Pekin man trains hard for 'Death Race'

PEKIN, Ill. — Lee Biga used to be a fitness buff. Now he's insane. At least he knows it and can laugh at himself.

He has to, if he's to build the sense of humor he'll need to crawl through mud under barbed wire, eat a pound of diced onions, push a wheelbarrow filled with sheep manure uphill, carry $50 in pennies, translate instructions in Greek and tote a fencepost hole digger for 32 hours for no reason at all.

Biga, 23, of Pekin, did all that and more last year. Yet it was a common case of sore feet — albeit very sore feet — that forced him to drop out of an endurance event in Vermont that another contestant described as a mix of the TV reality show “Survivor” and the movie “Jackass.”

“If I could've amputated my feet, I would've kept going” the final three hours, with no sleep, to finish the event known as the Death Race, Biga said.

This year, “I don't care if I have to crawl. I'm finishing.”

For that lunacy, Biga thanks Andy Weinberg, his swimming coach and physical fitness instructor at Pekin Community High School.

“He's an endurance freak,” Biga said of the coach who has since left Pekin for a college position in Vermont. “Just being around him is motivating.”

Still, when Weinberg first showed young Biga a video of what entrants had to endure in the first organized Death Race in 2007, “I thought those guys were crazy and he was insane” for suggesting Biga try it.

Now Weinberg is one of the organizers of the newly named Spartan Death Race, the capstone of an annual series of challenges to both physical and mental endurance created by Joe Desane and held on Desane's 35-acre stretch of mountain, creek, farmland and pond in Pittsfield, Vermont.

Biga said Desane has one goal for the race: “He doesn't want a single person to finish.”

Last June, fewer than a quarter of the 87 contestants brave or crazy enough to enter the event saw it to its end — which didn't come until each man and woman dropped at the finish line for 100 push-ups. Biga's sore feet and, he admitted, the drain of mental chores and tricks confronting the sleepless contestants without prior warning, proved too much.

“I think I was the last one to drop out. That's what ticks me off,” he said.

Physically, he'll be more than ready for this year's race on June 24. He was last year as well, according to another contestant who blogged that Biga “was one of the strongest guys on the course.”

That comes from workouts every day — “I try not to take days off” — that start each morning with flipping a six-foot, 400-pound combine tire over “15 or 20 times, just to wake up,” he said.

Three days a week he practices in his Brazilian jujitsu class before heading to his daily workout at the Pekin Park District's Parkside Athletics facility. Lately he's turned heads there as he walks through its hallways carrying two 100-pound free weights.

“There's a fair amount of ‘farmer's carries' of buckets of sand” in the Death Race, he said.

And while the race is more of a walk up and down steep trails and creek beds interspersed with tasks such as retrieving cinder blocks from 10-feet-deep water, Biga also runs miles of trails each day with his girlfriend and brother in McNaughton Park.

In between all that, he's taken engineering-based courses at Illinois Central College and works part-time at an engineering firm in Peoria.

Biga doesn't yet know what race entrants will be required to bring and carry in this year's race, “but I've still got my pennies,” he said.

And something else he thinks will see him through this time — a sense of humor. The race may be insane, but he learned a lesson from it last year that he said he'll carry though life.

“If you get angry, you're done.”