There's nothing I love more in this world than a good challenge. So last Saturday I entered the Samish Bay Bivalve Bash Mud Run. It was billed as the toughest foot race in the west, and I wanted to find out if it was as tough as the I-Can Run here in Tilted Village.

I had no idea where Samish Bay was, and discovered it was way up in Washington near the Canadian border, north-west of Sedro Wooley. So I pointed my hood ornament north and started driving.

The start time was 11:28 a.m., or low tide, and about a hundred of us lined up at the water's edge to await the starting gun. We didn't have to wait long; a cannon sounded at exactly 11:28, and off we went, at a spanking gate.

In the first fifty yards I lost a shoe in the mud and went back to retrieve it, but it had been swallowed up in the morass, and I had to continue with one shoe on and one shoe off, which was disconcerting.

A lady in front of me slipped and fell and I stopped to help her up but she was slipperier than a bar of Dove moisturizing soap, so I gave up and continued running, though with a guilty conscience. What if she was stuck there until the incoming tide took her out to sea? I stopped, looked back, and saw that a pick up truck had pulled in next to her and several volunteers were arranging to tow her out of the mud with a Badger winch.

My conscience was lighter, but my feet would no longer move. I was stuck in the mud! I had stood in one place too long and could not move either one of my feet. The fact was, I was sinking, and not slowly either. Not one to panic, I hollered at the top of my lungs that I was going down! But everyone was so busy rescuing the lady I had tried to help that no assistance was forthcoming.

I thought about praying, but figured it was too late for that. About ready to give up the ship, I remembered a technique they taught us in lifeguard school. Grabbing my hair at the nape of the neck, I gave it a sharp pull upwards, stimulating the fight of flight instinct that lays just beneath the surface, and sure enough, I was able to muster the strength to pull my right foot loose.

With the sucking sound of a plumber's friend my right foot sprung free and I held it in the air in a state of ecstasy until I realized that one loose foot was of no tangible use to me.

I accepted my fate and sat down to die. A few of my friends flashed before my eyes, Bummer, Easy Ellis, Marlboro Man, Ginzo, and Sneaky Legs Calhoun.

As I repented for sins committed thirty years ago, I fought the thought of never seeing Tilted Village again, or my beloved Dig Me Beach, and a tear ran down my cheek. But when I considered never having another pork burrito at T's I started blubbering like a baby without his binkie, and hung up my fiddle so to speak. Then it happened...because I was sitting down I could wiggle my toes!

Grabbing my knees, I rocked my feet until they popped out of the mud, sounding like corks from champagne bottles. I was free!

I wish I could report in this fine journal who won the Samish Bay Bivalve Bash Mud Run, and I suppose I can never look sports editor Wendy Lautner in the eye again, but I was all the way to Sedro Wooley before I stopped for coffee and discovered I was stuck to the seat.

So I can attest, the Samish Bay Bivalve Bash Mud Run is well named as the toughest foot race in the west, tougher even than the I-Can Run of Tilted Village...