t have a moment to spare. Until then, I’d assumed Tanya would be back to help us through the final weeks and join us at the starting line, but the bottom had just dropped out of that plan. We wouldn’t even see the starting line if I didn’t figure out—and fast—how to haul three donkeys to Colorado without Tanya, her truck, or her trailer.
“You know anyone who can drive us?” I asked.
Amos shook his head. “I’m not even sure who to ask.”
I dropped Amos off and drove home slowly, thinking hard. By the time I reached the driveway, I had it. God, the solution was so obvious. Why did we need a driver when we already had three? Mika, Zeke, and I would just haul the trailer ourselves. I’d ruled out that possibility ever since Tanya once described to me how dangerous and difficult it is to get donkeys back into the trailer once you’ve stopped on the road to walk and water them, but then I had the brainstorm that cracked the problem wide open: we just wouldn’t stop. If the three of us split the driving, we could bomb all the way to Colorado in one shot, taking turns at the wheel and sleeping in the backseat between shifts. What would it take—about a day, day and a half? Easy.
I sat in the driveway for a while, stress-testing the scenario before going into the house to present it to Mika. Obviously, we’d have to take it slow for the first few hundred miles, since none of us had ever driven a trailer before, let alone a trailer full of live animals prone to kicking. We’d need to borrow Tanya’s Durango, which would demand a little adjustment as well: it was finicky and had a quarter-million miles on the engine, and I think a stick. Did Zeke even drive stick? Her trailer was just as ancient; the tires looked bald and she’d had to nail down plywood to cover the holes in the floor. But hang on, we couldn’t be using that rig anyway; it held only two donkeys. Which meant…
Screams, sirens, the agonized shrieks of dying donkeys. My mind was suddenly filled with the image of a horrific highway accident: the Durango shattered and strewn in pieces across the asphalt, the trailer ripped apart like the old tin can it was, Sherman and Flower and Matilda mangled and bleeding, while the rest of us…Nope, not even going there. That’s where my imagination shut down, refusing to even envision what would happen to Zeke and Mika when we crashed—which we absolutely would. Put three rookies in a decrepit Durango that’s already ticked past a quarter-million miles and send them westward pulling a 5,000-pound stock trailer, and you know that somewhere—maybe at midnight in the Blue Ridge Mountains, possibly during rush hour in downtown Indianapolis, most likely on one of the hairpin passes high in the Rockies—that little gamble is ending in a morgue. I’m usually more stubborn than Sherman when it comes to letting go of a bad idea, but that image of blood on the road made me dump this plan for good before I even got out of the truck.
Amos was right about one thing, I realized as I went inside the house: fretting about the wrong problem was leading me toward trouble. Right now, there was nothing I could do about our transportation fiasco except send out a call for help and be patient, same as I did when we needed a new hoof healer. In the meantime, there was another situation that needed immediate attention. I checked the time. Nearly eight at night. Still early in Wyoming.
Time to make the call.
* * *
—
“Hey, Speedy!” a cheery voice on the phone greeted me.
No one except Eric Orton could give me that nickname without it sounding like a put-down. He knows better than anyone that nothing can make me fast and nobody can make me care, which in my eyes makes him the perfect coach. I met Eric during my previous life as a magazine journalist, when Men’s Journal assigned me to profile this innovative fitness trainer from Jackson Hole who was among the first to use natural-movement techniques to make his athletes stronger, calmer, and more resistant to injury. Back then, I was overweight and aging, and effectively banned from running by doctors who said my Shrek-like body couldn’t withstand the
impact of “all that pounding.”
Horseshit, Eric snorted, and then he proved it: within nine months, he’d ripped me apart and put me back together again, building me up from scratch until I could run a fifty-mile race with Tarahumara tribespeople across Mexico’s Copper Canyon. Coach E gave me a gift that changed my life. He not only made Born to Run possible; he sent me away from that adventure feeling absolutely unbreakable, as if I could step out the door every day and run as far and as hard as I felt like without worrying about getting hurt—which I’ve pretty much been doing ever since. Occasionally I’ll pull a muscle or get sloppy about technique, but all I have to do is reboot with the lessons Eric taught me and I’m right back in action.
“How’s it been going?” Eric asked, when I called him after Tanya’s accident. “You excited?”
“You wouldn’t believe the crazy drama. We could use some serious help.”
“Nice,” Eric said. “Way to keep things spicy. So what’s going on?”
Eric, naturally, was one of the first calls I’d made last fall when I’d first begun toying with the idea of a burro race. I wanted someone I trusted to tell me, flat out, if I could handle that kind of a beating. At age fifty-four, I would be preparing for an uphill run in thin air on the highest drivable road in North America. The Fairplay route begins at 10,000 feet and climbs to more than 12,000, nearly half the height of Mount Everest. I hadn’t trained for something that hard in a decade, not since the last time Eric helped me reverse years of inactivity, and I knew he would give it to me straight. I’d learned that lesson down in the Copper Canyon when Eric and I crossed paths in the middle of the race as he was descending a big hill I was about to climb. I expected him to cheer me on. Instead, he dropped this cheery basket of fun on me: “Brace yourself. It’s a lot harder than you think.” He totally knee-chopped me—until I began running again, and found as I leaned into the hill that the hard facts were a lot more helpful than a happy lie.
So when I asked Eric at the beginning of my burro training to handicap my chances, I steeled myself for another punch in the gut. Instead, he got all weird and karmic.
“So eerie,” he said. “You know how eerie this is?”
“Not a clue. What are you talking about?”
“Dude, it’s ten years to the month since we trained for the Copper Canyon race. It could be the same week. It might be the same day,” Eric said.
Fair enough. The timing was pretty cosmic. But from a more earthly perspective, it also drove home the fact that I hadn’t trained hard in a looooong time. “What do you think?” I’d asked. “Can we do it again?”
In that very first conversation, Eric had gotten right down to business. “Okay, we’ve got a lot of work to do. But yeah, you can handle it. You’ve got a great motor, and when you’re fired up about something, you see it through.” Eric quickly launched me on a workout schedule that gradually increased my mileage while fine-tuning my running form to prevent over-use injuries. I followed Eric’s formula whenever we weren’t training with the donkeys, and week by week, I began feeling stronger, faster, and lighter on my feet.
But then things got complicated. Eric thought he was signing on to work with one man and his sick donkey, and before he knew it, I’d added my hula dancer wife to the team, taken a depressed college kid under our wing, tripled the number of donkeys, realized one of them was too fast for me, discovered we had to cross a raging torrent, and lost our trailer driver and head trainer to a buggy crash.
“We’re getting down to the crunch,” I told Eric. “We’ve got a lot of problems and not a lot of time.”
Eric corrected me: “Flip it around,” he said. “Remember what I told you with the Copper Canyon race? You don’t start with today and aim toward your goal. You start with the goal, and aim back toward today. Do it like that, and you’ll always find a way.”
Eric was right; I’d forgotten we’d had the same conversation ten years ago, back when he’d also had to talk me off the ledge when I was convinced that nine months was far too little time for anyone, let alone an out-of-shape doughboy like me, to go from zero miles a week to fifty miles in a day. It’s not magic, Eric had taught me. It’s not even toughness or luck; it’s just math. Spot your finish line, count the steps to get there, and take them one at a time.
“But you’ve got a point,” he went on now, not missing a beat as he shifted from pep talk to whiteboarding. “This is a lot trickier than just running up and down a mountain.” The way he saw it, we were fighting three tugs-of-war at the same time. We had to prepare for high altitude, but at sea level. We had to train with the donkeys, but stay one step ahead of them. Mika, Zeke, and I had different ages, genders, and experience levels, but we had to run together as a team. Eric loved the challenge, and promised he would dive right in and get back to me with a battle plan.
“By the way,” he added, “have you told Mika she can win?”
* * *
—
As usual, Eric had done his homework. He knew a curious fact about pack burro racing: some of the greatest showdowns have been duels between men and women, and as likely as not, it ain’t the guy who comes out ahead. Once that shotgun blasts and the mad stampede disappears into the mountains, it’s anyone’s guess whether a man or a woman will be the first to return.
In 2011, for instance, forty-year-old Karen Thorpe went up against three of the fastest burromen alive—Tom Sobal, Justin Mock, and Jim Anderegg—and outran them all to win the 63rd World Championship. Louise Kuehster has been a top contender in the short courses since she was a teenager, and Barb Dolan triumphed in one of the sport’s most thrilling sprint finishes when she and her trusty partner, Chugs, fought off Bobby Lewis and Wellstone in a furious final charge to win the 2004 Buena Vista Gold Rush twelve-miler. Burro racing is one of those rare, beautiful, come one/come all events that doesn’t care a hoot about the size of the dog in the fight, or even the size of the fight in the dog: muscle and testosterone are no match for stamina, patience, and respect for your teammate.
“Whatever you’re hiding inside, a burro will sniff it out,” Curtis Imrie always says. “You can’t be a bully or a blowhard, and if that sounds more like one gender to you than another, you’ll understand why men can struggle at this sport and women excel.”
I learned that lesson by accident while I was visiting Hal Walter in Colorado. That same weekend, Hal was hosting his annual Hardscrabble Mountain Run, a 10K/5K trail race across the nearby foothills with no burros involved. I wasn’t exactly psyched to run after I’d been brought to my knees by the thin air the day before, but I couldn’t blow off Hal’s race after he’d been so hospitable. Surprisingly, I got off to a decent start—or so I thought, until I was halfway up the first big climb and some ponytailed kid blasted past me like she’d been launched from a cannon. She disappeared so far into the distance, I didn’t see her again until Hal was handing out the awards.
“C’mon up, Lynzi,” Hal shouted, calling out first place in the nineteen-and-under division. “Helluva burro racer too, folks. Lynzi was only fourteen last year when she finished fourth in the World Championship.”
Fourteen and finished fourth…
Hang on. Did I hear that right? Was Hal saying some ninth-grade girl not only handled the same kind of beast that had humbled me the day before during my training run with Hal, but did it so flawlessly that an army of seasoned racers couldn’t catch her? All weekend, I’d been soaking up a greatest hits of donkey disasters, cautionary tales of epic crashes and nasty bites and well-meaning McMurphys who trip over their own hooves with epileptic tweens on their backs, and just when I was sinking into a dark pit of doubt, from out of nowhere this human ray of hope suddenly appears…
And just as quickly disappears.
By the time I got to the awards area to ask Lynzi her secret, she’d already picked up her hardware and left. I pushed through the crowd, searching for her co
nstantly vanishing ponytail, and spotted her just as she was getting into her mom’s car. If I’d looked left instead of right, they might have been gone before I got there. That’s how close I came to missing one of the greatest stories of death, love, and triumph I’ve ever heard.
Plus, I never would have learned the Trash Wrapper Trick.
* * *
—
“People who knew Lynzi as a child can’t believe she’s even alive,” Lynzi’s mom, Kelly Doke, told me. She’d invited me over to the woodland home that she and her husband, Ryan, still have to pinch themselves to believe they own. The fight to save their little girl’s life was so devastating that the family ended up penniless and displaced, losing their house and everything they owned. Only now, fifteen years later, are they finding their footing again.
On the day Lynzi was born, Kelly was opening the door of their pickup when a blinding pain across her belly doubled her over. Ryan helped her into the truck and floored it, screeching up to the hospital just in time for Lynzi to emerge eight minutes later. Kelly is a nurse, and even though she was still woozy from her own ordeal, she immediately sensed something was wrong. She could hear the nurses whispering, but she couldn’t hear her baby. She called out for answers, insisting on being told what was going on, until one of the nurses finally told her: Lynzi was drowning. The pain Kelly had felt in the driveway was her placenta tearing away, allowing fluid to seep into Lynzi’s lungs. Lynzi was also six weeks premature, leaving her heart and lungs underdeveloped and vulnerable to infection.
After a few tense minutes, the nurses cleared the congestion and Lynzi began to breathe steadily. The Dokes took her home, but four weeks later, Kelly brought her back to the hospital. Lynzi wasn’t eating well, her breathing was raspy, and she seemed listless. “No, she’s fine,” her pediatrician assured her. “You’re a nurse, so you’re overthinking this.” Kelly had worked with that doctor and trusted him, but something in her gut told her he was wrong. Ordinarily, her husband is the peacemaker of the family, a quiet presence who’s clearly enchanted by the way Kelly runs the show. Kelly wouldn’t even date him at first; she was so focused on working her way through college as a veterinary technician that she let Ryan spend time with her only if he rode along on her emergency calls for cow C-sections. When Ryan tried courting her with roses for Valentine’s Day, Kelly was appalled at the cost and insisted he return them and take her to Taco Bell instead. After they were married, Ryan was happy to let Kelly call the shots with their kids, especially when it came to medical care.
Running with Sherman Page 23