Ok, check this out….
My coach wrote a training plan for me for the 12 Hours at Cool Night Run that will hopefully help me achieve six or more laps around the nine mile course. For the weekend of Western States (WS), he had me doing a 35 mile workout on Saturday and a 10 mile workout on Sunday. When I first saw it, I thought, “Those are going to be some lonely miles since I know where everyone else will be those days.” Then I thought, “How long will that 35 miler take me?” And suddenly I realized maybe those miles wouldn’t have to be so lonely after all.
I contacted my coach and asked if he thought pacing a “slower” WS runner through the night over the last 38 miles of the course was advisable… he gave the idea a thumbs up. So I went to ws100.com and looked at the list of people asking for a pacer. The very last one was a 55 year old guy from Montana named Rich DeSimone. His short bio said Western States will be his first 100 mile run, his time goal is to finish.
In life I have had some experience with Montanans. There is something about living half of every year below zero degrees that seems to have a profound psychological effect. Put another way: I have noticed that the average Montanan has a much higher pain threshold than the average Californian. I have also noticed that when you get a Montanan going at something physically difficult, they usually will be the last one in any group to give up. They start slow, but they go forever…. diesel engines. That’s what I’ve seen, anyway. It seemed like a reasonable gamble that I will be likely to get my mileage for the day if I offered to “pace” him from Foresthill to Auburn.
I sent Mr. DeSimone a brief email suggesting I might be an adequate pacer if his standards were low, and he jumped right on, willing to take me sight unseen… Because I already have plans to go out of town when he will be in town for the Western States Training Weekend over the Memorial Day weekend, we may not be able to meet each other until the moment we take off running together. In order to get an idea of who we each are, he sent me a link to a newspaper article that describes his work as a biologist for Montana Department of Fish and Game.
Of course, I had already noticed he was a biologist for Montana Department of Fish and Game from the automatic signature at the end of his first email. “That would be the life,” I thought. “Getting paid to go fishing or whatever… I bet he goes hiking in the woods all day for work!” I envisioned a guy wearing a big wool shirt, cutting open a massive trout to see what it had been eating, or laying on a ridge line counting elk through binoculars, you know, stuff like that.
Well, what I envisioned was just a little off the mark. What he actually does fits much more squarely with my preconceived stereotype for Montanans: He is the leader of a ten year study on mountain lions at the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station’s Wildlife Genetics Laboratory at the University of Montana. Hmmmm….. That didn’t quite sound like cutting open fish or counting big horn sheep. So I read the article. You can read it here.
When it explained how he hasn’t put collars on all 121 of the mountain lions he has caught during the study, I started to have second thoughts. I’m going to spend 12 hours running on a mountain trail in the dark with a guy who has been close enough to touch 121 mountain lions?
Hmmm… I’m not sure I want to go running… in the dark… on a trail where there is already a monument to a person who was killed by a mountain lion… with a guy who feels that comfortable with mountain lions.
There’s something about the idea that suddenly seemed… ill-advised.
In order to get a better perspective of his expertise, I googled “Rich DeSimone Lions”. The search returned eleven pages worth of hits. About the time I was starting to realize that maybe running with him at night is actually a good idea, I mean, he’s still around to tell the story of 121 mountain lion contacts, I found a great article about what to do if you ever encounter a lion face to face. Check it out here.
And now I am really eager to run with him. We need a friend who works for Montana Fish and Game….
