Cyclists ride on Circulus during its stay in Portland, Ore. (Photo by Jeff Snyder.)

“…and the ring of power has a will of its own.”
—Prologue to the 2001 Lord of the Rings film

TOILING DAY AND NIGHT at the end of his senior year, Sam Starr ’10 set out to forge his own 50-foot-wide mini-velodrome, a seductive ring of ready-to-race-on wood he called Circulus. Fueled by artistic vision and caffeine, he machine-cut board after board, tightened bolts and sanded away rough spots until the 39 portable sections were ready to be connected with help from a crew of friends. Finally, the senior art project would come to life in the cavernous emptiness of the decommissioned Seeley-Mudd Science Library. As Sam pictured it, the contrast of the sterile, silent location with the blur of motion on the track would make an artistic statement. But first there had to be a test ride to see if his creation actually worked. “A leap of faith,” Sam calls that initial spin. “I had no idea if it would even hold up.”

Sam had faced doubts early on, as some faculty members were concerned that there just wasn’t enough time for him to pull off a project of this scale. But Sam had a habit of making his own path. Before coming to Pomona, he spent a year racing on an amateur cycling team in Spain, building his confidence and riding ability. At Pomona, the art major became fascinated with fungi—yes, fungi—after attending an environmental talk, and he took a year off to work in a science lab at the University of Minnesota back home. He returned to Pomona determined to meld art and science by crafting his own bike-driven mobile biology lab, which he did, eventually riding the 130-lb. “Velolab” to Los Angeles and back in a 50-mile trek. Simply put: Sam can. “We live for teaching Sam Starrs,” says Art Professor Michael O’Malley, who helped guide Sam along the way.

Sam Starr ’10 rides on Circulus in the decommissioned Seeley-Mudd library. (Photo by Lisa Anne Auerbach.)

But Circulus was bigger and more ambitious than any of his previous undertakings. While Sam was fairly certain he could get the velodrome built in time, he worried over whether it would actually be rideable in the tight circle required for it to fit in Seeley- Mudd. His 3-D computer design and scale model would help reduce the risk of failure, but this was no sure thing until he put tire rubber to wood. So there was joy and relief as he made the inaugural ride with friends gathered around to watch. Thanks to centrifugal force—or was it something more?—he had no trouble taking a spin on Circulus without taking a spill. “I just rode around yelling and screaming and everyone was dancing around the side of it,” recalls Sam, speaking in his halting, soft-spoken manner that suggests that even as he talks a portion of his mental RAM is still devoted to making plans or poring over diagrams.

Circulus took off, attracting attention far beyond Pomona’s greenery-and-sunshine campus after a video of the mini-velodrome went viral on the web. The unusual project had obvious appeal for bikers, who were itching to ride it, and Sam suspects the do-it-yourself aspect added to the interest, as people found a certain “romance about such a big … project undertaken by one person.” All the attention was fun, but Sam had his own plans. After graduation, he was off to France for a gig helping with upscale cycling tours for American recreational bikers. Circulus found a temporary home, protected with tarps, in the backyard of a friend’s place in Upland, with a section going for a time to Riverside for a museum exhibition on bike culture. “I was worried that it was going to end up going to the landfill eventually,” says Sam. “There was just no way for me to really be able to do anything with it.”

Sam knew he couldn’t hold onto Circulus. And when he decided to give up the ring, its power only grew.

DAN POWELL SPENT A CHUNK of his childhood amidst metal coffee cans full of bearings and axles as he worked on bikes with his old man. His dad had made a hobby of pulling jalopy bikes from the garbage and fixing them up. “No one stole your bike,” Powell recalls of those days. “Because they looked horrible.” But Powell caught the bike bug and went on to work at a series of bike shops and then at Planet Bike, a well-known bike accessories brand. For a time he lived out of his 1964 Ford Econoline van while working as an intern for Bike magazine in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. In 2008, he and business partner Erik Olson started their own bike-accessories business, Portland Design Works, in the cycling-crazed Oregon city.

Powell dates his fascination with velodromes back to around 1995, when a couple of guys he knew who had been bicycle messengers told him about an event in Toronto with an insane figure-eight velodrome, complete with elevated flyover, called the Human-Powered Roller Coaster. Powell was transfixed by the blurry video. “As a very impressionable 19 to 20-year-old cycling kid, it seemed like the most badass thing ever,” he says. From then on, Powell recalls, he carried hopes of having his own velodrome.

Fifteen years later, in 2010, he read in the Urban Velo blog that Sam Starr was trying to sell Circulus. Here was his chance. When Powell didn’t hear back from Sam, he figured someone had already swooped in and bought it. But Sam was still in France and just hard to reach, and Circulus remained in storage. When they finally connected, Powell recalled that Sam had mentioned online that he would be happy to get back half of the $3,000 that had gone into the project. Powell offered $1,600, which he had to borrow from friends, and the deal was sealed. In time, he boarded a plane for Southern California and rented a truck to bring Circulus to Oregon.

Buzz about the velodrome’s arrival built quickly in Portland, and Powell and company invited friends to ride at a gathering that fell on April Fool’s Day 2011. They planned for a bigger unveiling, with a big party set for summer. They shored up the track,—which, after all, had been intended as an art piece—adding bolts and wood reinforcement. But they tinkered too much by brushing on a coating of basketball court varnish, leaving the track too slippery to ride just before the party. “We were panicked,” recalls Powell. Some skateboarders saved the day by letting them in on a trick: coating the track with a solution of watered down Coca-Cola would give it more stick and less slick. On went the show, which included a deejay and drew about 400 people, a cross-section of the biking community— “road cyclists, track guys, BMX kids.” The success of the event “kind of validated buying it,” says Powell.

New video from Portland only added to Circulus’ reputation, drawing more views and blog posts on the web. Powell notes the contrasts in the “peaceful and contemplative” video of Sam riding Circulus in placid Seeley-Mudd with the “devil-may-care” footage from the kick-off party. Circulus had left the artsy world of wine and cheese for the sweaty realm of beer and Cheetos. And that was just fine with Sam, who had watched it all from afar, checking in online every few weeks: “I’m sure a lot more people saw it as a bike project after I had let go of it than saw it as an art project when I still had it.”

“It was an art installation because of its context in the library,” he says. “You’re taking something and putting it … where it doesn’t really belong.” Then he turns a tad mystical: When Circulus became part of the bike world, Sam says, “in a way it was going home again.” But Circulus wouldn’t find a permanent home in that Portland warehouse. The velodrome was going on the road.

Next stop: Las Vegas.

EACH FALL, INTERBIKE International Trade Expo pulls in thousands of visitors for what is billed as the largest bicycle trade show in the U.S. With so many big-name vendors attending, Powell and his partner’s company would be small-fry, able to afford only a slim space at the Sands Convention Center. But with crowd-drawing Circulus in their possession, they would get a sweet deal for more room—and plenty of attention. On the first day of the show, an apparel brand had arranged for Jeremy Powers and Tim Johnson, big names in the cycling world, to race each other on Circulus. “They promoted it like a heavyweight boxing match,” says Powell. “The guys came out wearing robes. They weighed in. … They talked smack to each other.”

Their first two races in the best-of-three event went just fine. Then came the final showdown, and near-disaster. Someone in the crowd surrounding Circulus held out a $20 bill and Powers reached out to grab the cash, missed and nearly wiped out. “He came within 10 inches of leaving the surface of the track. You could smell the burning rubber,” says Powell. “This is 40 minutes into the first day of the show where we were going to turn people loose on this thing. I was scared.”

The show went on and so did the races, sometimes strangely. One was between riders in Gumby and Pokey costumes, another costumed race pitted a hot dog against a squirrel. All in all, Circulus was a crowd-pleaser as expected. (Sam Starr had tried to make it back to the states to see Circulus in Vegas, but he just couldn’t pull it off.) Still, Powell, glad there were no mishaps, was relieved when the time came to disassemble Circulus.

The ring, in some ways, had become a burden. Sure, it had brought lots of publicity to his enterprise in Portland, but he and his partner also didn’t want to be known just as the guys with the velodrome. Practically speaking, Circulus took up a lot of space they needed in their warehouse, and set-up and tear-down to take it on the road took hours of crew work—six hours to put it together, four to take it apart.

“My wife was like, ‘It’s time for it to go.’ My partner was like, ‘It’s time for it to go.’ I knew it was time for it to go,” recalls Powell.

So Circulus would be passed along once again.
Powell had a good sense of who the ring should go to next.

POWELL HAD CRASHED at his buddy Jeff Frane’s place last year when he came to Minneapolis for the Frostbike trade show. Frane was one of the first people Powell told about buying the velodrome, and Frane had fanned interest by unveiling the news in his Bike Jerks blog and posting the original video. “That was the spark in the proverbial dry grass,” says Powell. Frane has organized a slew of races in Minneapolis, another bike-crazy metropolis, including the annual All City Championship. “In short,” Frane writes online of his cycling interest, “I am way into it.” Like Powell, Frane also lived out of his van for a time. That was after college, where he’d studied comparative religion and public relations. “Super useful,” Frane says.

Once again like Powell, Frane found a way to make his living in the bike business, in his case as the sales and marketing manager for All-City Cycles. The difference is that little All-City is owned by industry powerhouse Quality Bicycle Products. Circulus was handed off in hopes that a big enterprise would be able to do more with the bulky attraction. Frane talks of bringing Circulus to Midwestern cities such as Chicago or Milwaukee this summer. He’d like to take it back to Vegas for Interbike in the fall, and maybe add a twist, throwing out the idea of a circus tent or a fog machine: “I think there’s a number of ways we could take it.” But there are logistics to be worked out and expenses to be calculated, and, at the moment, Circulus is safely stowed away at QBP’s massive warehouse in Ogden, Utah. Says Frane: “It’s sitting there while we decide what the heck to do with the thing.” The ring rests—for now.

Its maker, though, is hard at work. Sam Starr finally made his way back to the states, landing in little Hudson, New York. With some inspiration from art professor O’Malley, he took up another audacious industrial undertaking. Sam set to work on building a brick pizza oven … in the back of a truck. “To a large extent it’s just another excuse to get myself wrapped up in another crazy fabrication project,” he says. He recently started selling pizza out of the oven-bearing behemoth. (The business is called Truck Pizza: http://www.truckpizza.net./) But Sam remains an avid cyclist. He is still fascinated with velodromes and continues to field inquiries from would-be imitators requesting copies of the 3-D design he used for Circulus, though nobody ever seems to follow through and build one. “Maybe I should go into the mini-velodrome business one day,” he muses. Yes, Sam is tempted by the thought of forging another ring. “It’s in the back of my mind for sure,’’ he says.

Lucy Embick Kunz ’78 climbs onto the arm of the sofa, squats in her white sock feet and throws her whole body into the tale of her recent near-gold experience at the German Life Saving Championships.

The small-framed swimmer grabs below the arm of the sofa and demonstrates how she was perched on the block—one that was more slanted than usual—and ready to dive in.

Just then, Lucy recounts, she tipped forwards off the block, starting before the gun fired, disqualifying her from the second discipline, the combined swimming event. Lucy had already finished 12 meters ahead in the 50-meter freestyle, the first event of the three-part competition. She knew gold in her age category was within easy reach. “I would have won,” she says, squinting her blue eyes, clearly still furious with herself.

Lucy’s intensity serves her well because she is racing for more than medals: She swims for her own survival. Lucy has been fighting aggressive ovarian cancer since 2003, and she has done it, in large part, by throwing herself into competitive swimming. In a sense, every lap, every moment in the pool is a victory. As a medical physicist who knows her case confides: “The doctors say Lucy Kunz should have been dead seven years ago.”

Lucy has endured 157 days of chemotherapy, three months of radiation and 13 operations on what was once a near-perfect body. She has demonstrated pure mind over matter—winning dozens of golds and breaking an International Life Saving Organization world record in obstacle swimming with a body pumped full of toxic chemicals designed to fight off tumors. She says her greatest achievement may have been when she won the German Masters gold for the 200-meter backstroke in April 2010, about a week after her 118th day of chemotherapy.

She has done all this while grieving an unfathomable family tragedy. Her older brother, Dr. Andy Embick ’72, the one she followed to Pomona, the brilliant and restless Rhodes Scholar she had always looked up to, committed suicide just months before she was diagnosed with cancer eight years ago.

The combination of the two events launched Lucy on a journey of survival. “I never did give up. I never ever ever ever did,” says Lucy. “I have to be like the pop-up figures in comics. I’m shot down and have to get up again. If I give up swimming, I’ll give up my health and my life.”

LUCY’S LOVE AFFAIR with swimming started in kindergarten at her local YMCA in Salem, Ore., where she grew up as the third of four children. Her mother is a lawyer, and Lucy’s late father worked as an orthopedist. Lucy says the Embick children weren’t pushed to achieve. But excellence was in the air at home. She and Andy were always close, and he swam too, even though swimming was not something they shared in a big way.

Andy learned to love gymnastics as a teenager and later preferred the thrill of pursuits such as rock climbing and whitewater paddling. Lucy remembers the time, when she was a kid, that Andy embarrassed her at the pool by walking around the deck on his hands, as if in a gym. That was Andy.

Still, Lucy looked up to her big brother, the firstborn, to the point that he was nearly infallible in her mind. “He was always my example of doing everything right,” Lucy says, adding, “I had absolute trust in him. Andy took me climbing. He got me to rappel. I didn’t even think about it twice. Most people wouldn’t even go over the edge. Andy said ‘go’ and I went.”

Lucy followed Andy to Pomona after he told her she’d like it better than the other schools she’d applied to. Somehow, Andy was always right.

At Pomona, Lucy still went to the pool to keep fit, but she gave up swimming competitively to concentrate on her studies. Burdette Poland, a Pomona professor of history emeritus who taught Lucy in three courses, recalls Lucy as competitive, honest and determined. He remembers how she “broke loose” in her comprehensive exams in history, doing better work than she had ever done before and ranking third among history majors that year.

Andy, for his part, did compete on the swim and water polo teams, but was better-known for his mountaineering exploits, including eight days spent on Yosemite’s El Capitan. Richard Preston ’76, today a bestselling writer (The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event), recalls a conversation in which he reminded Andy that a single mistake during his solo ice-climbing expeditions could lead to his death. “Andy looked at me with this little smile and said, ‘Of course, I know that.’ I said, ‘Why do you do it?’ Andy said, ‘Because I don’t make mistakes.’”

Lucy and Preston dated steadily for two years when Lucy was a sophomore and junior. The pair would lose themselves in conversation about archeology and art history. Looking back, Preston recalls Lucy being in her prime during her Pomona years, except for having to live in the shadow of the monumental reputation of her brother, who had routinely scaled the side of Smiley Hall to get to his room instead of taking the stairs.

Andy and Lucy both were accepted at Harvard in their post-Pomona years, and Andy did go on to Harvard Medical Schoolafter his time at Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship. But Lucy, after earning a master’s degree in art history at the University of Oregon and going on a Rotary Foundation scholarship to Munich, chose to attend the University of Pittsburgh for her doctorate because of the financial aid package.

The siblings maintained a close relationship despite the thousands of miles between them. Andy, a physician, made his home in Valdez, Alaska, and Lucy settled in southern Germany, raising three sons with her husband Roland, who works in banking. Lucy met Andy regularly for ski trips in the Alps, followed his expeditions with interest and consulted him for medical advice regarding her children.

All along, Lucy would find time for brief swims, but only when her children joined a team did Lucy return to competitive swimming. Within no time, Lucy began racking up the medals at swim competitions across Germany, pleased that she had found a way to combine her love for swimming with her responsibilities to her family. In 2002, Lucy won three gold medals at the Life Saving World Championships in Florida and was named athlete of the year in Schweinfurt, where she practices swimming and teaches everyone from toddlers to triathletes.

Then came the news that Andy had rowed his skiff out onto Prince William Sound and killed himself.

Why Andy made this choice remains a mystery to Lucy. She confesses, “It’s a tragedy which, in its profoundness, is incomparable to anything else in terms of being an incalculable shock to me and to our whole family.” Lucy believes the shock compromised her immune system.

AFTER THE CANCER DIAGNOSIS, Lucy at first focused on the pain, the suffering and the fear she felt in the face of cancer and the treatments. But she intuitively understood that she had to turn negative feelings into positive emotions in order to survive, so Lucy began swimming in even more competitions, just when most people would have believed that impossible. The initial diagnosis of cancer and the ensuing treatments only kept Lucy away from swim meets briefly. To her doctors’ amazement, she won four gold medals at the Bavarian long-distance championship in March 2004, less than four months after her first operation.

Lucy began to develop a personal philosophy about living with the disease. She had seen how other cancer patients had given up quality of life during treatment, and she resolved to follow a different path. And, as the years went by, Lucy says Andy’s death increased her determination to survive. “He gave me even more reason never to give up,” she says. Lucy’s medical advisers say her attitude has been a key part of  her survival. “Frau Kunz keeps fighting … Such illnesses do not have to be accompanied with weakness and low performance, if patients are willing to actively do something about it and fight their way through,” says biochemist Ulrike Kämmerer, who Lucy consults on her diet.

Kämmerer and a colleague at the University of Würzburg, medical physicist Rainer Klement, were co-authors on a recent paper about the benefits of a high-fat, low-carb diet for those diagnosed with cancer, the diet Lucy keeps and one she calls the “Atkins diet” for cancer patients. In the paper, titled “Is There a Role for Carbohydrate Restriction in the Treatment and Prevention of Cancer?” published in October in the journal Nutrition and Metabolism, the two explore the effect of glucose on tumor cell proliferation.

The diet is not widely recommended by doctors because many don’t know about it, and there have been too few tests of the diet, Klement says. But the researchers say the sugars in a high-carb diet actually feed tumor cells. By lowering the amount of sugar in the blood, a cancer patient can “starve” a tumor of the nutrition it seeks. “Several factors play a role in Lucy’s survival,” Klement says. “One is the swimming, which gives her lots of strength because she loves it, and she swims with abandon. The swimming helps to detoxify her body. Doing sports in some sense is like reducing carbohydrates—both work together well, and both are helping Lucy. And then she’s strong psychologically and has an extremely strong will. That surely also plays a part.”

Lucy herself says having strong and supple muscles has helped her recover quickly from numerous surgeries to remove tumor growth from different parts of her body. Her rigorous swim training has reduced her pain substantially and become her best physical therapy. “After all that radiation, if I hadn’t really pushed myself, I wouldn’t be able to move today much at all,” Lucy says.

Still, from a medical point of view, Lucy’s swimming ability defies explanation, given her metastatic condition and the large number of chemotherapy treatments she has undergone. Kämmerer says, “Lucy is swimming times that hardly any healthy (and younger) person could. It’s extremely exceptional.”

IT’S TUESDAY, THE DAY when Lucy devotes herself to her students at the pool. She is conducting a class with nine small children. As she helps the little ones with their backstroke, Lucy’s strongest stroke, she holds their small heads in her palm like a healer.

On this particular afternoon, Lucy skips the nap she usually takes poolside. Typically, she lies down on the tiled stadium bench for a doze. Lucy has organized her chemotherapy treatments and her schedule around her coaching commitments and her own swimming routine. She even manages her available energy throughout the week so that she can be at her best on Tuesdays.

Dealing with her lack of energy is just one side effect that Lucy has had to learn to live with. She says it took her years to come to terms with the limitations that the disease brings with it. Lucy has hit multiple physical low points but, she says, the thought of giving up doesn’t enter her mind. In 2010, while on holiday in Michigan, she says she experienced pain at a level of 13 on a scale of one to 10 after two months of thoracic radiation. “I basically lay on the floor of the summer house all vacation,” Lucy recalls.

Lucy says her unusually well-tested pain threshold allows her to keep going. “I am able to transfer the tolerance of pain and suffering I have had to develop to survive the treatments for my cancer to my competitions in the pool. … I can let swimming hurt. I can go beyond my limit.”

Professor Poland compares her fight with cancer to the story of Persephone from Greek mythology, since Lucy is forced to live another life in a different realm when she’s undergoing cancer treatments. “Lucy has the good fortune to be able to come back but always with the limitation that she has to return to the underworld before the end of the year,” says Poland, who has been corresponding with Lucy in recent years.

He adds, “When I was a kid, I would get a fever and go to bed, waiting for deliverance. I would lie back and let nature take its course. Lucy is the extreme opposite of that. … She is indefatigable.”

Lucy’s story of courage also helped Richard Preston as he recovered from a shattered pelvis after a ski accident in 2010. A few years earlier, the author had taken up tree-climbing while researching his 2007 book, The Wild Trees, about the people who climb some of the world’s tallest. After the ski mishap, he feared he “would never climb a tree again,” Preston says. “I thought a lot about Lucy during that time. If Lucy Embick Kunz can break the world record in swimming with ovarian cancer, then climbing trees with a shattered pelvis ought to be doable.” Preston has now increased the vertical distance he can climb to that of a redwood tree. He did it in honor of Lucy.

“I see her as a breathtaking athlete—but her accomplishments are not just physical,” says Preston. “They’re spiritual at the same time. People who have seen this deeply admire it.”

EIGHT YEARS INTO THE FIGHT, Lucy hardly seems battle-weary.Just recently, she received news that her tumors had not shown medically relevant growth, which meant she could extend the pause in her chemotherapy for another three to four months. “I feel like I have been saved from a burning airplane,” she says.

Amid her cancer treatments and swimming meets, Lucy still grieves the loss of Andy: “There is never a day when I do not miss him.” Resolving the tragedy isn’t possible, but she is no longer trying to find answers about why Andy did what he did. “Andy was always absolute in his decisions. I have accepted it,” Lucy says.

It’s not just the swimming that helps her cope, but the people she meets in occasional competitions for people with disabilities. At these meets, Lucy swims with people who are blind, deaf, paralyzed or have limbs missing. (She is categorized as “generally” handicapped.)

Lucy’s eyes well up as she describes a swimmer who has no arms and legs: The swimmer bites on a cord with his teeth to hold him at the edge of the pool (any body part counts). When the starting gun fires, the swimmer releases the cord and begins to propel himself through the water with sinuous short dolphin motions. “You watch people who swim 50 meters without arms and legs, and everything becomes quite relative,” Lucy says, adding, “I don’t think it’s fair for me to complain about my health.”

Nor does she complain. Andreas Moser, who coaches triathletes with Lucy at the Silvana pool in Schweinfurt, notes that Lucy doesn’t talk much of her cancer. She will just occasionally mention in a neutral way that she’s going to lose her hair again, something that makes her bathing cap the perfect accessory.

“I don’t look for excuses,” says Lucy. “I just swim.”

The motto of the Tahoe Rim Trail Endurance Run is “A Glimpse of Heaven, A Taste of Hell,” and it’s not hard to recognize why. Taking place smack-dab in the middle of the sweltering summer, the race encompasses two states, three national forests, six counties and a 10,000-foot summit in Nevada.

On this particular day in July 2009, Zach Landman ’08 was one of more than 100 runners jogging the route. Until the spring of his senior year, Landman—then a beefy linebacker on the Pomona-Pitzer football team—had never run more than five miles in a row. Barely more than a year later, he was competing in this 100-mile “ultramarathon.”

Just past the halfway point, he was settling into a nice pace. But as any ultra runner can tell you, there’s always time for things to head south, and at mile 60, they did. Landman’s stomach shut down, his muscles started cramping and he began throwing up every few steps in the dry afternoon heat. He was underfed and dehydrated, but couldn’t keep down food or water. For several hours he groggily stumbled along the dusty trail, dragging his feet and feeling on the verge of collapse.

“I was ready to quit,” he says simply.

As the sun set across the horizon of the Sierra Nevadas, Landman was losing hope and growing delirious with exhaustion. But with a bright array of constellations scattered across the sky and the piercing silence of the desert surrounding him, his mood slowly shifted and adrenaline started coursing through his veins again. After reaching the very edge of his ability to go on, he had somehow emerged in a strange, transcendent, almost blissful state of being.

He sped up for the final 20 miles of the race, and blew through the last seven to 10 miles of the course at a blistering seven-minute-mile pace. “Getting past that threshold of pain you thought you could withstand, you get to a new level of lightness and feel as though you could run forever,” he says. “You break through and it becomes almost utopia.”

Pause.

“Almost.”

CERTAIN ATHLETIC GOALS are understandable, practical and even downright enjoyable, like honing a tennis serve or perfecting your downward dog. But what, exactly, possesses someone to want to run 100 miles without stopping? “I read about it flipping through a Runner’s World magazine, and thought it sounded like just about the hardest thing I could possibly do,” Landman recalls with a hearty laugh.

The Orinda, Calif., native has a history of taking on tough challenges. In high school, he made a documentary about gay marriage that surprised his football teammates and won national film awards. At Pomona, he majored in science, technology and society, and was known as a fierce competitor on the gridiron. “Zach’s only happy when he’s being challenged,” says Robert Pepple ’08, a close friend and former teammate. “If something’s too easy for him over the long run, he gets bored. He loves the process itself—reaching a goal and then progressing to the next one.”

That same fire in the belly has further revealed itself at the University of California at San Francisco, where Landman is a fourth-year student of orthopedic surgery who, when he finds the time, publishes papers in major orthopedic journals. (He also fit in getting married this past summer.) All the same Type A personality traits of ultra runners figure prominently in medicine, among them intensity, focus, stamina and a drive to better understand the limits of the human body. “We are an ambitious, self-motivated bunch,” says ultra regular Mark Tanaka, an E.R. doctor and friend of Landman’s. “This isn’t a pastime for the lazy.”

LANDMAN’S ULTRA CAREER almost didn’t make it beyond the first race. Even with that joyous last-minute sprint, when he crossed the finish line at Tahoe—with a time of just under 24 hours—he vowed never to run another ultra again. In the ensuing days, though, he couldn’t get the experience out of his head.

“Whenever I closed my eyes, I was on the trails,” he says. Within two weeks, he was online researching his next competition. Landman won four of his first six races, even setting a course record at the Big Basin 50K (4 hours, 39 minutes). In 2010, he tackled the sport’s Holy Grail at the Western States Endurance Run, which climbs more than 18,000 feet, descends nearly 23,000, and traverses snowcaps, riverbeds and a seemingly unending series of sun-baked canyons with such names as “The Bake Oven” and “Devil’s Thumb.” Typically, as much as a quarter of the more than 400 participants don’t finish. The then-23-year-old, in only his second 100-miler, placed 16th.

Mark Gilligan, a long-time runner who founded the website UltraSignUp, had already heard about Landman after two races. “When you’re in a sport where everyone’s pretty gangly and the average age is 45, a young, muscular guy like Zach sticks out,” Gilligan says. “I could tell he was talented and that it was only a matter of time before he started winning races.”

That’s not to say success has come easily. In the early days, Landman spent hours painstakingly poring over topographical route maps and picking the brains of his peers. He quickly learned that the advice about how “it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon” becomes exponentially more valuable in ultras, which runners train themselves to separate into 10- or 20-mile minigoals to conquer.

“Rough patches in marathons may last a few minutes,” he says. “In ultras they feel like an eternity.”

In preparation for those eternal runs, Landman’s weekdays begin with 3:30 a.m. “easy runs” of 10 to 12 miles through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. On weekends, he embarks on 50- mile excursions in which he equips himself with nothing more than a water bottle and a salt tab. When he and his wife Geri take hiking trips into the mountains, she will often drop him off at a trailhead and meet up with him 50 miles later in time for dinner.

During races he subsists on one-ounce energy gels that he knocks back like shots. At Western States, while others rested at aid stations and chowed on PB&Js and Red Bulls, he guzzled a couple gallons of water, sucked down 52 gels and stopped for nothing. (Nope, not even nature’s call. “I guess it’s one of those skills you pick up along the way,” he says nonchalantly.)

To motivate himself the night before each competition, Landman writes out a list of reasons that he’s running and hands it out to his crew to read back to him during the race. “I know I’ll want to come up with reasons to quit,” he says, “but I’ve grown to anticipate those moments and almost look forward to them.”

So what’s the payoff? Ultramarathoners aren’t looking for money or fame or glory; the prize for finishing Western States in under 24 hours was a silver belt buckle. For an overscheduled guy like Landman, the ritual centers him and lets him shut down his mind—which, somewhat paradoxically, often results in fresh perspectives and new research ideas.

“Every time I do an ultra, rather than feeling bigger and stronger and better about myself, above all I feel humbled,” he says. “Running up mountains and through nature, you can’t help but be in awe of what’s going on around you.”

LANDMAN’S HOBBY, while closely related to his career in orthopedic surgery, might also seem somewhat at odds with it. His UCSF colleagues tease him about how he’s “just trying to build a network of patients,” and caution him, only half-jokingly, about subjecting his feet to an activity that could result in the debilitating injuries described in his textbooks.

“There’s probably a healthy balance to this, but doing things in moderation just doesn’t work for me,” admits Landman, who cut a quarter of the weight off of his 225-lb. football frame in his first year of training. After Western States, he exhibited symptoms of rhabdomyolysis, a muscle-breakdown condition that can cause severe kidney damage. While he understands the risk of developing early osteoarthritis or hypoglycemia, he says that the joy he gets from the sport, for the moment, outweighs the potential repercussions 30 years down the road.

His research at UCSF could provide insight into what damage will be done: This spring, the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine is publishing an article he co-authored that looks at physiological changes runners experience during races. Bucking conventional wisdom, he found that runners who hydrated less—and, therefore, lost more weight—were actually more likely to succeed. He argues that the “drink plenty of water” mantra that’s been drilled into our heads vastly oversimplifies matters for ultra runners, and that factors such as electrolyte balance and blood pressure may be better benchmarks for good health than weight loss. In many cases, runners are disqualified from races if their weight drops by more than 5 percent. Landman hopes his article might inspire the entire community to rethink the rule that has been followed for more than three decades.

AS MUCH AS IT IS a physical achievement, ultra running is ultimately bigger than the body. Some of the most experienced marathoners view a 50- or 100-mile race as beyond the realm of possibility, but ultra veterans would argue that it’s all in their heads. “If you can get past the mental roadblocks, you can get past the physical ones,” Gilligan says. Or, as one of Landman’s mentors told him: “The first 50 miles are run with the legs, and the second 50 miles with the mind.”

Landman wasn’t surprised to discover through his research that ultramarathons attract a disproportionate number of recovering addicts. The sport is, if nothing else, rooted in extremes— that mix of heaven and hell, of unbearable hurt interspersed with intense physical euphoria.

Speaking of hell, still remaining on his bucket list is the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon in Death Valley, where temperatures get so high that runners keep their feet on the road’s white lane markers to prevent the soles of their sneakers from melting off.

“Sure, some people don’t understand all of this and think I’m crazy,” Landman says. “But it works for me.”

I realized my mistake as I sat sweating and gasping for breath, knees trembling, body strapped into a bare-bones racecar with more horsepower than I wanted.

At the twirl of the instructor’s hand in the air, I flipped two of the six switches that comprised the entirety of the racecar’s dash controls. The vehicle rumbled to life, shaking and coughing at idle in a way that let you know it would only be happy going fast.

I hadn’t wanted to go to racing school. I’d rather not go fast, and I’m not the physically adventurous type. The only boundaries I like to push are how many books I can read in a week. But I’d had the idea to write a mystery series set in the car racing world after working in corporate marketing for a racing series sponsor. The fact that I’d never written a mystery—that I’d written fiction for the first time in my life only a few months prior—hadn’t stopped me from pitching my nascent idea to a published author. She encouraged me, with one caveat: My sleuth, who I’d seen as a woman in corporate marketing, had to be the racecar driver.

I needed the knowledge I’d get from being behind the wheel, and I wanted to have done it, even if doing it scared me to death. So there I was in the car at Road Atlanta, a road course in Georgia. Panicking.

We’d started the three-day course with classroom work, which is the kind of thing I’m good at, even if the topic was tire contact patches and the forces involved in cornering and braking. But then they put me in a car, and told me to forget everything I thought I knew about driving.

The first hands-on exercise was learning to brake, which should have been a no-brainer. What’s different about braking on the track, however, is that you don’t ease onto the brake and ease off, as you would in a street car rolling to a stop at a light. In broad strokes, racecar drivers want to be 100 percent on the throttle until they’re 100 percent on the brakes.

That meant barreling toward the brake markers at full acceleration—and then standing on the brake pedal with all my might, hoping to God I didn’t run into the gravel trap or, worse, the wall at the outer edge of the turn. Every fiber in my body screamed at me to brake sooner while my brain countered with “they said not to brake until the next marker.”

After braking, we learned how to heel-and-toe downshift. That’s using the right foot on two pedals at once, to both brake and blip the throttle (press the accelerator), which raises the engine revs so the car doesn’t lurch when I release the clutch. The point is to be as smooth as possible—“smooth is fast,” one driver told me—and maintain the connection of the tires to the ground at all times.

I kept telling myself that if I could tap dance (which I can), I could heel-and-toe downshift too, even if tap dancing doesn’t usually happen at 80 mph. I managed it only once the first day.

At this point in the instruction, I should have taken comfort in the fact that the other students were in the same boat, all beginners, all learning—except that they weren’t, because three of them were NASCAR drivers, young guns recently hired by one of the top NASCAR bosses through a televised reality show.

They were there to brush up on their road-racing skills, since their experience mostly ran to ovals. I’m sure intimidating an already scared writer was all in a day’s work for them.

Unlike me, the NASCAR boys had no trouble putting all the pieces together when it came time for a lead-follow around the track with an instructor showing us the correct line and braking points. They performed well; I floundered. It was the second day, and we were in groups of three cars (one student per car) following an instructor who was a professional driver. We were supposed to hit each apex correctly, upshift to the gearing they’d told us was correct, brake where they told us to brake and heeland- toe downshift.

Another attendee was frustrated with my pace and dogged my back bumper, which didn’t improve my skill. But I simply wasn’t ready to go as fast as the other two drivers in my group, and I stuck to my own comfort level, trying not be peer-pressured into a speed I wasn’t ready for. A good friend and professional driver had counseled me to take things at my own pace, and I repeated her words to myself as I struggled through our sessions.

Sooner than I wanted it to, the moment of truth arrived: my first solo laps. I sat waiting in the rumbling car, sweating and terrified, hoping my shaking legs would be able to work the clutch and throttle. I wondered again why I was doing this and why I hadn’t chosen something more normal and less violent to write about besides racing. Tea parties and embroidery, perhaps. And then they waved me out.

The change didn’t happen right away. As I lapped the track in short stints, punctuated by feedback from instructors stationed at different corners, I slowly began to enjoy myself. To find myself grinning under my helmet because I enjoyed the section of the track that curves left and right like the letter “S.” To think more about doing every corner right the next lap, not just three of 12. I got comfortable enough to relax, process more information and handle the speeds. I still wasn’t fast, relative to other students in the school. But I was doing 90 mph before braking for one corner, going 75-80 through another corner, and hitting 117 on the back straight. Best of all, by the start of the third day, the instructors were telling me I was doing everything right. That even if I wasn’t fast, I had the right skills. Going fast just takes more seat time, they assured me. I’ll take their word for it.

In the end, I learned enough to make my racecar driver sleuth, Kate Reilly, credible in the eyes of the racing world. Even if I can’t drive the way Kate can, I understand how she does it, and I can make her a character that the racing world believes in—in part, thanks to one of the instructors who later reviewed and blessed the driving scenes in my novel. I also faced down my fears and made it through one of the toughest challenges in my life.

But the truly eye-opening moment came near the end of the three-day course, when I rode in the racecar I’d been driving, with an instructor at the wheel. That’s when I understood how much more potential there was in the car and the track, and how much farther away the dge was. That two-lap ride gave me a glimpse of a different world, one of extreme speed and control and daring.

I know I’ll never personally inhabit that world, but at least now I can write about it.

ABOUT TAMMY KAEHLER ’92

She fell into the world of auto racing—and landed in the VIP suites. Kaehler had a freelance gig writing marketing copy for a mortgage lender during the housing boom of the early 2000s. When the lender decided to help sponsor the American Le Mans racing series, Kaehler saw a chance to travel and look inside another world, so she signed on to help with corporate hospitality work at the races.

Since she was working for the company putting up the cash, Kaehler got inside access at the track, riding in top-of-the-line Porsches and meeting “everyone and their uncle.” She became fascinated with auto racing: the money, the violence, the rock-star drivers.

Soon she was at work on a racing-themed murder-mystery book featuring a female racecar driver, Kate Reilly. After the mortgage company went bust, she kept at her writing and kept her toes inthe motorsports world, volunteering at races. When Dead Man’s Switch finally published last year, she launched the book at the American Le Mans Series at Connecticut’s Lime Rock Park, where the story is set.

Since then, her author events have continued to zigzag between conventional mystery book venues, where the racing aspect of the book stands out, and book-signings at racing events, where the mystery aspect is unique. “At each, people are totally fluent with one aspect of what I’m writing about,” she says.

Following this unusual course, Kaehler has found her audience. Publishers Weekly and Library Journal both praised the debut, and the second Kate Reilly mystery will be published next year.

Our story begins with a long-ago knock on a door on a balmy June evening. The door is in France, at the apartment of a very young Kimball Jones, just a year out of Pomona where he was known as a nice guy who could often be found playing the grand piano in the lounge at Walker Hall or performing with his small jazz group for school dances.

But at this moment, Jones is simply an American in Paris. He is living the continental life thanks to the largesse of the French government, which awarded him a scholarship for this year following his 1960 college graduation. In return, three days a week he teaches conversational English at a lycée in suburban Paris. Much of the rest of his time he spends sitting on the iconic green chairs in the Jardin des Tuileries outside the Louvre. There, during an unusually warm February, he reads the entire works of Camus and Gide in French. In the evenings he goes to the cafés to drink good beer and better wine. He is living the life.

As befitting a young man living in the most romantic city in the world, he has fallen in love with a Swiss woman, Margrith. On this particular night in June, it is 10 o’clock. Jones and Margrith are engaged in the most ordinary of activities—cleaning the kitchen in his apartment from top to bottom. They have no way of imagining that, in a moment, the knock on the door will come, drawing Jones into a cascade of events that will change the balance of power in Africa.

Kimball Jones ’60 and Margrith in Paris.

Fifty years later, Jones is recounting this tale, sitting at the table of his sunny New York apartment with newspaper clippings and 8-by-10 black-and-white photographs spread out in front of him. Margrith brings in the worn brown leather diary he carried with him those many years ago and in which he kept an account of his remarkable experience that began on this one early-summer evening in Paris.

Down on the street in the Place d’Italie is a fellow by the name of Bill Nottingham whom Jones has met only once before, in an interview at the French refugee organization Cimade. Nottingham doesn’t know Jones’ exact address, so he stops people on the street, asking if they know where the tall American lives. Eventually, someone waves him in the direction of Jones’ apartment, where he interrupts their cleaning that night—along with their lives for a time.

Nottingham can’t discuss the urgent matter that has brought him there in front of Margrith, so he asks Jones to come down and talk to him in his car. Much later that night, Jones describes their conversation in his journal, crowding the words onto the pocket-sized pages:

I am almost hesitating to write this down, as it is very important and must be kept secret. Bill asked me if I could leave Paris tomorrow for a week. The story is as follows: There has been much trouble in Angola (Africa) recently. Out of 16 Methodist missionaries, 13 are dead or missing. There are many Angolese students in Lisbon, Portugal. The Portuguese government has taken their passports, immobilizing them. There is a good chance that a follow-up of the Angolese affair could occur in Lisbon, directed against these students. In fact, the possibility of a mass slaughter is not an exaggeration. These students are in hot water!

Before the month is over, Jones will end up in his own hot water, in the confines of a Spanish prison. But he’s not thinking about the possibility. Perhaps when Nottingham asks him to drive a car across Spain and back to clandestinely transport these fugitive students, he might have been wise to mull it over for a moment or two. But he is swept up in the drama and intrigue of it all. He answers in less time than it would have taken him to pick out a shirt to wear. He doesn’t think of himself as a hero. He doesn’t see himself playing a role in a historic moment. Truth be told, he sees it as an adventure, a great story to tell in years to come.

Clinging To Empire

Portugal had been a presence along the coast of Africa since the late 15th century as the first European nation to establish settlements and trading posts. The European colonization of Africa’s interior would begin in earnest at the grandiose behest of Belgium’s King Leopold II, who sat down with other European leaders in 1884 and blithely divvied up the continent not unlike the way the modern-day game of Risk begins. But while one after another African colony claimed its independence in the aftermath of World War II, Portugal, under the dictatorship of António Salazar, had held tightly to its holdings in Africa, including Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Principe.

Long-simmering tensions in Angola, on the western coast of Africa, had come to a head six months earlier when peasants who worked in the cotton fields protested their low wages and deplorable working conditions. The protest turned into a revolt. Portuguese traders were attacked. A month later in retaliation, the Portuguese military bombed villages, killing many thousands of the indigenous population.

The African students believed to be at risk in Portugal were among the first to complete a university education there. Salazar, fearing the political and intellectual leadership they might contribute to their homelands, had not only detained them by taking away their papers, but also had them tailed by his secret police, the PIDE (pronounced pee-day).

The leaders of the Methodist Board of Missions and World Council of Churches (WCC) had decided to secure false papers for these students and smuggle as many of them as they could across Spain—which had its own dictator—and into France where they would be given political asylum. Because of Cimade’s experience with this kind of endeavor, the WCC asked that organization to plan and carry out what would later become known as “the Fuga” (meaning escape or flight in Portuguese).

Jones will leave Paris in 24 hours. The first thing in the morning he procures his international driver’s license. It happens to be the final week of the school where he teaches, but under Nottingham’s advisement, Jones simply doesn’t show up. Later he is too embarrassed to go back and explain. For all the head of the lycée ever knew, he had fallen off the face of the earth.

To Margrith he confides only that he is going on a secret mission for Cimade. If anyone asks, he says, tell them I’ve gone off to Geneva for a conference. That cover story is so convincing that when he tells Mrs. Hauser, for whom he has been doing some house painting, she pulls out a Swiss watch that wasn’t working and asks him to get it repaired while he is there. He pockets it, not knowing what to do with it. Like so many other things, he’ll figure it out later.

Paris, France — June 14, 1961

The “big adventure,” as Jones calls it in his diary, gets underway that evening. Jones and two of the other drivers meet up for a relaxing dinner in the Latin Quarter. Dick Wyborg and Dave Pomeroy are students from Union Theological Seminary in New York who just happened to visit Cimade the day before and were pounced on by Bill Nottingham when he found out they had driver’s licenses and some free time.

That night, they all board an overnight train from Paris to Bayonne, a town north of the waistline border between France and Spain. Almost immediately, they get behind schedule. There are two trains to Bayonne that night—the express they are supposed to be on that arrives around 6 a.m. and another one that takes a more leisurely route, arriving at 11. When they disembark some five hours late, they find the gentleman from Hertz International who has waited for them the entire time.

During the next several days, Jones’ journal seems like something of a travelogue, as the drivers meander their way along the French coast. (Each of the four have their own rental cars, but they travel the route in tandem.) They are looking for a border crossing into Spain with few checkpoints, but not so small that they will stand out when they return with the African students. They settle on Hendaye, a resort town on France’s Atlantic coast. Then they begin their trek following secondary roads primarily along the Spanish coastline. The rendezvous near the Spain-Portugal border is 600 long and bumpy miles away. Cimade has encouraged them to look the part of tourists by staying at good hotels and eating fine meals. (In Spain, they can get an excellent meal for the equivalent of $2.) Jones, relishing the opportunity provided, has no trouble complying. He has a new 35 mm camera and enjoys taking photographs of the picturesque towns and sweeping coastline views. He buys some souvenirs as well—a leather bag for himself and a purse for Margrith—marveling at the inexpensive prices.

Towns along this route later become a litany to them—a tick for another leg of an endless journey. But on that first passage, when his heart isn’t pounding from moments like a near head-on with a truck on one of the hairpin curves through the mountains and his bottom isn’t aching from the long stretches of tremendous ruts on unpaved roads, Jones marvels at the sights, including the elaborately ornate cathedral in the city of Santiago, shown to them by a young Spanish hitchhiker. It doesn’t occur to them until later that picking up hitchhikers—they even picked up soldiers along the road—could compromise them. “They say that ignorance is bliss,” says Jones these many years later, as he speculates that his political naïveté may have kept him from a nervousness that might have given him away.

No matter how long the day behind the wheel, Jones still takes time every night to record observations:

Though today was a fatiguing day filled with much tension from trying to drive “as fast as possible,” it was also an enjoyable day—for we drove through some beautiful countryside. The people along the road are also very interesting. There were many places where we wanted to stop and take pictures or to watch something that was going on, but we couldn’t take the time. On one spot we saw a traditional funeral procession—women in black robes and veils, men with the casket on their shoulders, marching to the slow chimes of the little church.

After three days of traveling, and a final push of 60 miles, they arrive at their destination of Pontevedra, a town north of the Portuguese border. The next day their covert work will begin in earnest.

Spain-Portugal Border — June 18, 1961

While Jones and his fellow drivers have enjoyed something of a sojourn as they make that first run across Spain, the Portugal side of the operation has been fraught with tension and intrigue. Cimade officials Jacques Beaumont and Chuck Harper are coordinating that part of the escape, slipping African students out of Portugal, hopefully before the PIDE catches on. In one case, they spirit two young men away from a bar right under the noses of plainclothes PIDE, who have been tailing them for days. The men innocently get up to use the restroom where they jump out a small window, and are whisked away while the PIDE enjoy their wine.

Nineteen Africans are brought to the banks of the Minho River, which marks part of the northern border between Portugal and Spain. There, a notorious coffee smuggler with land on both sides of the border and family connections to Portuguese and Spanish customs police runs his well-oiled operation. The Fuga crew gave him the nickname “Edward G.” because of his gruff, no-nonsense manner, which reminded them of the gangsters portrayed by American actor, Edward G. Robinson. Beaumont and Harper wait with the students in the tall brush above the river until the first light when they slip and slide their way down to the water and clamber into a small rowboat three or four at a time.

The river has a treacherous current. At any time, it could have carried them around a bend and into view of the border patrol on either side. But the crossings turn out to be blessedly uneventful. Up above the steep riverbank on the Spanish side is a windowless barn where they will wait in stifling heat and in complete silence until the arranged pick-up at mid-day. “During that Spanish siesta time when ordinary Galicians, guards, dogs, every living thing and time stopped,” Harper wrote in a recollection, “four spacious automobiles, one after another, came to a stop in front of the barn door facing the dirt road, with their American drivers.”

Jones and Pomeroy get their first taste of the cloak-and-dagger maneuver when they pull up alongside the barn where the fugitives are hidden and five figures dart out, eyes blinking as they adjust from the radical darkness to full sunlight, faces filled with trepidation. As soon as they jump into the car, Jones gives them the papers with their false identities that have been supplied by the Senegalese and Congolese embassies in Paris. They are to immediately memorize the information in case they are stopped somewhere along the way.

The tension in the car is palpable. Jones drives many hours with barely a word uttered. Even had there been, he wouldn’t have understood much. The students, for the most part, speak Portuguese, Spanish and their native African languages. A few know a little French. They don’t plan to stop much as they hasten back towards San Sebastian, 600 miles away near the French border. But late that afternoon, the right rear axle slips out of joint on Jones’ car. It is a Sunday. They are in the mountains. Two of the students who know Spanish hitch a ride into the next town and, miracle of miracles, find mechanics—two brothers— who know how to fix Chevys. But to everyone’s consternation, when the students arrive back with the mechanics, they are accompanied by two guards ominously armed with machine guns— Franco’s men, says Jones in his diary, referring to Spain’s autocratic head of state, General Francisco Franco. To make matters worse, a student has left one of his documents where it can be seen through the window—and where it is duly noticed. “Oh,” says the mechanic off-handedly. “These are Angolese students from Portugal. You never know what these Americans will do for a thrill.” The comment is enough to raise the hairs on the back of everyone’s necks. But the policemen say nothing. They don’t even ask to see passports.

In the end, Jones saw this delay as a bonding moment. The mechanics fix the car enough to get it to town where they have to work on it for a few more hours. Meanwhile, they lead the group to a dirty stucco building across from the garage where they can get some dinner while they wait:

There we encountered “Pepita” who served us a wonderful meal of some wild bird. We had great time talking and laughing, kidding Pepita. For the first time, everyone really seemed to relax—and it was at this point that I really developed a warm feeling toward these fellows.

     Pepita’s place was like something out of the middle ages, yet we wouldn’t have found Maxim’s to be half so enjoyable. Outside her place was a little “place” where three pigs were running around loose, oinking. A little old lady was sitting there watching over them.

     This incident proved to be more a blessing than a hindrance for it served to loosen up everyone. We wouldn’t have missed this evening in Mondoñedo for anything.

Shortly before midnight, they get back on the road. In one of the sweeter moments, the students sing Angolese freedom songs. One in particular catches Jones’ fancy—the haunting Muxima, which is the name of an Angolan town. It means heart in Kimbundu, one of the native languages of Angola. Fifty years later, Jones can still sing it.

Northern Spain — June 19, 1961

The drive becomes a punishing exercise for an exhausted Jones, who nonetheless plows on through the night. In the mountains outside of Oviedo in northern Spain, they run into thick fog. By then, Jones is almost dreaming as he drives, he is so tired. On one curve he doesn’t leave enough room. When he slams on the brakes, the car spins around, nearly smashing into the side of the mountain. That is a wake-up call, so to speak. As soon as there is a place to stop, he pulls over and sleeps for an hour-and-a-half.

By now, dawn is almost breaking. The nap doesn’t do much for his fatigue, though. He stops to get some coffee, but he is still dangerously groggy. Further down the road, he starts seeing things. It is the only time in his life, he says now, that he ever hallucinated. Giant, animated rabbits hop across the road in front of him. He can’t think clearly. When he stops the car and gets out for a breath of fresh air, he can hardly stand up. He feels drunk. But still he continues the marathon. One hour fades indistinguishably into the next, until they finally arrive in San Sebastian. By then, another day has passed. It is 5 o’clock in the evening.

The next day the group approaches the Spanish border crossing. Bill Nottingham has to meet with the commissariat of police and explains that the group has been on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and is now returning to France. The Spanish official is nervous and suspicious, sensing that things are not what they seem. However, he allows them to cross.

Jubilation! The Africans will board the next train to Paris. As for the four chauffeurs, they return to their hotel for a celebratory meal and a good night’s rest before their own return to Paris the next day.

But that is not to be. While they are still enjoying their dinner, Nottingham is called to the phone. It is Jacques Beaumont in Portugal. He speaks in code, saying that the “picnic” went so well he wants them to return the next day. They are going to do it again.

This is not what Jones has expected. By now, the tedium of driving has replaced some, although not all, of the romance of the adventure. But he is more familiar with the roads, and has the greater wisdom to stop and sleep in the car for longer than a catnap when he gets tired. Still, it’s no picnic for him.

Spain-France Border — June 30, 1961

Two more trips across Spain and back deliver 41 additional Africans from the troubles in Portugal to the Spanish side of the border crossing with France. Because the original group had gotten over the border into France with no real trouble, Nottingham decides to expedite matters and take this much larger group of “pilgrims” across en masse. This time, though, things don’t go as hoped.

First of all, everyone, including, apparently, the commissariat, is celebrating at a huge festival. The streets are filled with music, parades and dancing. The anxious group sits at a café, watching the revelry and biding their time until Nottingham comes back with permission to cross the border. They wait through most of the day.

When the commissariat returns, it is a different official than the first one. The new commissariat wants to talk with each student individually, so he has them arrested and taken to the governor’s palace in San Sebastian. The students are searched and interrogated. Everyone manages to hide the papers from Cimade allowing them to seek political asylum in France—with the exception of one individual. That’s all it takes. The guard who is questioning this unfortunate soul runs out into the hallway, waving the paper and calling loudly to his comrades. Soon the students are all handcuffed and everyone, including Nottingham and Jones, are put in military vehicles and taken to the prison in San Sebastian. Amazingly, despite the exhausting reality of the past three weeks, Jones savors even this moment, which he records later:

I’ll never forget that ride, under armed guard, across San Sebastian in the back of a Land Rover.

     My attitude was perhaps a bit of a stupid one, for I was carried away (as was Dave) by the romantic conception of spending a night in a foreign prison.

     … Our cell had bars on the windows and door, a small crucifix on one wall. There was a room with several washbasins on the right-hand side of the door, and a room with several “Turkish-style” toilets on the left-handed side. Looking out the door you could see an enclosure which stretched around a square, with a long hall extending from the other side, and at the commencement of this hall was a statue of Mary, lit by candles. Our mattresses were very smelly (of sweat and dirt, probably hadn’t been washed for months!).

He manages to hang onto the feeling he is on an adventure even when dinner is served—a half loaf of thick bread with smelly cheese and unidentifiable brown glop. It is only when other prisoners come in the next morning with instructions to assemble 44 beds that Jones began to appreciate the serious ramifications of the circumstances in which he found himself.

The night before, the students had sung the Angolese freedom songs until well after midnight. But now spirits are so low that many of them simply lie back down and go to sleep to try to keep from worrying about what will come next.

For Jones, it is a moment of reckoning. Margrith and the plans he was making for the future loom large. Now he feels pinned in place while everyone else in his life is free to move forward. His three weeks on the road seem less the romantic adventure, and more the serious matter that it has always been. Would he have chosen to get involved had he known it would land him in prison in a foreign country? Probably, but that is little consolation at this moment.

And then, miracle of miracles, they are awakened late in the afternoon by a guard telling them to get their things and get out. They are leaving. Don’t ask questions. Don’t look back. Just get out of here, get out of Spain, and don’t come back.

Over the Years

Kimball Jones never has. He never returned as a tourist to the lovely coastal towns that had enchanted him. But several years after the operation—after Jones had married Margrith, attended Union Theological Seminary and become pastor of a church in Antwerp, Belgium—he was visited by a minister with ties to Africa. Melvin Blake, who oversaw the Methodist Church’s missionary work in Angola, had been the one to get the ball rolling on the Fuga. Blake let Jones in on the secret of how they were all sprung from prison, as reported to him in a debriefing from the CIA. When Portugal’s Salazar learned that 60 of his political de- tainees had slipped out of the country without the PIDE noticing, and that 41 of them were now being held in a Spanish prison, he demanded them returned immediately. Spain’s ruler, Francisco Franco, took offense at the request. Thus it was that after a few exchanges between the two countries, Franco settled it all by opening the prison gates and letting them all go.

Jones’ brief career as a secret operative was over—and not a moment too soon.

Over the years, Jones wondered what had become of the students. He got his answer last summer when, out of the blue, he was invited to a 50th reunion of the Fuga as guests of Pedro Pires, the president of Cape Verde, who had been in the Fuga.

Some of those students settled in France, others in Switzerland and Russia. They were physicians and engineers and, as Salazar had worried, political leaders who played roles in the liberation of Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and other nations. The reunion, Jones says, was a veritable Who’s Who of Portuguese- speaking Africa. Among the 60 African students that Cimade helped to rescue were three who would go on to be presidents of their newly independent countries, four prime ministers, five ministers of defense, a minister of health and a Methodist bishop.

Jones himself has spent close to 40 years as a pastoral psychotherapist with the Psychotherapy and Spirituality Institute in New York City. On the side, he is a gifted jazz pianist who has performed with his group at Birdland and other jazz clubs in New York. But one of his most recent gigs may stand out as the highlight of his career. At a nightclub one of the evenings in Praia, the capital of Cape Verde, he took a turn as a guest musician, playing an original jazz composition, which he renamed, in honor of the occasion, “Bossa de Fuga”—the music of the flight.

1) Cape Verde
2) Guinea-Bissau
3) Sao Tome and Principe
4) Angola
5) Mozambique

Flight into History

Last summer, Kimball Jones ’60 found himself on a plane heading for Africa—and 50 years into the past—after President Pedro Pires of the island nation of Cape Verde called a reunion of people who took part of the 1961 Fuga. The theme for the event was “The Flight toward the Fight” (“A Fuga Rumo à Luta”) in recognition of how many of the African students who escaped went on to be leaders in their countries’ struggles for independence from colonial rule.

On the flight from Lisbon to Praia, capital of Cape Verde, Jones was reunited with Joaquim Chissano, who was part of the Fuga and served as president of Mozambique from 1986 to 2005. Chissano, in first class, learned of Jones’ presence and came back to find him.

“Margrith and I were napping,” Jones remembers, “when Chissano suddenly took my hands in his and said, ‘Kim, Kim, do you realize what we achieved together, my friend?’” Reminded of the Angolese freedom songs they had sung together during the drive, Chissano began to sing a favorite, called “Muxima,” and Jones joined in. The photo above was taken right after they finished singing.

In all, three of the six original rescuers—Jones, Chuck Harper and Bill Nottingham—along with 16 of the original 60 escapees were able to attend. Among those were Pascoal Mocumbi, a medical doctor who was prime minister of Mozambique from 1994 to 2004; Manuel Boal, who led the World Health Organization in Africa; along with three others who served as prime minister of Angola. Along with sharing memories, participants reported to the group on the political development of their nations since the Fuga. The conference was well covered by African news media and drew film crews from Angola and Portugal, each working on documentaries about the Fuga.