By Ben Kesling
CRYSTAL CITY, Mo.-- Zach Waske went through his pre-race
routine, tightening his running shoes, scratching his beard and
doing calisthenics.
Also, he adjusted his headlamp.
"It's gonna be a tough race," said the 30-year-old
aircraft-parts salesman for Boeing Co., as he surveyed the eerie
gloom of a 200-acre sand mine about 150 feet below the snowy woods
of this town about an hour outside St. Louis.
Conditions were perfect, as usual. Fifty-six degrees and pitch
black in places, but the veteran cave runner was nervous. You never
know who might sneak out of the dark to steal a victory.
"Sometimes you can pull it off, other times there's somebody
from out of state who blitzkriegs it and wins in record time," he
said.
Mr. Waske was among nearly 900 runners competing in the fifth
annual Sandmine Challenge, a race that generally falls into the
category of obstacle course races or mud runs, increasingly popular
pastimes for people bored by flat-surface races.
Now cave running, or speRUNking, is taking the trend to new
depths. Racers run though loose sand, duck under rock arches and
wade through chilly, waist-deep water guided through much of it
only by the light of their bobbing headlamps.
"There's a lake and that scares me," said Nicole Tyler, a racer
from Springfield, Ill., who stood about a head shorter than most
others on the course.
At 10 a.m., Mr. Waske took off in the first wave of runners,
including a couple of friends who run every year. Among the group,
Jack Bourbonnais, a lean runner and perennial top finisher hungry
for the title. They zipped around a dark corner, hitting the first
water obstacle. Splashes, whoops and curses bounced off the water
and the rock walls.
Above-ground obstacle races have ratcheted up their intensity
over the years. One of the most popular, the Spartan Race, presents
a "riddled battlefield of insane terrain" where racers tote
boulders and jump through fire. The Tough Mudder race zaps
competitors with electric shocks, fills their lungs with noxious
gas and plunges them into ice-cold water, but all of that is done
in the light of day.
Here, the dark adds a special challenge.
Even experienced runners like Mr. Waske hit snags. He and his
friends were setting a scorching pace when they ran into a dead
end.
"We've got giant sandstone pillars on each side," Mr. Waske
said, recalling the stony cul-de-sac. "As soon as we hit it, we
said, 'What did we do? Maybe we missed something.' "
They searched for a way out with their headlamps before
realizing that a marker had been moved. They soon got back on track
by following music wafting over from the finish line.
"It's easy to get turned around back in there," said Jake
Goldsborough, director of race productions at Fleet Feet Sports in
St. Louis, who had spent several days setting up the nearly 3-mile
course. He remedied the situation by grabbing a sledgehammer and
banging a spike into a sandstone pillar to post caution tape to
guide runners.
More than an hour later, as Mr. Waske and his friends sipped on
post-race beers, more than two-dozen college students bounded off
in some of the last waves of the day.
Among them: Andrew O'Sullivan, a freshman at Washington
University in St. Louis and the vice president of the school's
running club.
The shirtless 19-year-old neglected to bring a headlamp, instead
toting a dinky LED flashlight his mother had put in his Christmas
stocking. "Lucky it was waterproof," he said. "There were times
when it was fully submerged."
The water just a few hundred yards from the start took its toll
on him. "It was kind of demoralizing to hit that right at the
start," he said. "I was expecting to hit some other obstacles first
and kind of ease into the race."
Ms. Tyler's fear of the water also proved daunting. "At certain
parts, it was up to my chest because I'm so short," she said. It
took her breath away.
As Mr. O'Sullivan hurdled rock walls and ducked through old
pipes, racers from prior waves gathered for beers near a DJ at the
post-race party. There, in a blue Hawaiian shirt, sat Tom Kerr,
owner of the cave known as the Crystal City Underground complex. He
hosts barge rides on the cave's lake, various sporting events and
parties that sometimes clash with aboveground authorities.
"I got no roof costs," he said smiling. "Buildings have pipes
that can freeze and break in the winter; I've got none of
that."
In early February, a municipal judge found Mr. Kerr guilty of
holding improperly planned underground "raves" in the cave last
year.
He says he will appeal the ruling, arguing that since it is a
cave it should be regulated not by local authorities, but by
Missouri mining officials.
Meanwhile, Mr. O'Sullivan headed for the finish.
"I had pure excitement and adrenaline running through my body
and had my flashlight ready," Mr. O'Sullivan said later. He vaulted
over a waist-high wall and scrambled up a ladder, leaping from the
top to save time. "I didn't get turned around too much."
He finished in just over 16 minutes, beating Mr. Waske by a
minute, topping Mr. Bourbonnais, and winning the race. He and his
26 teammates didn't even wait for the awards ceremony. They just
hurried to their cars and headed off for lunch.
Mr. Waske, still in the cave sharing beers with his friends,
took his seventh place finish in stride.
"As it catches on, you start to attract people like the running
team from Wash U," he said. "We'll always be ready to give it a go
next year. Maybe they can throw in some more obstacles."
Write to Ben Kesling at benjamin.kesling@wsj.com
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