The C₃ Fun Run: The Real Story

t was Saturday morning, 6 o'clock, and as I bent over to pull on my running shoes, a sharp pain in the temple reminded me that we had said goodbye to the last bottle of Chateau C₃ the night before. Bob Perkins and I were sharing a hotel room, and it seemed to have become the default conference hospitality suite. It's a dirty job, but in Shahid's absence this year, somebody had to do it. I stumbled across the hotel lobby to check the temperature outside. It was a bright clear morning, but the resistance of the door to my efforts to open it betrayed a stiff Yukon breeze on the other side. As I stood outside, I wondered if the good folks at Nike had ever considered making Polarguard running shorts.

The run was to start on the east side of the Yukon river, across the bridge from where the sternwheeler Klondike sits as a reminder of the area's colourful past. I joined small group of runners headed across the bridge for our meeting with destiny. By the time we arrived, the van from the college rolled into the parking lot, dropped its load of bleary-eyed runners, and headed back. There was no way to avoid it now, there was definitely going to be a run.

The race start was deceptively easy, and I soon found myself running along a narrow trail beside the river. It quickly became apparent that this was a cross-country course, sometimes requiring a jump over a creek, other times a quick decision about which fork in the trail to take. The pace seemed tentative, as if the runners needed some time to warm up and check out the competition. After an uneventful 2.5 km, we reached the dam where the route doubled back. There is extensive fish ladder here, constructed to allow fish to struggle around the power dam and continue up stream. Today, there was no water, no fish, and absolutely no reason to stop, and yet I found myself joining the crowd staring down into the empty structure. There was nothing there! Why, for the first time in C₃ Fun Run history, had everybody stopped in the middle of the race? Was this some sort of perverse stratagem to catch us all napping and steal the coveted J. Willard Gibbs Fun Run Trophy?

Napping, that's it! It suddenly hit me. I had a flash back to the previous year's run at Heritage College. The day of that race was cold and rainy, and Bob Perkins and I received a phone call at 5:30 am informing us that the race had been cancelled and suggesting that we go back to sleep. Being from BC we knew we wouldn't dissolve in the rain, so we had our own fun run along the Ottawa River. Later that day, conference organizers announced that a Montreal runner had run the real course, and they intended to award the trophy to him. The whole thing smelled of a rip off. They even got a usually trustworthy college administrator to purger himself by declaring that he had been a witness to this alleged race. I refused to give up the trophy. Much shouting and pushing ensued, but J. Willard went back to the coast in my luggage. And now, it was my hunch that someone had created this distraction and had started back along the trail, leaving the rest of us in the proverbial cloud of moose dung.

I bolted for the path and suddenly the race was on. With only 2.5 km to go, and not knowing how much of a lead our perpetrator had, we would have to set a blistering pace if we expected to catch him. We retraced our route along the water: there was the jump over the creek, the spilt in the path, and the washout where we almost fell into the river. It all went by in a blur. And then we rounded that last corner and the finish line came into view about 50 m ahead. I could see Suzanne and Jacky, cameras and stopwatches poised to record the winner for posterity. I scanned the path ahead but our phantom runner was nowhere in sight, and to my surprise, I was heading for the tape. At last the fun run trophy would be mine, and legally this time.

Ah yes, the J. Willard Gibbs Fun Run Trophy. As the last 50 m disappeared behind me, my thoughts returned to the first time it had been presented. Rintje Raap had won the race in 1990, but when he saw the trophy at the award presentations, he slid quietly down behind the row of seats and pretended that he wasn't there. You see, it's a little unconventional for a running trophy. That golden woman swinging the golf club at the top of the thing is a little misleading for starters. And where the solid gold plating is starting to chip, it looks suspiciously like plastic underneath. The more I thought of it, the more urgent that little voice inside me became. "Haven't you lugged that piece of junk around long enough? Do you actually want to win it this year and condemn yourself to another twelve months of dusting it?" For the first time that morning, I had a calm rational moment, and I stopped about 10 m short of the finish line. When I turned around, I noticed that those behind me, in a moment of generosity, had decided to yield the moment of triumph to someone else and had stopped too. Soon there was a mini traffic jam of benevolent, selfless people, all standing just short of the finish line. Then around the last corner came a puzzled Rick Bolesta. In the excitement of the moment, we hoisted him on our shoulders and carried him triumphantly across the finish line and into the record book. Actually it was more like kicking and screaming, but what the heck, we had our winner.

So it's all over for another year. The J. Willard Gibbs Trophy is back in the west, entropy is increasing, and the universe is unfolding as it should. As a postscript, Rick won the draw for one of the race T-shirts, a fitting reward for being such a good sport, and my buddy Bob Perkins won the other one. And we have a whole year to speculate about how those folks in the east plan to get the trophy back.