To borrow a category from the Odyssey of the Mind competition, it wasn’t “The Most Dramatic Problem Ever!!!”
But it was a problem.
Shaun and Shamus Evans were in great shape to qualify for the Boston Marathon for the first time as a duo in September, Shaun pushing Shamus’ racing wheelchair at the inaugural Sackets Harbor Marathon.
Boston was a profoundly important goal for the father-son team from Middle Grove, since Shaun had run well there in the 2000s while pursuing a shot at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials, and Shamus, a senior at Galway High School, would be 18 years old by April 15 of this year to reach the age minimum for Boston.
The Evans family’s adventures include their “Power to Push” run from Seattle to New York in 2015, but racing Boston would hold a special spot, considering Shaun’s history there.
Then the handlebars broke.
“The one wild card that always exists when you’re pushing a chair is a flat tire or something,” he said in a phone interview on Feb. 14. “So I always have that in the back of my mind. But I never expected what happened in Sackets Harbor.”
At mile 9 of the 26.2-mile race, the two aluminum tubes Shaun was holding sheared off at a weld, and after he got his bearings on what had happened, he was stuck in a complicated predicament. That included difficulty reading his watch, managing his water bottles and making turns while doubled over to sharp-edged contact points with the chair at waist level, instead of shoulder level.
Undeterred, the Evanses finished in 2:59:26, well under — if not comfortably — the 3:20 they needed to qualify for Boston in Shaun’s age group, 45-49.
“Then the emotional release when the race ended … I started crying,” Shaun said. “Overwhelmed because, one, I knew that 20 minutes under our qualifying time was probably going to get us into Boston, and, two, just overcoming that obstacle, with Shamus and his positive outlook and smile just helped it to be possible. And [wife] Nichole and [son] Simon were there to greet us.”
Shaun’s overall marathon personal record is 2:26, and he ran 2:31:46 at Boston in 2008. He stopped running there to look for quicker courses that would get him into the U.S. Trials, but that didn’t happen, especially when hip surgery wiped out his 2012 season.
When he came back, instead of running solo, he started training on the roads around Galway Lake and racing as a duo with Shamus, who was born with a form of cerebral palsy that mostly affects mobility in his legs.
It was Shamus who came up with the idea of running cross country, which they achieved in 2015, Shaun pushing Shamus for about 45 miles a day for 64 straight days while Nichole and Simon, currently a junior at Galway High and an ever-improving member of the Eagles' track and cross country teams, accompanying them in a big camper.
The trip served as a means of donating racing chairs throughout the 15 states they covered in the name of Ainsley’s Angels, a national organization devoted to promoting inclusion and participation in long-distance activities by kids with disabilities.
Last year, the 2024 Boston Marathon became an objective because Shamus would turn 18 in January.
They just needed a qualifying time, and Shaun targeted the 2023 Buffalo Marathon on May 28, to some degree for sentimental reasons, since that was the race he had used to qualify for his first Boston.
Shaun and Shamus were going to be keynote speakers at the pre-race pasta dinner in Buffalo, they were going to sign copies of their book, “Better Together: A Memoir of Persistence, Inclusion, and a Family’s Power to Overcome,” at the fitness expo, then they were going to run a big race and post a time to get into Boston.
Then the plan broke.
Galway High’s Odyssey of the Mind team, of which both Shamus and Simon are members, performed well enough at the New York State Finals of the problem-solving competition in April to qualify for the World Finals at Michigan State University … on the last weekend of May, the same weekend as the Buffalo Marathon.
Since Simon was also running for Galway at the Section 2 track championships that week, Shaun and Simon had to jump in the car from the sectional meet at Fonda-Fultonville High, drive to Ontario, Canada, to rest at a hotel, then jump in the car the next day to finish the trip to East Lansing, Michigan, for the Odyssey of the Mind worlds.
The Buffalo Marathon went on without them, but in Division III of “The Most Dramatic Problem Ever!!!”, Galway finished fourth, the school’s second-highest placement ever.
So, what to do about a Boston qualifier?
While they were in Syracuse the month before for the Odyssey of the Mind state finals, Shaun, Shamus and Simon had run the Syracuse Half Marathon with an Ainsley’s Angels group, and Shaun had picked up a flier for this new race up in Sackets Harbor to be run on Labor Day weekend. New plan.
Then the handlebars broke.
“I was pushing on sharp metal,” Shaun said. “Shamus said, ‘Dad, what can I do?’ So typically I have a water holder that’s mounted to my handlebars. There was no way to do any of that, so Shamus was holding my water bottles and passing them to me as I needed them, which actually was very, very helpful.
“He was very upbeat and was like, ‘Oh, we’ve got this, Dad.’ It was neat, because for the first time in a race, Shamus wanted to wear a GPS watch because he wanted to track our speed and see where we were at.
“It was actually really helpful, because once my hands were down pushing on him, I had to manipulate things to see my watch. He had his watch set at bike mode and could look at the speed we were running. I told him we want to be around 9.4 miles per hour or whatever. It was something he could focus on and something new.”
Because Shaun had no leverage on the three-wheeled chair while making turns, he slowed down and shifted ahead of Shamus to pick up the single front wheel and pull the chair — all 160 pounds of it, including his son — around the sharper bends.
“So we just kept running,” Shaun said. “The rest of the race, after mile 9, was kind of hanging on for dear life.”
Last year, Shaun and Shamus, who wants to study aerospace engineering in college, picked up a valuable sponsorship with ASICS and have been selected as “Sound Mind, Sound Body Ambassadors” for the shoe company.
They were in Orlando, Florida, on Feb. 3 to cheer on the ASICS runners in the U.S. Trials in the marathon, including Clayton Young, who finished second to qualify for the Paris Olympics.
By the time the Paris Games roll around, the Evanses expect to have rolled through the Boston course from Hopkinton, Massachusetts, to Copley Square, which Shaun is looking forward to from his son’s perspective as much as his own.
They have met Team Hoyt, the late father-son duo of Dick and Rick Hoyt who have a lasting legacy at Boston for having run it 32 times. In fact, Shaun contacted Dick Hoyt 12 years ago for information and advice when he first started exploring the special racing chairs equipped for running.
This will be an odyssey of the mind, body and spirit: Two wheels you push all the time, and a third that sometimes maybe needs to be pulled along a little bit.
“Boston is unique,” Shaun said. “It’s basically wall-to-wall people start to finish, and I don’t know this statistically, but I think it’s got to be one of the most live-spectated sports events in the world.
“For Shamus to experience Boston, man, they come out to cheer. It’s a party for them, from start to finish, with barbecues ... You know, the smells and the sights and the sounds of that day permeate my soul, and I’ll remember them forever. And for Shamus to have that experience …
“They’ll cheer for us just because of Shamus and that smile.”