The other day I checked my blog, thinking, “Hey, maybe I’ve posted something new. O wait . . .” I can’t wait until I’m addicted to posting like I’m addicted to checking my email every .2 seconds, and my friends have to chisel my fingers away from the keyboard or maybe put a bottle of Jamesons across the room under a rock that’s feebly propped up with a stick.
So I’ve just finished my Arabic class this semester, along with my boxing class and my tutoring jobs (more on those later). Unlike most classes, which end with a big final, or a big presentation, or a big paper, my professor was like, “Hey guys, how about you bring me 4 essays, and then speak in Arabic for 10 minutes on a topic using advanced vocabulary you don’t know yet, and then we’ll have a two hour final, and then I’ll smack you around for a bit with this tire iron.”
I like presentations in other languages about as much as I like getting sprayed in the eyes with cleaning fluid, so I wait until the night before to pick a topic and prepare notes. Because most of my classmates went with topics that were guaranteed to be incomprehensible to anyone except the professor (water treatment systems in the Middle East, the symbolism found in Arabic gardens), and because I didn’t feel like writing out my entire presentation, I decided to do the Iraqi soccer team winning the 2007 Asia Cup.
More specifically, the final game where the Iraqi national team beat Saudi Arabia (3-time champions) to win the 2007 Asia Cup. The more I read about the game and the team, the more impressed I got. The other teams had been playing together for months and practicing in state of the art facilities. The Iraq team met two months before the Cup started, and had to train outside of Iraq because of the war. Their coach, a Brazilian named Jorvan Vieira, met the team a month before the Cup started (Brazilians are apparently way better at soccer than Asians. He stated in a press conference that “winning the Asia Cup would look good on my resume”). One of the team trainers was killed in a car bomb explosion on the way to picking up his airplane tickets. The goalkeeper’s brother-in-law was killed just before the tournament began, a midfielder’s relatives were kidnapped and murdered, and a forward’s stepmother died two days before the quarter final in Vietnam.
On an interesting side note the Iraqi team is known as Asuud A’rrafidain, or Lions of the Two Rivers. In Greek, “Mesopotamia” means “the land between the two rivers”. Those two rivers would be the Tigris and the Euphrates, and Iraqis often call their country by the aforementioned name.
When Iraq won the semifinal game against Korea, thousands of Iraqis celebrated wildly in the streets, until two car bombs killed 50 people in Baghdad. What the hell. So there was a vehicle ban in Baghdad for the finals. There was also a shooting bullets into the air ban, but of course as soon as the Iraq team scored that went right out the window, and four Iraqis died from falling bullets.
The team is a symbol of unity in Iraq because it is made up of Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurdish players. The Bush administration really wanted to use this win as propaganda for how it was possible for the people of Iraq to unite as one. Unfortunately, Younes Mahmoud, captain of the team and purveyor of amazing headers, came out against the American occupation as soon as the game was over. Look how emocionado this guy is:
Younes Mahmoud could eat the American occupation. I’ll leave you with this awesome clip which proves once again that every foreign sports announcer in the world is more exciting than one speaking English.
So I was at a party in Santa Cruz a few months back when the lovely and asthmatic Katie was like, “Hey, do you want to run a relay? It’s from Calistoga to Santa Cruz!”, to which I replied, “Sure! No problem,” not having any idea where Calistoga was.
A few weeks later I go check out the website, and the first thing I notice is the name: The Relay. How presumptuous. Then I see where Calistoga is, and I almost empty my bladder in shock. 199 miles from Santa Cruz! And there’s an $80 entry fee per person! And each team has to raise $600! And it’s for a good cause!
Normally I would have been out right then, but I don’t like going back on my word, and the more I found out about The Relay, the more awesome and epic it sounded. So I pay the entrance fee like a huge sucker and start training. Because I’m taking a boxing class at a junior college, a lot of that training consisted of getting punched in the face, but I did some running too. Sean suggested that our team name be “Don’t Belittle Little Italy” (Sean still can’t believe we didn’t get best team name), which is even funnier if you imagine Bob Loblaw of Arrested Development fame saying it. The other Shaun designed awesome t-shirts for our team, which look like this:
So here’s how The Relay works. A 12-member team runs 199 miles nonstop over two days from Calistoga to Santa Cruz. The 199 miles are split into 36 legs, and each person runs 3 legs, so the first runner runs legs 1, 13, and 25. The team is split between two vans, so that while one half of the team is running, the other half of the team can theoretically get some rest for a few hours. The legs vary from running 5 miles along the scenic beauty of Napa’s vineyards to a murderous 1000-foot elevation climb for 3 miles up the Santa Cruz hills. Here’s a picture of me running one of my legs:
That’s right, I’m FORDING A RIVER. Just kidding, that’s actually Team Dean, known affectionately in van 1 (my van) as “that asshole Karnazes”. People call him Team Dean because he runs THE ENTIRE RELAY BY HIMSELF. No sleep. No breaks. He eats and drinks while running, he only pulls over to drain the lizard, and he carries a cell phone with him so he can manage his business while he runs. He has also run the “Northface 50”, which is 50 marathons in 50 states in fifty days, and even a marathon in Antarctica. He also eats bears for breakfast.
Here’s the team gathered around The Relay’s mascot (which looks suspiciously like spongebob) at the starting line in Calistoga at 6:30 in the morning after getting 5 hours of sleep. I’m not in the picture because I was standing next to the wrong sign.
We start running Saturday at 7:00 am because team start times are determined by the mile pace times we sent in, and being mostly inexperienced runners, most of us overestimated our times a tad bit. In the industry this is known as “sandbagging”. Because of how sandbaggy we were, our very 1st runner, Trevor the bee farmer, pulled ahead of the pack and left that asshole Karnazes in the dust. For the rest of the relay we battled it out for first place with the Slowskys and then with Uncle Wally’s, building a good-natured rivalry and prompting Todd and Shaun to draw an enormous penis and balls on the top of our van.
As usual, most of the screw-ups came from me (and van 2. Really, Cline?). After my very first leg, the “baton” (a useless green knock-off of a livestrong bracelet) snapped when the next runner tried putting it on, probably because of my corrosive sweat, which I sometimes use to remove paint. Then I just barely miss the hand-off at the start of my second leg because I went #2 in a church bathroom, so Yira, the runner before me, decides that instead of waiting for me at the hand-off, it would be funny to start SPRINTING AWAY FROM ME. Admittedly, it was pretty funny, but it’s not as funny when you have to run up a 400-foot hill immediately after chasing down a crazed elementary school teacher.
When we weren’t running, we spent our time yelling encouraging things out the window of our 15-person van and staging photo-ops where we sprayed our runners with water, pillows, high fives, and affection in the form of songs from Shaun.
The race was awesome, more awesome than you could possibly imagine. It was a wellspring of untapped, limitless awesomeness. Nothing beats the view of San Francisco from Bridgeway under a full moon, or ghostriding the whip of a 15-person van in the middle of the night, or warming up for your run in someone else’s bathrobe at 5am, or running downhill a winding road to the sound of squealing breaks because the trucks behind you and can’t see you until you have taken up residence in their fenders.
Saturday night van 1 finished our second rotation after Todd’s epic run across the Golden Gate Bridge (the tunnel at the end had no power, so he was running with only the light from his headlamp), and our awesome driver Melissa drove to Todd’s parents house, where we gorged ourselves on pizza and strawberries before passing out at midnight, only to be rudely awoken two and a half hours later. Who feels like running? F off.
Sunday morning was sooo cold (my last run was 5.9 miles at 5:30 in the morning, and halfway through I had lost most of the feeling in my hands). And even though Trevor could still feel the four slices of Hawaiian pizza he ate three hours earlier, and had a gimp knee from being run off the road by a car, he still booked it on his last leg, roadkilling (when you pass a runner in front of you) an Uncle Wally runner. The rest of the crew pulled awesome last legs for not having slept at all, including Todd’s ridiculous 6.5 minute mile uphill with a BEER IN HIS HAND.
After van 1 finished, we all drove to Santa Cruz, took showers, gorged ourselves on burritos at Planet Fresh, and then went down to the beach to wait for the rest of the team. Sean, our anchor, ran the last leg to the beach like the wind, and even had enough energy for a fist pump when we crossed the finish line.
Conclusion: I can run ridiculously fast downhill. Also, video to come soon.
You guys can disregard this post, my brother put it up, I had nothing to do with it. Seriously. Speaking of my brother, he is a amazing website designer/manager, if you need help with any of that kind of stuff shoot me a message and I’ll put you guys into contact.
