Nominees for Badass of the Week

Inspired by meeting the author of the incredibly appropriately named Badass of The Week website (and subsequent books), I would like to nominate some folks who I believe uphold the best of the badass ideal.

Everybody knows about that dude who ran from some Greek city to another after some battle, declared “Rejoice, we conquer!” then dropped dead. His name was Pheidippides, and because of him, a bunch of skinny people think it's a good idea to run 26.2 miles every once in a while so they can feel superior to everybody else.

But what most people don't know is that it wasn't the 20-some-odd miles that killed him. That dude had run 150 miles in the last two days. It's what battlefield messengers did. That last run to Marathon was just the straw that broke the Greek's back.

This is not the badass I wanted to tell you about.

You know what's more hard-core than running 26.2 miles? Swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles THEN running 26.2 miles. The Ironman Triathlon is 8-17 hours of mental and physical anguish, during which any one of a million bad choices or just pure dumb luck can cause your surroundings, your equipment, or your own body to destroy you.

Take for example these two women. Sian Welch so completely used up that she can barely make her legs move, but still looking over her shoulder to see how far ahead of her competition she is. Wendy Ingram catching up fast, but just as destroyed, every molecule of glucose in her muscles already spent. Barely a hundred feet from the finish, Sian falls for the lat time, body betraying her at last. Wendy, who had been on her heels all race finally passes her, but in doing so, falls herself. They are literally in view of the finish line, 140.6 miles from where they'd begun. Unable to stand, but just as unable to quit, Wendy started crawling. Not one to be outdone, Sian gets crawling too. Race officials could only stand in awe as they watched these two “race” the last few yards on hands and knees, pulling their ruined bodies behind them. Obviously they were racing for some championship, some title, some prize, right? Nope. These iron-ovaried valkyries were battling for fourth place.

And THEY are not the badasses I'm here to tell you about. I told you that tale merely to give you an idea of how tough this race is. And they were young women, trained to a peak of lithe physical perfection that most of us only dream of.

Now picture an old guy doing it. While carrying his crippled son.

Let me tell you about Rickie and Dick Hoyt. Rickie can't speak, basically can't move, but for some reason he fell in love with racing. And Dickie was is a regular middle aged guy who loves his son. The tale of what they had to go through to qualify for the Boston Marathon alone would probably qualify them for BAOTW, but check this out.

When Team Hoyt does the Ironman triathlon, Dick does the swim in a harness, dragging a boat that has Rickie in it behind him. Then, while the other athletes are stripping out of high-tech wet suits and strapping into ultra-light super-areodynamic bikes, Dick carries Rickie out of the boat and carries him to the special seat in front of the handlebars of his own heavy-duty bike. Over a hundred miles later, when professionals carrying only their own scrawny weight are sucking wind, Dick again carries Rickie out of the bike seat and puts him into a gigantic jog-stroller, and heads off for a quick little marathon.

This is the kind of race that some pretty hard-core endurance athletes don't even bother putting on their bucket list, and this guy has carried a whole other human being through it not once, but a half-dozen times. Sure, this tale doesn't end with scrotum-slicing, face-stabbing, or a rain of bullets thicker than Odin's Eyebrows. But it's still unquestionably badass.

By the way, Rickie, the one who can't speak or move? When he's not out enjoying a little adventure with his dad, he's somehow writing software to allow other profoundly crippled/disabled people to communicate and interact with the world. Put THAT in your jade war-club and smoke it.