Great Turtle Half-marathon

Let us return, dear readers, to an episode from the Saturday before Halloween last year. After running a race and submitting a short article about the event, I learned that one participant had not survived the time trial. I raised the subject at the office but was not encouraged to pursue it. My notes were destroyed but I’ve taken bits from the original article in addition to memories and subsequent investigations.

A fine way to die on a fine day to die

Reluctantly crouched at the starting line...

We must begin with a full disclosure that our narrator was himself a participant in the Great Turtle Trail Run on Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023, finishing the half-marathon race 52nd in a field of 570 and 7th out of 23 competitors in the same age*sex bracket. It was nothing short of a glorious return to form after a 20-year hiatus from competitive running.

Ian Torchia (photo from free online gallery)

The half-marathon winner, a 32-year-old out of Dodgeville, held a pace averaging faster than six minutes per mile, finishing in 1:17:15, while the winner and pace-setter in the 5.7-mile walk/run was Ann Arbor’s Ian Torchia, 27, who averaged 5:07 per mile and finished with a time of 29:07. Over 2,000 people from 39 states participated in the event overall, which consisted of one 5.7-mile and one 13.1-mile race and constitutes the final leg of the Run Mackinac series of races.

Weather on the day was close to ideal: partly cloudy and neither hot enough to induce stroke nor cold enough to pose serious risk of hypothermia.

Mandy Paull (Cat Marsh photo)

“It was just gorgeous. It was so sunny,” said Mandy Paull. “It’s such a dynamic course—some gravel, some road, some trees.”

Paull came from Cheboygan for the half-marathon and finished 10th place overall and first place in the women’s bracket. Earlier in the season she had taken first place for her third consecutive year in the M22 Challenge, a 2.5-mile run through the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes, 17-mile bicycle ride, and 2.5-mile paddle on Little Glen Lake using kayaks or standup paddle boards.

“We were sure happy that the rain stopped! That was wonderful,” said event organizer Anne Gault. “I think everyone had a great time.”

Gault reported receiving no complaints relating to the event, and perhaps the only entrant truly to have left it all out on the course, the man who collapsed and died during the 5.7 mile race, would not have complained either. One can after all imagine less pleasant ways to jog off the mortal coil.

Facing one’s own mortality is a common sensation for distance runners. Apart from the overt agony unto death that can be observed on the faces of those in final sprints toward finish lines, even a placid and meditative mind in the thralls of the legendary “runner’s high” can meander round to the macabre.¹

Few public records captured the incident. A terse line in a police report included an officer assisting private Emergency Medical Services providers “with an unconscious male” before escorting and providing traffic control. Gault acknowledged the incident in a follow-up call and said the man had been surrounded by off-duty nurses when he collapsed but could not be revived.

Thus he died, taking the air on a sunny day surrounded by sympathetic souls, and any further gruesome details are relegated to the private sphere of kin, close friends, and immediate witnesses. More than likely an oblique reference by a so-called professional writer between day jobs will be the only spectacle ever made of his passing.

A most enviable death.

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1 “You’ll die here one day,” said a wry voice from the deepest recesses of my long-tortured head as I cruised easily down a hill on a long run at a familiar recreation area one summer afternoon. My half-marathon finish time was 1:44:28, which averaged to roughly 8 minutes per mile. In the last mile I was gasping and whimpering so pitifully that a race volunteer issued a warning to the next helpers up the chain on her two-way radio. Look out for this one, I imagined her saying, he’s looking like he might not make it.