It would take a Miracle ...

In honor of my Boston Bruins, who begin their quest for the team's first Stanley Cup in a gazillion years tonight against the dastardly Les Habitants of Montreal, here is one of my favorite stories ever. First published in February, 2004, it recounts the making of Miracle, the movie of the gold medal-winning United States hockey team at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980. The original ran on SportsIllustrated.com, and can be seen here.

The best part of the research, in addition to interviewing my good buddy Bobby Hanosn (who plays Dave Silk in the movie), was chatting with Kurt Russell (at right, with director Gavin "No Relation" O'Connor) as a hockey fan, not a movie star. I couldn't get the guy off the phone!

Real to the core
Getting the hockey action right was the key to making Miracle work

Athletes have to believe in miracles. That's why they show up.

Just ask Mike Eruzione, captain of the unheralded 1980 Olympic hockey team that grabbed gold in stunning fashion at Lake Placid. Better yet, ask three Boston guys plucked from obscurity to play key roles in Miracle, which is due out on Friday.

A short 16 months ago, Patrick "Paddy" O'Brien Demsey, Michael Mantenuto and Bobby Hanson were Hollywood unknowns, as faceless as Herb Brooks' band of college students from the Cold War winter of 1980. No acting experience, no national recognition.

"I told Paddy, 'Hold you breath, man, because we're about to go from zero to 4,000 miles an hour,' says Mantenuto.

No doubt, life is going to change in a big way for these three former college hockey players. Backed by Disney's promotional machine and a "can't miss" storyline, Miracle had to be considered a hit coming out of the gate. Kurt Russell gave the movie star power as Coach Brooks, while Eddie Cahill (Jennifer Anniston's boyfriend on Friends) was tagged as goaltender Jim Craig.

But director Gavin O'Connor wanted authenticity above anything else. That meant taking risks, starting with casting hockey players who could act, not actors trying to play hockey.

"I wanted a dramatization of the sport, and I didn't think that could be executed at the level I wanted with actors," O'Connor said. "Using stunt men and body doubles wouldn't give the audience the visceral feeling of what it's like to be on the ice. I wanted everything to smell real and raw and truthful.

"The challenge was to find kids who could play the sport at a very high level and who were born with the acting gene but didn't know it. It was a very long process. We saw almost 4,000 kids."

Casting calls went out in Minnesota and in Boston in October 2002. Mantenuto was working on a fishing boat in Gloucester, Mass., when he learned about the auditions. After playing a season and a half for the University of Maine, the 22-year-old was taking a break from school, reassessing his priorities.

So he answered the casting call, auditioning in Boston, where he met Demsey, a high-energy 23-year-old, and Hanson, a quiet, 26-year-old part-time coach with superb hockey pedigree -- four years at Boston University and brief stints in Europe and the East Coast Hockey League.

Demsey grew up skating on a backyard pond built by his dad, picked up organized hockey in high school and played two years at Fitchburg State College. A communications major, he was interning at a graphic arts firm when he found an ad for the auditions. It didn't matter that he had never acted before.

Demsey showed up the next day in Boston, one of thousands of Hollywood wannabes. He had the look, the accent, and the mannerisms that pegged him for Eruzione, or as Hanson called him, "the Irish Eruzione."

"I know Disney wasn't interested in me, because I had never done anything before and Eruzione is such a huge part of this story," Demsey said. "But Gavin told me that from the time he met me, he knew I was the guy."

At a subsequent Los Angeles audition, Demsey further impressed Hollywood scouts during a scrimmage between Miracle candidates, scoring two goals ("That equaled my college output.").

But it was Mantenuto -- eyed for rock-solid, wisecracking defenseman Jack O'Callahan -- who secured his spot at the Tinseltown tryout. Told beforehand that he'd be reading for the O'Callahan role -- "a tough, Boston kid, the first guy in a hockey fight to stand up for his boys" -- Mantenuto was goaded by another recruit.

"He was a big kid, played at Harvard," Mantenuto said. "He's out there picking on these actor-type kids, who weren't sticking up for themselves, and I have a problem with that."

Mantenuto stepped on the ice, got hacked, and his hockey instincts took over.

"This kid says, 'What are you gonna do, pretty boy?' So I drop my gloves," Mantenuto said. "I end up getting in a fight, and kicking his ass pretty badly. And, in slow motion, I look over at Gavin and I think, 'Oh, s**t, they're gonna throw me out of here.' And Gavin has this huge smile on his face. I came off the ice and apologized, and Gavin said, 'No that was great.' "

Mantenuto scored the O'Callahan role. Hanson was cast as winger Dave Silk.

"Were their audition tapes good? No," O'Connor said. "No one would look at audition tapes and say these guys are actors. I had to bring Paddy Demsey back to the studio three times, because they kept saying 'No' to me. They didn't see what I saw in this kid.

"I usually operate on an intuitive level. I just saw something in this kid's eyes. It's an intangible thing. But there was a spark there, something I just responded to."

By February, O'Connor had his team. Everyone -- plus a collection of ex-NHL and other professionals brought on to play the Soviets and other opponents -- was ensconced in Vancouver, B.C., for five months of filming. Russell, determined to capture Brooks accurately, remained aloof, recreating the same tension that brought the 1980 team together.

"The first night, the first shoot, he walked up to me, looked me right in the eye, and just sucked me into his head," Demsey said. "I really had no clue it was Kurt Russell standing in front of me. It was like a hypnotic state. He was Herb Brooks."

Russell laughs at Demsey's recollection.

"It was a little manipulative, but it was also for a specific reason," he said. "We were working with guys who had never been in front of the camera before. I had to establish as quickly a feeling of honest respect from them, like Herb had from his players."

O'Connor took a different tact, embracing his young charges.

"What's interesting is that these guys became actors in the best sense of the word," says Russell. "They were absolutely committed to each scene. The players didn't have to act -- they discovered that they just had to be themselves."

Sports coordinator Mark Ellis and former NHLer Ryan Walter teamed to put the players through intense rehearsals to make sure the finished product was convincing. Scenes in which players were forced to do brutal wind sprints feature retching too real to be feigned.

O'Connor broke with Hollywood tradition and ask his pseudo-actors to review daily footage with him to ensure veracity. Mantenuto, who felt he could deliver body checks better than any stunt double, steamrolled one extra so often that "by the end of the day he looked like Jay Leno."

"These poor guys are skating with their head down, and we got to run them over," Mantenuto said. "How often is someone going to give you a free pass like that? Any frustration I had with the movie I think you'll see in my hits. Those are real."

Also authentic was the blood drawn between Mantenuto and Nathan West during a scene where O'Callahan and Minnesotan Rob McClanahan duke it out, as well as the dozen stitches collected by Stanley Cup-winning goalie Bill Ranford (Cahill's stunt double as Craig) compliments of an errant shot from Hanson.

"Billy was the best," O'Connor said. "When the kids were getting tired, and the intensity wasn't there, Bill would get in their faces and say 'Look, bring your A game.' He lit a fire under people."

Russell believes the on-ice scenes turned out superbly due to the chance they took by using real hockey players rather than actors.

"Sometimes they did end up in fights," Russell said. "At one point there were four fights going on, and Ryan Walter just threw his hands up and said 'I can't stop them.' "

"We had high-contact, high-spirited hockey," Walter said. "The problem was you couldn't fake that. You can't fake the game. So the key piece was that our guys came to play, played hard, and we all took risks. We were very professional as a group, but there were times when guys weren't getting along on the ice. You have to show that. So much of the game comes from passion, and if the passion's not there, it doesn't work."

According to Eruzione and O'Callahan, Miracle works.

"The hockey is great, intense, high-speed," O'Callahan said. "These guys are probably better athletes than we were at the time. Let's face it -- if you're making a hockey movie, and you can't sell the hockey, you can't sell any of it."

Eruzione also reserves special praise for Russell's portrayal of Brooks, saying it was almost unnerving.

"I thought Kurt was spectacular," Eruzione said. "This guy nailed Herb Brooks right on."

Eruzione believes that Brooks, who was killed in a single-car accident last August while the film was in the editing stages, would have enjoyed the final version. Hearing that makes O'Connor beam, because in many ways, he says, Miracle is The Herb Brooks Story.

Brooks, the last man cut from the 1960 Olympic team that shocked the Soviets and the Canadians at Squaw Valley, reinvented himself as one of the game's great hockey minds and a brilliant if unconventional motivator of younger players.

"After meeting Herb, I said to him, almost offhandedly, '1980 must have been such a blast, this must have been such a great year in your life,' " Russell said. "And he said, 'Well, no, it was the loneliest year of my life.' I snapped to at that point."

Out of the ensuing conversation came the reality of what Herb's year was, and the amount of sacrifice that took place, not just from him, but his family, mainly his wife Patty. In the third week of filming, O'Connor introduced the team to the real Herb Brooks.

"Coach Brooks asked us how we were doing, and everyone was just silent," Demsey said. "So I said 'We're a little bit rusty.' And he looks at me and says, 'You must be Eruzione. He was always a little bit rusty.' That was definitely a highlight, when he pegged me as Eruzione in half a second."

Demsey admits that he was more of a physical force than a scorer in his own hockey career. But he nailed the climactic scene with the game-winning goal against the Soviets on the third take.

"My college coach is going to look at it and say 'How come I didn't play that kid?' " Demsey said. "I look like Wayne Gretzky out there."

The 1980 team might be best remember for its youthful exuberance, best captured in the raucous celebration following the 4-3 win over the Soviets. And while O'Connor needed to take some dramatic license, focusing on fewer players to tell the story in two hours, Eruzione and O'Callahan say the depiction rings true.

"The movie will absolutely do our team justice," Eruzione said. "These guys could play."

Meanwhile, the young guns that Disney uncovered say they have a renewed appreciation for the team, Herb Brooks, and the enduring legacy of their accomplishment.

"It's like folklore," Demsey said. "This team helped get USA hockey going. And this film is going to bring their story to a whole new generation of people, which I hope will create another hockey boom."

If it happens, the charge will be led by a group of fledgling actors who, at their core, are hockey-loving Hollywood greenhorns. Nice symmetry, but no miracle.

--Brion O'Connor is a Boston-based freelance writer.

Celebrating hockey’s origins

There's a magic to playing pond hockey that's really difficult to capture in words. But we keep trying. Here's one of my favorite stories from this year. You can see the printed version here. My thanks to the great work by my editor, Tom Connelly, at the New York Times.

On Frozen Pond: Playing up a Hockey Legacy
CONCORD, N.H. — When Chris Brown, 40, laces up his skates and pulls on his Concord Budmen jersey on Jan. 28, he will be reconnecting with the hockey gods who have smiled on New Hampshire’s capital for almost 130 years. The Budmen are among 52 teams, at least 40 of them from this city of 42,000, that will participate in the first 1883 Black Ice Pond Hockey Championship, a celebration of Concord’s singular ties to hockey played in the elements.

“When I was growing up in Concord, there used to be areas flooded in most of the parks,” Brown, a tournament organizer, said. “Then, over the years, those just slowly went away, whether it was lack of interest or the city not having the funds to do it.”

The tournament at White Park, just up the road from the capitol, is a fund-raiser to help restore outdoor skating opportunities in the city. For players and spectators, it promises a tableau resembling what many hockey historians believe was the first organized game played in the United States, on Nov. 17, 1883.

It took place two miles away, on Lower School Pond (pictured above) on the campus of St. Paul’s, a boarding school whose students have included Astors and Vanderbilts, future United States senators and at least one N.H.L. player, Don Sweeney, the former Boston Bruin and now the team’s assistant general manager.

The term black ice was coined at St. Paul’s, a reference to the smooth-as-glass surface that set when temperatures first plummeted, leading to “black ice holidays,” when classes would be canceled so that the students could skate. According to the school’s archives, hockey was played on campus as early as the 1860s, but the modern game took hold with the arrival of two students, George Perley from Ottawa and Arthur Whitney from Montreal, in the early 1880s.

“At one point, when I was a student here, there were eight rinks on that pond,” said the current St. Paul’s rector, Bill Matthews, a former player and coach at the school. “Every afternoon you’d hear the pucks banging against the boards.”

St. Paul’s is also where Hobey Baker began his ascent in the early 1900s. Baker, whose name is on the award given annually to college hockey’s best player, took his skills to Princeton, but St. Paul’s continued to make headlines. On Dec. 15, 1913, The New York Times trumpeted a game between Baker’s Princeton squad and the “famous St. Paul’s School team” at St. Nicholas Rink in Manhattan. The article refers to St. Paul’s as a “little preparatory school, tucked away in the New Hampshire hills.”

“Unless they really know hockey, most people don’t even know where Hobey Baker came from,” said Jim Hayes, 57, a Concord native and director of the New Hampshire Legends of Hockey, the state’s Hall of Fame.

The City’s Sport
Pond hockey at traditionally blueblood St. Paul’s is only part of the Concord story. The sport here has strong blue-collar roots, too, and has produced Olympians as well as numerous college stars and pros, including one N.H.L. veteran, Kent Carlson, an enforcer who played mainly with the Canadiens in the mid-1980s.

“The competitiveness and the drive to succeed in Concord was just amazing,” said Lee Blossom, 51, who attended St. Paul’s before leading Concord High to the state title in 1977, scoring every goal in the semifinal, a 5-2 victory against Manchester Memorial. “Our era had a tremendous group of athletes and hockey was the sport of choice for many of them. That equation created a real hockey hotbed.”

Blossom went on to captain Boston College and play in the International Hockey League. He said the season in Concord ran six months, from November to April.

“When you grow up in a culture like that, it’s easy to hone your skills,” he said. “Hockey was a way of life.”

In many ways, the hockey culture reflects a strong appetite here for sports in general. For a small city with a sometimes inhospitable climate, Concord has left an unusually well-defined footprint in arenas and stadiums around the world.

In addition to its hockey stars, who include the 1998 Olympic gold medalist Tara Mounsey, Concord has produced Matt Bonner of the San Antonio Spurs; Red Rolfe, an All-Star third baseman and table setter for Lou Gehrig on Yankee teams of the 1930s; Bob Tewksbury, whose pinpoint control earned him a 13-year major league career; Joe Lefebvre, who homered in his first two games as a Yankees rookie in 1980; and Brian Sabean, the general manager and architect of the World Series-champion San Francisco Giants.

And yet no sport has captured the city’s imagination quite like hockey.

“It’s one of those places where you go to the park and the pond will be plowed and people will be playing hockey on it,” said Bonner, who stands 6 feet 10 inches and said he stopped playing hockey when he was 12 and could no longer find size 13 skates to rent at the skate shack.

Shinny Town
Teams playing pond hockey, or shinny, began appearing in Concord 100 years ago. The famed Sacred Heart squad, formed in 1929, played on an outdoor rink alongside the church. The Sacre Coeur, as the team from the then largely French-Canadian parish was known, was made up of local players and St. Paul’s teachers, said Tom Champagne, 81, who played at Concord High and worked at St. Paul’s for 35 years.

So formidable was Sacred Heart that the United States Olympic team, on its way to the 1952 Games in Olso, stopped by in Concord for a game.

“The Sacred Heart group was up, 5-3, after two periods but ended up losing, 8-6,” said Hayes, who still skates weekly and will play for the White Park Hockey Club in the tournament. Champagne, one of five surviving members of that Sacred Heart team, said, “As far as I’m concerned, when I was still playing for Sacred Heart, Concord had the top team for hockey next to the Berlin Maroons,” a reference to a traditional power from the state’s northern reaches. He added, “Concord was a real good hockey town.”

Ensuring that Concord remains just that is one of the goals of the 1883 Black Ice tournament, in which seven-person teams, in three divisions for men and one for women, will play four against four on six rinks.

“It’s shinny hockey,” said Tom Painchaud, 55, a Concord native and St. Paul’s graduate, “like we used to play when we had nothing else to do on a Saturday afternoon.”

The tournament was the result of a brainstorming session between Brown and David Gill, the city’s recreation director. The City Council directed Gill to find ways to help offset budget shortfalls, and he reached out to Brown, a board member of the Concord Boys & Girls Club

“This is not necessarily about hockey; it’s about a community,” Brown said. “It’s a great way to showcase a great facility. Not every town has a park like White Park."

Gill said the tournament, through its business partnerships, has already raised enough money to revive a skating area at Rollins Park in the city’s South End. “We haven’t had skating there in two or three decades,” he said.

Moving Indoors
Hockey in Concord moved indoors with the dedication of the Everett Arena on Dec. 7, 1965. The arena was named for Douglas N. Everett, a member of two Olympic teams who was inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in 1974.

“The interest in hockey, when they built the Everett Arena, just exploded,” said Blossom.

The arena ushered a new era in Concord hockey lore. Champagne’s son, also named Tom, recalls the visceral thrill of attending amateur games there, starting with the Concord Shamrocks, alongside his father.

“In the days before Plexiglas, it was wire mesh, and you could smell these guys,” said Champagne, a Concord High player and current Legends president. “You’d get sprayed with the shavings. You could see the blood. You’d be right there. That was before we were watching the Bruins. That was the place to be for a game on Saturday night.”

Sabean, 54, who never played hockey but whose brothers did, said the opening of Everett and the availability of Bruins games on television for the first time revived the sport from a down period.

“That place was going 24 hours a day almost, to accommodate all the teams,” he said of the arena. “They had youth teams, the high schools, travel teams, games, practices, what have you.”

Over the years, the city was also home to the Coachmen (1966-68), the Eastern Olympics (1967-74), the Tri-City Coachmen (1974-75) and the Budmen (1975-92). Leagues came and went, among them the Granite State League, the Can-Am League and the New England Hockey League.

“I watched them all,” the elder Champagne said. “That was good hockey. It was a different era, but a great era.”

For the younger Champagne, 52 and with three sons, the 1883 Black Ice tournament is a reminder of how things used to be and an example of how different the game is for today’s generation.

“What’s unique for guys my age is that I spent just as much if not more time outside playing hockey,” said Champagne, who will suit up for the Turkey Pond Flyers. “Nowadays, even my kids, it’s pretty limited how much time they go out. They don’t know what the nuances of the ice are like. You’ve got to learn to skate around the cracks, and how the puck’s going to bounce. You have to shovel the ice off. If you miss the net, someone has to go get the puck.

“It was just shinny pick-up. But that’s where you learned to be creative, where you learned the etiquette of the game, keeping your stick down, being a competitor. I think the kids miss that today, because it’s all about systems, and it’s all about drills at practices.”

Which, ultimately, may be the best reason for a pond hockey tournament, though certainly not the only one.

“There’s nothing quite like skating outdoors,” Matthews of St. Paul’s said, “no matter what the weather: whether it’s freezing cold or one of those beautiful cool days when the sun is shining, one of those magical days.”

FINIS

Joe Desena wants to break you

A recent email reminded me of this fun piece on Vermont's "Death Race," held every June. Yes, the "race" itself is a bit contrived, but the pain and suffering (and mental anguish) is the real deal. I originally wrote the piece for The Boston Globe. The published version can be found here.

Running them into the ground
Vermont’s ‘Death Race’ is a brutal test of the body and the mind

PITTSFIELD, Vt. – A distressed Joe Desena stands under a bright June sun soaking wet, a combination of sweat and a big dose of slimy Vermont mud. He has already crawled through a half-dozen sections of barbed-wire-laden trenches, hacked a thick tree stump out of the ground, run a mile in a slick river bed, split 20 logs into quarters, and hiked up one of the steep hillsides lining Route 100.

And it’s only 10 a.m.

On Desena’s aching back is a tool pack, with the aforementioned stump strapped to it. Slung over his shoulder is a bike frame. In his trembling hands, he’s holding a gnarled piece of paper with 10 names scribbled on it. Desena stares at the names - ostensibly the first 10 presidents of the United States - but he can’t decipher his handwriting.

“Martin?” he says to a Death Race official. “There’s no president named Martin, is there?”

Martin van Buren shouldn’t feel slighted. Clearly, the Death Race, Desena’s creation, is taking a toll on its maker. He’s not the only one. There were 49 lunatic souls who started the race at 4 a.m. Twenty-one hours later, the last of 18 finishers straggled across the finish line. Thirty-one quit. By Death Race standards, that simply means the event was too easy.

“Our goal is to have at least one person finish,” says Dave Darby of Bedford, Mass., a veteran adventure racer and mastermind behind many of the “special tasks” that make up the Death Race. “Then everyone knows they could have finished, that it was possible. If no one finishes, then we screwed up.”

Desena’s Death Race is a brutal combination of the IronMan triathlon, ESPN’s Outdoor Games, and network reality shows like “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race.” Last year’s co-winner, Chris Mitchell, a 41-year-old software engineer from Boston, is on hand to help out, but had no interest in defending his title.

“I looked at a few pictures of myself after last year’s race, and all these memories came rushing back,” says Mitchell. “I looked like hell, covered with chigger bites, one eye swollen shut.”

Mitchell’s co-winner, Stever Bartlett, a Middlebury College ski coach, is nowhere nearby. “He won’t come back to this town,” says Desena, grinning. “He’s got bad memories of Pittsfield.”

Desena hadn’t originally planned on competing in his own event. But last summer, during the second running of the Death Race, he was confronted by several irate competitors who accused him of “putting them through 24 hours of hell.”

“So I had to see for myself if I could do it.”

Looking for adventure
The Death Race is one of many edgy competitions offered by Desena’s Peak Adventures. Upcoming events include the 666 Mountain Bike Race Saturday (with a “King of the Hill” competition the next day), the Funeral Run (featuring 50-mile, 100-mile, and 200-mile ultra-endurance options) in late October, and a Snowshoe Marathon in March. None fit the description of “normal” competition.

Peak Adventures grew out of Desena’s belief that society has become soft. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., who was bitten by the adventure racing bug a decade ago, Desena jumped into his new hobby with the same zeal that made him a successful Wall Street broker.

“For thousands of years, we’ve been creatures that have dealt with this kind of adversity,” says Desena. “It’s only in the past hundred years that we’ve become couch potatoes.”

Desena, 41, has competed in more than 40 adventure races around the globe. He also has the financial wherewithal, thanks to the success and sale of his Burlington Capital Markets firm, to create an adventure racing and training destination in Pittsfield. Situated on Route 100, Vermont’s “ski highway,” the town has gone through several alterations in the past half-century. Established in 1781, Pittsfield was primarily a farming community 50 years ago before Killington changed the landscape. Many farm owners, looking to cash in on the ski craze, opened inns. But when Killington and Pico built on-site lodging, Pittsfield fell on hard times.

In 2002, Courtney and Joe Desena were sharing a loft in New York City when they discovered Pittsfield’s Riverside Farm. The couple bought the dilapidated horse farm, renovated it, and held their wedding there in 2003. Today, the Riverside Farm, in addition to being a home to the Desenas and their three children, hosts a number of exclusive weddings each year. The property, with three rebuilt barns, can also accommodate a variety of special events, from corporate retreats to weekend getaways. Over the past few years, the Desenas have expanded their presence in Pittsfield. They now own roughly 400 acres in the 20-square-mile hamlet, including the Original General Store and a Bikram yoga studio. They also helped salvage the nearby Amee Farm. The Amee property, owned primarily by Michael Halovatch, an adventure racing/Wall Street colleague of Desena, is home to an eco-friendly inn, a working farm, and a huge, rough-hewn roadside barn. The barn headquarters Peak Adventures, which hosts races and training camps.

“Joe moved up here to retire, to slow down, but he’s not wired that way,” says his wife with a laugh.

The juxtaposition between high-end weddings and weekend retreats and the Peak Adventures events often proves hilarious. Last year, Courtney intercepted several Death Race competitors who came stumbling out of the woods, like “Dawn of the Dead” zombies, before they reached a Riverside wedding reception. This year, the early- morning tranquility of a yoga retreat at the Amee Farm Inn was broken by a cacophony of axes splitting wood, as Death Race competitors quartered logs in the inn’s driveway.

Physical, mental challenge
The Death Race festivities actually start the day before, at 10 p.m., when organizers host a race meeting atop “Joe’s Hill” behind Riverside Farm. Racers hike up the hill with their bikes, but return only with their frames, leaving the wheels and chains behind. Nervous chatter fills the cool, bug-infested air.

“I’ve done a lot of races, and you get to the point where you want to keep challenging yourself,” says Greg Hartwell, 24-year-old accountant from Andover, Mass. “This seemed like a great opportunity.”

Hartwell cajoled his 30-year-old brother, Thomas Hartwell of Wakefield, into joining him. “He told me it was an arts and crafts weekend with the boys,” says Thomas.

The race starts at 4 in the morning, well before the first rays of sunlight squeeze into this narrow valley. Race director Andy Weinberg, hoisting a sawed-off stump overhead, informs racers they must find their own in a field across the street (identified by their race bib), hack it out of the ground, and carry it with them the entire day. “You guys are a bunch of nut jobs who want to torture yourselves in Pittsfield,” he says, half-taunting, half-encouraging. “The next 24 hours will be the toughest you’ve ever experienced.”

Competitors crawl through a muddy trench, under barbed wire, to and from the stump field. Then they pick up their bike frames and, after snaking through two more barbed-wire sections, jog a mile upstream in the Tweed River. Everyone falls. Repeatedly.

“Running in the river is like a woman going into labor,” says Desena. “You know it’s going to hurt.”

After the river run, racers lug their bikes, stumps, and tools to the wood-chopping station, split 20 logs, then hike a mile uphill to the list of presidents’ names, before returning to the Amee Farm. The next test is a Lego challenge. Racers have to assemble a collection of Legos, using only their memory or notes, to replicate a model provided to them earlier. After six hours, cracks begin to show.

“There are physical challenges in this race, but we’re trying to break them mentally,” says Darby.

Part of the anguish is that racers never know when the race ends. Competitors aren’t given a race itinerary; they’re simply told to go from one task to the next. From the Lego station, racers head back to the Tweed River, and slog a mile south. At the next station, they hustle to the Riverside Farm, find a raw egg, return to the river, create a fire from scratch, boil water, and eat the egg. Only then can they retrieve their bike wheels.

After rolling their bikes to a small pond at Riverside Farm, racers watch as a volunteer tosses their bike chain into the frigid waters. The racers must dive in, find the chain, and reassemble their bikes. After a brief 300-yard pedal, they exchange the bike for a 40-pound bucket of rocks, which they must drag 1,000 feet straight up Joe’s Hill through “the ravine.” Hiking the ravine, says Desena, is “like trying to ski uphill with banana peels on both feet.” At the top of the hill, racers get instructions to hike back down the hill, fill the bucket with water, and bring it back to the summit. Only then are they given the OK to head to the Amee Farm, and the finish line.

Striking a deal
Similar to 2008, the 2009 Death Race had co-winners. Richard Lee, a 27-year-old former British Royal Marine Commander who is hiking the Appalachian Trail to rehab a broken leg and shattered patella, builds a dominating lead early. But Tom Worthington, a 22-year-old freshly minted graduate of Norwich University and a native of West Falmouth, Mass., closes the gap during the last few events.

On a treacherous hillside, heading toward the finish line, Worthington catches Lee, who got lost and is clearly tiring. The two discuss options.

“I told him, ‘We can do this with dignity, and finish together, or we can race, if you want to race,’ “ says Lee. “I know how competitive I am, and I knew how competitive he was.”

Both decide discretion is the better part of valor, in part because the slippery slope is a serious accident waiting to happen, and in part because they’re both running on fumes. So the two, like Mitchell and Bartlett the year before, make a pact to cross the line together, a Marine from the United States and one from the United Kingdom. Their winning time is 11 hours 31 minutes.

A half-hour later, Desena is the fourth racer to finish. Though he has disqualified himself for getting assistance from his support crew with the presidential names and the bike chain, Desena is determined to complete the course.

“Another 12 hours and this would have been a great race,” he says.

Two of Worthington’s Norwich classmates, Chris Prybella of Pennsylvania and Zach Castonguay of Maine, cross the line nine hours after the winners, well after midnight. The two spent more than two hours at the pond looking for Prybella’s bike chain. But neither would quit.

“One volunteer told me to throw in the towel,” says Prybella. “I told him I’d throw him in before I threw in the towel.”

Finished by the end
Stretching out on his barn floor, trying to work out the knots in his back and legs an hour after finishing, Desena mulls a question: Is this his first and last Death Race?

“I think so,” he says. “This is a race very few people want to do multiple times.”

The Hartwell brothers are among those who fail to finish. Greg never found his bike chain at the Riverside pond (“Plus, my toes had turned green, and I draw the line at green toes.”) while Tom failed to make the time cut-off at the same station.

“I’m pretty disappointed I didn’t finish,” says Tom. “I had a lot more will than I gave myself credit for. On top of that, I had more than my brother. Which was nice.”

However, 18 racers proved equal to the 14 tasks.

“No one gets to the finish without earning it,” says Chris Mitchell, watching racers pick their way through the last, gnarly section of razor wire. “There’s no shortcut.”

FINIS