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FeedThe Toughest Man Alive... Lives in White Bear Lake
By Michael Tortorello
Photo by Darrell Eager
(page 1 of 3)
This month, Pierre Ostor—a former gunsmith who holds a patent for a grenade launcher—will host and compete in one of the most grueling sporting events in the world, the Arrowhead 135 Mile Ultramarathon, from International Falls to Tower. That is, if he manages not to kill himself first.
As gravesites go, this one is crap.
It’s right on the highway, route 136 in California, for one thing, and the dry crust of salt and rock won’t keep the body down. In a way, that’s fine, because Pierre Ostor isn’t going in the ground. He isn’t dead—not yet, despite his best efforts—and so the Field Marshal, the Rabbit, and the Old Timer—Pierre’s support crew—are debating whether to pack him into the front seat of a rented Dodge Caravan and cart him into the little town of Lone Pine.
The body is fragrant. That’s one factor to take into account. Pierre smells like an offal-and-bunion sandwich, or a Tijuana floor-show, or a guy who’s been wandering through the desert for a-day-and-a-half straight while suffering a heinous case of the runs—which turns out to be exactly the case. And in the Venusian heat, rolling down the windows is not an option.
“We could wrap you up in ice out here,” the Rabbit says.
Pierre doesn’t say yes or no, doesn’t nod or lift a finger. He’s past moving, seemingly past caring. What happens to his broken-down body is a cosmic question now. A boon for the buzzards.
To Lone Pine, then. First, though, there’s the matter of the stake with Pierre’s race number, 71, scratched on the side. The splintery pine won’t mark the place where Pierre Ostor died, but rather the precise spot where the 51-year-old’s quest to run 135 miles through Death Valley came to a miserable end.
The Rabbit bends down in a shallow gully to sink the stake into the ground...and the pointed end snaps clean off. Hilarious! In the shaggy-dog joke that is the Badwater Ultramarathon, this is the punch line.
If the self-inflicted suffering of one man is a folly, the needless agony of dozens is a mass-delusion. A cult of chumps. Heaven’s Gate with pricier Nikes. And yet every summer now since 1987, dreamers and masochists and ordinary wackos have gathered at the lowest point in North America to see who can run the fastest and sleep the least. There are 83 other competitors on the highway this year, dangerously tanned ultrarunners from 15 countries. And every few minutes, one of them is overtaking Pierre. Stumbling faster, basically. You can see them coming from a mile away. Literally. Picture a Segway creeping past a Rascal scooter at Daytona.
Unlike NASCAR, though, practically no one here collects any sponsorship. A free Coleman cooler is about the extent of it. Dean Karnazes, author of the best-selling memoir Ultramarathon Man, is what passes for a celebrity. The fastest finisher will get a Badwater T-shirt. The slowest finisher will also get a Badwater T-shirt. It’s the same T-shirt.
But right now, Pierre lies stripped and supine on one of the double beds inside Room 124 of Lone Pine’s Budget Inn, a fine hostelry if you happen to measure your budget in aluminum cans. “You should take a cold bath,” the Field Marshal says. He looks in the bathroom; there’s no tub. “Or a cold shower.”
“No, I don’t want to,” Pierre says. “I’m freezing.”
Even with the air conditioner rumbling like a cement truck, it’s a dry sauna in here. Something to do with the fact that the window is open. But heat be damned. A few minutes later Pierre burrows into the sheets, and then under the blanket, and finally beneath the Dacron comforter, which is the color of an old bloodstain and bears a floral pattern of vaguely Roman imperial design.
Pierre running through Death Valley
at the 2007 Badwater Ultramarathon
On the other hand, there’s something encouraging about Pierre’s refusal to get in that cold shower. To do the eminently sensible things that his crew is telling him to do.
It’s this same obstinacy that kept Pierre circling Lake Nokomis just seven weeks earlier in a race that served as a warm-up for Badwater. Circling, then circling, and then circling again, for 24-hours straight, like a gerbil on Adderall. And it’s what Pierre is counting on to propel him through the race he founded back home in Minnesota, the Arrowhead 135 Mile Ultramarathon. Pierre and his wife, Cheryl, will stage this frigid sister to Badwater on February 4 to 6, along a state trail from International Falls to Tower. As an event, it tends to makes this little trip through Death Valley seem like a fun run.
Pierre will race Arrowhead again himself—if this bed back at the edge of the desert doesn’t become his sarcophagus.
Pierre stirs; the wooden stake hasn’t gone all the way through this zombie’s heart, despite a belly swollen with water and sports drink and cold cuts. “I told them that I felt bloated,” he says, talking about his race crew—three ultrarunning buddies from back in Minnesota. “They were trying to give me the amount of stuff they would take.”
On the surface, it sounds as if Pierre is blaming his friends for all the fluids and supplements they’ve pushed on him to help counteract the gruesome environment. But what he may be turning over in his mind (or in his roiling belly) is a bigger question: Would I rather succeed on someone else’s terms, or fail my own way?
What could make a person want to undertake such a fantastically unpleasant endeavor? Fair question. Unfortunately, the only answer may be another question: Did your father give you a hand grenade when you were 4 years old and instruct you to defend the household? Pierre’s father did. He was an explosives expert in a French engineer regiment in the late 1950s and early ’60s, stationed in insurgent Algeria.
“Since [security] was already a problem,” Pierre says, “when he was at work, he wanted to make sure that we had something to defend ourselves. So we had a little can of”—Pierre searches for the English word—“concentrated milk. We put nails all the way around and explosives in the center.”
Pierre and his two brothers never had to deploy the jury-rigged explosive, but back in France its memory detonated in a teenage mind. Pierre didn’t need a copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys to get into trouble. All he needed was the dictionary, a book that didn’t just contain the word “nitroglycerin,” but told you what went into it. At the same time he was keeping a logbook of his experiments with black powder, he was also talking back in school—“I had an attitude problem,” Pierre says—“I didn’t let anyone tell me what to do.”
Pierre is genetically incapable of keeping his mouth shut. He hasn’t spoken to his older brother Yves in five years, even though he lives in California. Politics, Pierre says. The two used to be close, and there’s a Huck and Tom quality to stories from their youth. Like the time the brothers ditched their summer jobs, de-tasseling corn on a neighbor’s farm, and went on a little bike ride. An 850-kilometer ride. Pierre was 14 years old, Yves, 15. “My parents didn’t know,” Pierre says. They were off visiting family in Normandy in France’s northwest corner. Back in Avignon, in the far south, the boys had worked through July and they were supposed to stay on for August. They didn’t.
The boys traveled light, really light. “We had a jersey, a pair of shorts, and some cash,” Pierre says. At night they snuck into barns and slept beneath the hay. They both had raced bikes in junior divisions, and Yves was older, faster. So as they closed in on their destination—their grandmother’s house—the country jaunt turned into a grudge match. “The last few hours he put the hammer down,” Pierre says. “He wanted to make sure he got there first.”
Pierre was there for the grand arrival, though, in front of his mother. “When we showed up at the door she almost fainted,” Pierre says. The brothers had covered more than 525 miles in three days.
A few months later, Pierre’s father enrolled both of the boys in Eetat Tulle Issoire: military school.
If Pierre Ostor fails at Badwater, it will not be for lack of nutritional supplements. Hannibal’s elephant train scaled the Alps with fewer provisions. There are cases and cartons of Gatorade (Pierre has dibs on the Cool Blue), Zipfizz, Endura, Endurox. Every time you open a bag or a box there’s another supplement, goo, gel, powder.
How this roving GNC store is going to fit in a Dodge Caravan along with five adult males is a logistical question that would baffle the harbormaster at Rotterdam. Pierre has 47-year-old crew chief Paul Hasse—better known as the Field Marshal. He’s a planner by nature, a man who travels with a device to squeeze toothpaste from its tube most effectively.
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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?