East High grads reunite at Boston Marathon, where one pushed the other 26.2 miles

When Andy Beardsley ran his first marathon in the early 1980s, he was an East High student who previously had never raced anything close to 26.2 miles. His buddies figured he'd fail.

"I think I bet him that he couldn't beat the first woman," former classmate Larsen Klingel said.

"He lost," Beardsley said.

Fast-forward some 35 years to Klingel's first marathon, and there was no wager between the old friends. Only a challenge for Klingel from Beardsley.

"Andy asked me to lose some pounds," Klingel said.

Beardsley's request was a reasonable one: Every pound lost by Klingel was one pound less Beardsley had to push in last week's Boston Marathon, where the 1982 East High graduates competed in the duo team division for athletes with disabilities.

Klingel, a retired commodities trader who lives in Homer and was born with cerebral palsy, was belted into a racing wheelchair pushed by Beardsley, a high school teacher and running coach who lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

They completed the race in 3 hours, 40 minutes, 43 seconds, which placed them in the top half of the field — 10,961st overall among 25,822 finishers.

For perspective, consider that Beardsley and Klingel, both 54, were 43 seconds off Boston's 2019 qualifying standard of 3:40:00 for the men's 55-59 age group.

Klingel, who uses crutches to walk, did his part to get ready for the race, trimming down from about 165 pounds to 150.

Then race day arrived, and with it a torrent of rain.

"My dietary efforts weren't enough," Klingel deadpanned.

The men estimated Klingel and their borrowed Hoyt racing chair took on as much as 60 pounds of water weight as they raced through the streets of Boston. For Beardsley, that meant pushing some 250 pounds — 150 of it Klingel, 40 of it the chair, 60 of it water — for more than 3.5 hours nonstop.

About 2.5 inches of rain fell during the race, Beardsley said. It was cold and windy, and Klingel was dressed in multiple heavy layers that quickly became waterlogged.

"Imagine taking a full getup of winter gear and putting it in a bathtub for three hours," Beardsley said.

Imagine, too, a pad inside the chair that's intended to provide comfort for the rider but doubles as a water magnet.

"The pad that I lay on is like a sponge," Klingel said.

"… The ride wasn't pleasant. But I would much rather be in my shoes than pushing."

But Beardsley could hardly complain, because this was all his idea. The veteran of dozens of marathons, he said he has thought about doing one with Klingel for several years.

"It's something I always wanted to do," Beardsley said by phone a couple of days after the marathon. "Larsen had a lot of surgeries in high school to help with his legs, so he spent a fair amount of time in a wheelchair, so I would push him around a lot.

"I've been a runner most of my life, and when I saw other people were able to push people (in races), I thought it would be really neat to push Larsen in a race."

Klingel started out as a somewhat reluctant participant. Then time went by and suddenly the former T-birds were AARP eligible.

"I'm over 50, Andy's over 50," Klingel said. "If I'm gonna do it …"

And so last year, the partnership became official. Beardsley and Klingel entered a 4-mile race to get the hang of the racing wheelchair, and then they entered Virginia's Richmond Marathon in December 2016.

With Klingel sitting in a reclining position and Beardsley doing all of the work, the men finished in 3:17, easily meeting Boston's standard of 3:30:00 for the men's 50-54 age division — no time adjustment is given for those pushing someone in a wheelchair.

Later they entered a hilly 10-mile race to get an idea of what it would be like on some Boston's hills, after which Beardsley asked Klingel to try to drop a few pounds.

On race day, both men were cold and wet — "we were equally drowned rats," Klingel said. But both survived relatively unscathed despite what many described as the worst conditions in the 122-year history of the Boston Marathon.

More than 500 people were hospitalized after the race, Beardsley said, and more than 2,300 needed help for hypothermia.

"Neither of us got hypothermic," he said.

For that, Beardsley said, he thanks Klingel's mother, who traveled to Boston from Alaska to watch the race.

"She came out of her hotel room bathroom and asked if I could use her shower cap," he said. "I said, 'You know, I would like to use that.' I wore a shower cap the whole way. Underneath it I wore a winter hat, and the combination kept my head dry."

In the first couple of days after the race, Beardsley said, his legs felt pretty good but his arms, shoulder and back were sore from all of the pushing.

"It wasn't really like a marathon," he said. "More like being in a boxing match, or four hours of a core workout.

"It was definitely a different experience for both of us."

Yet it almost seemed like a natural undertaking for two men who have known each other since grade school and have never let Klingel's limitations curb their fun or friendship.

As kids attending Rogers Park Elementary and Wendler Junior High, they hit it off because they liked the same movies and comic books, they liked playing Dungeons and Dragons together, and they shared the same sarcastic sense of humor.

They hung out with four or five other boys, and Klingel said the bond helped him through some rough times.

"I spent a lot of my high school days at Providence hospital," he said, "and they made my life much easier."

Beardsley, especially, always encouraged Klingel to be as active as possible. To that end, Beardsley took Klingel and a stopwatch to the Wendler track one day when they were about 16 years old. Using his crutches, Klingel made four trips around the track — the equivalent of 1 mile — in 17 minutes, Beardsley said.

It was their first workout together, but not their last.

Although Beardsley said it's never a good idea to talk about doing another marathon when you can still feel the last one in your muscles, Klingel is open to the idea of another race, especially one without rain.

"I don't know if I'd do Boston again, but I would love to do more marathons," he said. "You basically get a tour of the city and all I have to do is hand out salt tablets."