The Toughest Man Alive... Lives in White Bear Lake
By Michael Tortorello
Photo by Darrell Eager
(page 2 of 3)
When a watch alarm beeps reveille at 5:10 a.m. Monday morning—July 22, race day—the Field Marshal hits the luggage like a looter. He’s out the door of the motel room before Pierre has lifted his head off the pillow. “Unggh,” Pierre says softly, his first sentiment of the day. It’s a grunt, as if he were dead-lifting a pony. Sleeping hurts, and it hurts more the longer he sleeps. The pain gets progressively worse in the days and hours leading up to the starting line. Anxiety in the flesh. When it comes to these punishing death marches, the mind may be gullible but the body is nobody’s fool.Only the Rabbit can still sleep like a young man, unhurried and unconscious. At 27 years old, John Storkamp is almost too young for ultrarunning. It’s a 45-year-old’s sport—a discipline to take up after your foot speed is gone. And the Rabbit’s foot speed hasn’t gone anywhere. He has thighs like telephone poles and a torso that should be headless in an antiquities shop.
At 6 a.m., the Old Timer’s garden thermometer reads 110. And yes, that’s in the shade—not that there’s going to be any shade. The temperature is so great on the road that it actually pays to wear long pants and a long-sleeve shirt. An air pocket between you and the heat, that’s what you want. Last time Pierre ran Badwater—when he dropped out—he wore shorts and a T-shirt, which is precisely what you don’t want to wear, the Field Marshal will tell you. The Field Marshal was there that year, along with the Old Timer, and they watched Pierre’s appetite for the impromptu cut the legs out from under him. Running too fast, eating too little, counting on sheer orneriness to carry him through.
This year Team Ostor has a plan: a set of printouts with topographical charts and ETAs for all the race checkpoints. Data sets from Pierre’s previous Badwaters.
Pierre dons his all-white running suit, the one he’s borrowing from the Field Marshal, then hits the head one last time. Before leaving the room, he stops in front of a mirror. “I look like I escaped from an institution,” he says. Then he heads out to join the rest of the crazy people at the starting line.
Pierre has something he’d like to share. Welcome to show-and-tell at Pierre’s place, the split-level in White Bear Lake he shares with Cheryl. Pierre kneels down and pops open the latch, revealing a malevolent-looking black block. Not a gun, precisely, but a grenade launcher. It’s a fully functional prototype, minus a part or two he’s removed for safety. He made this device himself, he explains. He’s got the patents to prove it.
Pierre appraises the chambering mechanism with a probing eye, recalling the engineering obstacles. Twenty years ago, he was fabricating weapons like this one for a Miami arms exporter. His profession was different then, not just a profession but a craft. Pierre machined this weapon, every part and every piece of it, from the trigger pin to the gears that rotate the chambered rounds. Remember how you dyed the nylon stock over the stove with a box of Rit, Cheryl says. Apparently, generalissimos worry that white shows the bloodstains. Pierre made regular trips to South America back then: Honduras, Peru, Colombia, Argentina. Providing firearm solutions to the kinds of swells you’d read about in the back pages of the Iran-Contra report—that was, um, interesting work. After he moved back north and started his own business, Pierre once presented a set of his grenade-launcher prints to a table of U.S. Army weapons engineers. The unconventional guts of the gun baffled the experts, he says, a source of satisfaction for someone who’d never made it to college. “They loved it,” Pierre says of his invention.
Loved it, but didn’t buy it. Instead of going with an elegant bit of engineering, they manufactured a clumsy, practical device that would fit on the end of a machine gun. Pierre shrugs: If you expect authorities to make rotten decisions, you won’t be disappointed.
It was the same narrative he had encountered as a young man, when he was the head gunsmith in a French army regiment. That was a job worth hating. He’d graduated among the top three students in his military class and had hoped to continue in a university program at officer’s school. First, though, there was a little matter of a five-year service contract to fulfill. Five years. Five years of inspecting weapons, ordering replacement parts, notifying superior officers, lieutenants, and captains what needed to be done, all the while knowing they wouldn’t do it. “I said, ‘You don’t fix your guns, I’m not going to get a haircut,’” Pierre says. “The rules have to go both ways.”
It turns out the rules did not go both ways. He was 19 years old and he already had the best job he’d ever get. If he’d been an officer’s son himself—well, then, maybe something could have been arranged. But he wasn’t and, worse, people remembered his father: a career enlisted man who wouldn’t make nice. Another guy who didn’t understand how business got done. So Pierre made his own arrangements. By “arrangement,” read lawsuit. His contract was invalid, he argued, having been signed by a 15-year-old. And then, just like that, the army spat him out with the equivalent of an honorable discharge.
Pierre resurfaced in a familiar spot: a gunshop in the medieval city of Avignon. There, the shop’s retired proprietor—a guy who knew the city’s ruling class from fixing their bird guns—helped Pierre to get a job in a nuclear-research facility. “I was Homer Simpson!” Pierre jokes.
The work was challenging and the money was good, and a more contented soul would have made a career of it. Pierre? Before long, he was headed to St. Peter, Minnesota, following the American exchange student he’d met in an outdoor café. That was Cheryl, a self-made success story herself: a blonde half-miler and a high school valedictorian from Knife River who’d grown up in a household without a car or a phone.
While Cheryl finished her degree at Gustavus Adolphus College, Pierre moved furniture by day and crafted guns at night. An example of his handiwork from that era, an unmatched pair of flintlock dueling pistols, hangs on the south wall of the couple’s den. If the grenade launcher is an ingenious piece of industrial design, these firearms, with their hand-carving and intricate metal inlays, look an awful lot like art.
Pierre would finally abandon this 17th-century trade in the dying days of the 20th century. While Cheryl earned a master’s in international management, he sat at home with a software package and taught himself computer-assisted drafting. It was desk work, so he kept his hands busy with a cigarette. Pierre does nothing half-assedly. “Sometimes I’d have two cigarettes going at the same time,” he says.
Yet when the time came to break off this abusive relationship, Pierre picked up an even more demanding mistress. In 1995, six months after quitting smoking, he ran his first marathon.
Whenever it seems you’re about to be swept up by the grandeur of ultrarunning—the splendor of the scenery, the extremity of the challenge—that’s when a gun runs over to the side of the road to lubricate his ass with athletic ointment. “If you don’t do that,” the Field Marshal explains, returning the goo into its proper container, “you get a scab this big”—he makes a circle with his thumb and middle finger—“where the cheeks rub together. Right around the bullet hole.”
No, there’s not a lot of room for modesty out here. As the Rabbit will joke with Pierre later, back in the van, “I’ve handled your snot, your shit, your sweat, your blood.” And indeed he has, along with the rest of the crew. It’s a huge gift they’re giving of themselves: stuffing fresh ice into Pierre’s bandannas every mile, toting soiled toilet paper in Ziploc bags. This experience is about the limits of the body, and when you push it far enough, the body is going to do what it’s going to do.
The key is learning how to ignore the pain, Pierre’s crew explains. “I went to the doctor a day or two after a race, when I was peeing blood,” the Rabbit says. “He said it’s actually not that big a deal. It won’t kill you.”
It’s tempting to blame such extreme stoicism on a modern craving for novelty. The search for a knife sharp enough to cut through the numbness of our Lexapro lives. But in truth, ultrarunning fads have burned through the Western world every few decades like evangelical movements. The six-day track races of the late 19th-century gave way to the English long-hauls of the 1930s, which inspired the cross-country “transcons” of the 1960s, which gave birth to a series of now-legendary 100-milers in the 1970s. In every era, there is apparently something in a man that sees value in unadulterated hurt.
The Field Marshal smiles while he recites a little ditty about the types of blisters that made Dr. Scholl his fortune: “If the bone ain’t showing, keep on going.”
Pierre is having trouble finding the plastic bag with the pieces of his toes in it.
“You’re not going to show him that,” Cheryl says.
Pierre laughs without answering: of course he is. The toe fragments, which he has been storing on an end table beneath a stack of papers, are a souvenir from last year’s Arrowhead 135, a genuine memento mori. He passes the sandwich bag. Inside, the skin slivers appear desiccated and dark brown, not unlike the cracked shell of a filbert.
In an odd way, the toe bag helped insulate Pierre from scattered complaints that last year’s Arrowhead was too dangerous. He’s not just the president of the frostbite club; he’s a client! Not a lot of finishers last year in this one. You can try it on foot, on skis, or on bike, which is a bit like giving someone the choice between watching George W. Bush’s last seven State of the Union addresses or reading Bill Clinton’s Whitewater testimony.
A team of buoyant Brazilians from Badwater, who seem to regard Pierre as something of an idol, turned up in Minnesota last winter with snowmobile suits and heavy steel sleds for their gear. Rumor has it they’d never seen snow. At starting time, the temperature in I-Falls was 29 below zero. A race official yanked the Brazilians off the course for their own good after just eight miles.
They got off easier than poor David Heitkamp, whose cornea froze open, blinding him with brilliant prisms of light. Through his good eye, the 57-year-old accountant spied a beautiful naked woman on the trail. With the benefit of hindsight, Heitkamp concedes there were no ice nymphs in the North Country that day. He doesn’t blame Pierre for organizing such a punishing race, though—far from it—which is particularly sporting because he left the better part of three blackened toes in an operating room.
Believe it or not, Jack Frostbite gobbling on your nose is good publicity in the world of ultrarunning. The Arrowhead 135 is a nonprofit, which is another way of saying that the Ostors lose money on it. (Local bike peddlers County Cycles, Surly, and Park Tool—where Pierre works as an engineer—dole out a small complement of freebies.) Pierre and Cheryl say that the race enrollment is up to 56, the greatest number in its four-year history. The crew of Brazilians is back, God help them, along with masochists from eight other countries.
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Reader Comments:
Thanks for the fun and dramatic article. (I did not realize I was married to the French 007).
Regards,
Cheryl Ostor
Arrowhead 135 Winter Ultra
How did Pierre do in the 2007 Badwater Marathon?