5 men towing friend through triathlon
By SEAN KEELER • sekeeler@dmreg.com • June 22, 2008


Dan Dowson of Indianola, front, will have company throughout the Hy-Vee Triathlon today. Friends Grant Johnson, Brad Schulze, Mike Staudacher, Dale Crain and Steve Sayler will tow, pull and push Dowson, who has Lou Gehrig's disease, through the swim, bike and run phases


You have friends. Dan Dowson has saints. Oh sure, we've got loads of buddies who'll pick up our newspapers while we're on vacation, maybe a handful who'll take a day off to help us move. But have you got a pal who'll jump into a lake on a Sunday morning and drag you 1.5 kilometers while you sit in a little kayak?

Who'll then pull you and your wheelchair 40 kilometers by tandem bicycle in the summer heat? Who'll then push you, in that same chair, another 10 kilometers while he jogs beside?

Dowson has five. At least. The few. The proud. The cramping.

"You will never find better guys," the Indianola resident says, "than the ones that are doing this."

This is nuts. This is perfect. Today, Dowson and his team — nickname: "Dobbers Up" — will be among the thousands of unique stories diving headlong into Blue Heron Lake for the start of the Hy-Vee Triathlon. Officials expect about 2,200 amateur athletes to brave the course in West Des Moines — it had to be moved because of downtown Des Moines floods — with the elite participants chasing a total purse of $700,000.
At one extreme, there's the best in the business, vying for the last two spots on the U.S. triathlon team that will compete at the Olympics in August. At the other, you've got the Dobbers, this ragtag bunch of middle-aged fathers trying to prove a point: Dan Dowson has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease, and so what? Whether you're talking about the Hy-Vee Triathlon or ALS, he intends to scrap all the way to finish line.



It was Steve Sayler's idea, originally, born of a February brainstorm. In retrospect, he says now, there might have been a few adult beverages in the equation, but what the heck?

Sayler itched to do something lasting, something memorable, for Dowson, his longtime friend and golfing partner who'd been diagnosed with ALS last August. Then he remembered hearing the story of **** and Rick Hoyt, a Massachusetts father-and-son triathlon team — Rick is disabled, **** does the legwork — who were featured in Sports Illustrated three summers ago.

"I always thought it would be something that I would like to do," explains Sayler, a pharmacist. He had never attempted a triathlon before.

But that didn't stop him from working Dowson's inner circle in Indianola, culling volunteers. He eventually bought an inflatable kayak, assigned himself the swimming leg, and worked out six days a week, rain or shine; Mike Staudacher and Dale Crain hooked up to handle the tandem bikes (they'll haul Dowson's wheelchair); Grant Johnson and Brad Schulze will take on the running/pushing part.

They're slated to start about 15 minutes before the rest of the age-group racers, just to get a smidge of space before the hordes pass them by. Fortunately, all the test runs in the water and on the bikes have been smooth so far, knock on wood.

The most interesting leg might be the last one. Schulze jokes that between he and Johnson, there's one full, healthy meniscus. He'd like to say there's some heroic story involved, but there isn't — he was putting up lights for a party three years ago and slipped off a ladder.

"I swear to you, I know we're going to get laughs," Schulze says, "but if there's a chance we can beat somebody at the end, (Dan) will be (saying), 'Come on, let's catch 'em!' I hope I have a little bit there at the end."



Dowson always was the toughest competitor in the group, a classic "type A" personality, the closer, the same tiger on the diamond — he played baseball at Dowling Catholic — that he was on the 18th green. Which is why it eats up his teammates, deep down, to see him like this.

"Once you've been an athlete and been competitive, it's hard to get it out of you," Schulze says. "And he'll be that way until he's here no longer."

Dan can still get around by himself. Most days. But only for short distances, and only with the help of a walker. The rest of the time, he's in a wheelchair.

The worst fears were confirmed late last summer, after his left arm started twitching uncomfortably. He was getting his kids ready for a baseball tournament and running down the first-base line when his legs suddenly went out from under him.

"It was like I got shot," he says.

Things only got worse from there. A specialist in Des Moines referred him to a specialist in Iowa City. You call it a raw deal. Dowson calls it a battle.

"From the time they told me, it's never really had me down," says Dowson, 49, a salesman with Cemen Tech Inc. "It's like, 'Hey, I've got this, what can we do with this?' Can we do something to help somebody else? And what can we do?' "

Last October, the guys threw together a karaoke night to raise money for Dowson's medical costs; if you wanted someone to sing, you had to pay. And if someone paid to have you sing and you didn't want to sing — this was usually the case — you had to fork over even more to get out of it. Earlier this month, they held a golf tournament in Indianola that raked in more than $30,000.

When Sayler pitched the triathlon idea around town, they had to turn people away.

"There were about a dozen people," Staudacher says, "who said, 'If somebody drops out, let me know.' "

A raw deal? Dan Dowson will tell you he's the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.

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