Who is that Guy in the Shower Cap?

[ODB]

This is the guy that first made me want to try an adventure race -

Category: Living legends of multisport.
Answer: He lives in a bus, cleans windows for a living
and is the most decorated adventure racer in history.
Question: Who is John Howard?
“That’s John Howard?” is the typical exclamation from people seeing him for the first time. He
has perennial pillow hair, a spiky beard flecked with gray and a holds his gangly frame in a
lopsided quizzical pose. To most observers this patriarch of adventure racing is a total enigma.
Here is a guy who has won every major race in this sport at least twice, including Raid Gauloises,Eco-Challenge, ESPN X-Venture Race, Southern Traverse, and New Zealand’s Coast to Coast,and yet as MTV commented in Utah in 1995, he “looks like an old man crossing the street”. The scene in question showed Howard wading through a deep dark canyon, hands held in front of him and sporting a hotel shower cap on his head. This is not exactly the height of adventure
racing fashion, but to Howard this is a good thing. Stories about Howard’ athletic endeavors abound. In the New Zealand National road cycling
championship in 1996, he turned up on his re-welded, generation old bike, replete with unshaven legs and was hardly given a second look by the regular roadies. He stimulated a little more interest by hanging in with the top pack and then, with one lap to go took off on his own. None of the other veterans took him seriously until a few kilometers from the finish when it became apparent that he would seriously drub the field on his solo break. Several minutes after he had crossing the line, the pack sprinted for home, many of the cyclists having no idea they were racing for second place. This is typical Howard. No fanfare, no loud proclamations, not even a hint as to who he is until someone else points him out.
You have to dig back a long way to see just how deep Howard’s athletic background is. As a
youth in the seventies he spent a great deal of time climbing and did some of the earlier ascents of El Capitan and the north face of Half Dome in Yosemite. Around the same time he was doing some serious mountaineering in Patagonia and the Andes, summiting several technically
demanding peaks. Not satisfied with simply “playing” in the mountains, Howard soon took his skills into competition, winning seven Alpine IronMan titles, two Coast to Coast’s and twice competing in Survival of the Fittest (2nd and 4th). More recently he has shown his dominance of international adventure racing, being on eof only two people to win the big four (the other is team mate Ian Adamson), Eco-Challenge ('96, '97, unofficially '95), Raid Gauloises ('89, '94, ’98, 2nd '91), the ESPN X-Venture Race ('96, '97, 3rd '95) and Southern Traverse ('96). In fact no one else has come close to this number of wins or the consistency he has shown by always finishing and never in lower than third place. Howard also has a remarkable ability to win at single sports,
against dedicated single sport athletes. He currently holds national veteran titles in road cycling, mountain bike, and rogaining.
Most Americans know him as that guy who lives in a bus, among his sheep in New Zealand.
Widely seen profiles on the Discovery Channel and ESPN have tried to capture the essential
Howard, shooting him inside his bus, running with his sheep and cleaning windows in his
adopted town of Christchurch. Howard was born in the North of England but moved to New Zealand with his parents in the early sixties. As a teenager he traveled widely to climb rocks and
mountains and rubbed ropes with the likes of John Long and Lynn Hill in Yosemite. Today John
still travels widely and does as he has for the last quarter of a century, he hikes, climbs, skis, paddles and bikes his way into and out of adventures.
Well known American adventure racer Cathy Sassin and good friend of Howard’s calls him “the
guru of adventure racing”. This refers as much to his aura as to his ability to win races. Sassin says the Howard “lives his life the way he races and races the way he lives”. This goes a long way to explaining why he lives in a bus and has wild hair. There is absolutely no pretense about Howard, he is what he seems. Sassin has another perspective that is lost on most people, saying that since he doesn’t care about fashions or trends, he really does live the “perfect life”. If you can see through the superficiality of looks and image, Howard has it all. He is his own boss, lives on his beautiful 10 acre farm with million dollar views and has direct access to boundless wilderness. He can mountain bike for eight hours on single track from his door step, rock climb on crags in his back yard or slip down to the ocean for a paddle when he sees the conditions are good from his bedroom window. Given that he has no need for a big screen TV or any other gizmos, life down on the farm is indeed good.
Another cabalistic aspect of Howard’s life is his attraction to natural disasters. In January 1997 Howard was on the panel of an adventure racing symposium in Los Angeles. Prior to the
meeting, he decided to do some skiing in Colorado and found himself stuck in a blizzard on Vail Pass in 15 degrees below zero. After the meeting he decided to visit Cathy Sassin’s sister in the Sierra Nevada and was again caught in a vicious storm. Just before Eco-Challenge in British Columbia he was caught in an avalanche while hiking and although one of his friends broke her pelvis, Howard escaped serious injury. While training for the ESPN X-Games, his five person kayak was swamped and washed out to sea in stormy weather. All five were rescued in various states of hypothermia. This may seem extreme, but for John Howard it is another day at the office.
The real enigma is that while he has frequent and dangerous adventures in his day to day life,
Howard’s races are close to faultless. At the awards ceremony after a stunning victory in Eco-
Challenge British Columbia, Howard made a speech aimed at encouraging the other teams.
Gasps of incredulity escaped from the crowd as he revealed that like them, he too had made
several serious errors on the course that cost the team several hours. Unbeknown to him, most
teams had been lost on the first section alone for several days! This incredible disparity simply flaws the majority of adventure racers, most of whom are accomplished athletes in their own right. This is a sport in which world champions, world record holders and endurance legends abound, and yet Howard still manages to stand head and shoulders above the crowd.
Why haven’t other athletes had the same consistency as John Howard? One reason is that it takes an as yet undefined and somewhat mysterious mix of skills to win races. It is obvious that one has to be a superb all round athlete to make it through a race with winning speed. Navigation is also key, as is team work, superhuman endurance and physical strength. How then does Howard win virtually every race with different partners? Sure, he has gifted team mates, as is the case with his team Eco-Internet which has cleaned up over the last few years, but he still provides the winning ingredient. A good example is his results in the ESPN X-Venture race. This invitation only competition pits the best of the best against each other in a ballistically fast and incredibly grueling contest. Despite Eco-Internet splitting their team into different combinations each year,
the fraction with Howard has proved to be the winner each time.
Another measure of Howard’s strength is his ability to beat the French at their own game. ABC
sports has often commented that the French will always win the Raid Gauloises, the granddaddy
of long course adventure racing. Somehow though they seem to have missed the fact that
Howard has won the race three times and come second once. Probably his greatest win was in an
incredible four days in Borneo in 1994 with a team of three local villagers who had to be taught how to ride their bikes during the race. In a competition where most teams took a week and many took a full ten days, Howard, along with team mate Steve Gurney from New Zealand, absolutely decimated the strong French field. Race director Gerard Fusil was heard at the finish to exclaim “what have you done to my race?” John answered in his usual taciturn way “I shortened it.”
Champion endurance athlete Robyn Benincasa raced with Howard and Eco-Internet on Team
Salomon in Ecuador in 1998 but before then had never actually met him. She was understandably nervous about getting to know and racing with the enigma, and faced the challenge with a mixture of anxiety and excitement. Benincasa is no slouch herself when it comes to ultra distance racing. She captained the first all American Team to place in an international
adventure race (second in Eco-Challenge Utah in 1995), and several top five age finishes at the
Hawaii IronMan. Although she has been around Howard and seen him race many times since the
Borneo Raid in 1994, Benincasa still talks of him with a hint of awe in her voice. “As a relative outsider, I think of him as the Superman of adventure racing. Not because he is faster than everyone else (as many New Zealanders have told me, John is above average in his speed and strength), but because he ALWAYS finds a way to win. No matter what the odds or what his circumstances. He just seems exceptionally bright, very clever, and most of all very experienced.”
The John Howard “living in a bus” manifestation is not lost on Benincasa either, “He also seems
like he lives this way (as he races) all the time and that he is always having too damn much fun. Nothing seems to ruffle him during a race - “just another day at the office.” I have also overheard that he is very opinionated and very vocal about the race directors' treatment of the athletes. He has a reputation as a leader among the racers and, therefore, is very intimidating to most folks in the race organization ... one snap of his fingers, and he could probably get any race to come to a stand still and all the racers to mutiny!” In actual fact this very situation happened in the ESPN X-Venture Race in Baja in 1997. The race director had made a succession of questionable decisions, one of which Howard thought had endangered the lives of the competitors. At the dawn pre-start meeting on day two he stepped forward and loudly voiced the athletes concerns, threatening to boycott the race, something that no one else was game to do, or indeed would have gotten away with. Later that day after more race course snafu’s he got on the emergency radio to the director (usually an automatic disqualification), demanded, and was granted a list of requirements in order that the athletes continue. In effect he had mutinied and sustained a series of demands, all of which were eminently reasonable, but something which is unheard of in a race.
People are still heard to whisper “Did you hear what John Howard did in the X-Games in Baja, ...”
Eco-Internet Captain Robert Nagle, who has raced with Howard as much as anyone else calls
him “the wild man from Borneo”, in reference to his bedraggled look and unfathomable mystique. Howard himself doesn’t reveal much except to occasionally comment during a race that the course was enjoyable, or very tough, or both. One particularly poignant e-mail on Nagle’s web site (//yuri.harvard.edu/~nagle/) spoke of the sacrifices Howard has to make to be at
the top of this sport. It called him a "hermit" down in New Zealand, who lives alone in a bus on
top of a mountain, devoting his whole life to training “with no friends”. In actual fact Howard has many friends and is very well liked amongst racers and organizers. As Benincasa puts it “He also seems like a genuinely nice guy in his interviews - someone that you could hang with for a while and have a good time.”
Nagle says that the picture on the inside cover of a 1997 Winning Magazine is vintage Howard.
“In this shot (of team Eco-Internet pressing home towards victory in the Discovery Channel Eco-Challenge), John is peering between the rest of us with a "Mona-Lisa like" grin on his face. It conveys the sense that he knows more than you do, that he's thoroughly enjoying himself, that
he's operating half-in, half-out of this realm.” His persona is similarly portrayed in the ESPN
interviews after the X-Venture race in Baja Mexico. While team mate and two time world
quadrathlon champion Andrea Spitzer could barely walk or stay awake, Howard commented “I feel quite good, I think I could go for a run”, and he meant it.
Howard’s navigational skills border on the mythical, and it is something he cultivates. In the article “Field notes from the winning team” Nagle recounts the story of Eco-Internet passing one of the top New Zealand teams. The navigation was particularly tricky, but Howard took only a
cursory look at the map and in a “display of genius” lead the team past the rest of the field and into first place.
Howard has many other quirks that contribute to his mystique. One thing he hates is conformity,
so he goes out of his way to look different. In Eco-Challenge Utah in 1995 most of the teams
looked very smart in their matching outfits and shiny new gear. In contrast Howard conceived to
look like the antithesis of the clean cut athlete. He had his wild hair, bushy beard and not a matching piece of clothing on his gaunt frame. His equipment was old and worn out, with
patches, holes and repairs in evidence everywhere. The message is quite clear for the casual observer - “I don’t need Gucci gear to win, I can do it all in my socks and underwear”.
Interestingly this is quite close to the truth, less the underwear! One of Eco-Internet’s members
had contracted a severe and debilitating case of trench foot during the ESPN X-Games Eco-
Challenge in Main in 1995 and needed urgent help. One of the delights of trench foot is that it swells the feet and ankles to an enormous. Since Howard has quite large (size 13) shoes, that would fit the infected feet comfortably, he thought nothing of giving away his footwear and
continuing with extra weight for another 24 hours over a mountain wearing his and team mate
Cathy Sassin’s extra socks. The underwear story also came to light in this race. While fiddling
with gear pre race, he decided he needed a French Legionaries Hat, and tore the lining from his shorts to sew into his cap. Sassin asked how he was going to fare without any underwear, and he answered that he never wore “that restrictive waste of material.”
This penchant for nudity caught the race entourage quite by surprise when the team stripped off their clothes to cross a lake. In Howard’s mind this was an eminently sensible thing to do. It kept everything dry and light and helped him swim faster. Television anchor Arlene Burns was had jumped in the water to interview the team, and as she swam along side, Howard’s white behind could clearly be seen bobbing along with her.
Burns: “What have you got in the bag John?” (he was pushing a large inflated garbage bag as he
swam)
Howard: “Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yeah! ... Everything!”
One of Sassin’s favorite stories is from later in the race. The American ultra runners from Twin
Team were just ahead having slept only three hours over the previous five days. They had
persevered in the face of incredibly adverse conditions and sleep deprivation. Howard on the
other hand likes his sleep and was determined to get it. As the team lowered their kayaks into the
bay in Newport in sight of the finish, he put down his end of the boat saying “I’d like to take a nice rest, I’m tired”. This simply flawed Sassin who after nearly a week of racing could see the barn door. She recalls breaking up in fits of laughter at the preposterousness of the situation, with Howard sitting on the dock looking at the finish and resting because he was tired.
And the stories go on. Very few people really know what makes the enigmatic John Howard tick,
but they do know he can tick longer, faster and more consistently than just about anyone else in
the adventure racing world.