Triumph and Insanity

First and foremost... THANKS THANKS THANKS to EVERYONE who blew up my phone this weekend with calls and texts to keep me awake, and QUADRUPLE THANKS to everyone who came out and visited me as I squatted on the ground with my hand on the mattress.  I could not have done it without you. My cell phone bill is going to be astronomical because of the number of texts and calls I received, and I wish now that I would have brought a guest book for people to sign because I had SO MANY friends and family come out and visit me while I held my hand on a mattress for two straight days.  I have so many people that called me at regular and irregular intervals through the night, who texted me encouragement, that I cannot name everyone.  You know who you are, and thanks!!!

Special thanks to Garrett and Vauna, Derek and Tess, and Rebbecca for being there with me in the dark and in the rain, and for treating me with the kind of compassionate service and caring that few people get when they have cancer or a family member die--even though this was just a contest to win some furniture.  Also, Jon, Holly, Brandon, Emily, Allen, Jake, Evanrude and Irvin, and everyone else that came and hung out in the middle of the night in the cold and in the rain: THANKS for helping me set a personal record and do something crazy that I didn't think I could do.

Special thanks also to Carla and George for making my huge billboard that kept cars for me all night long.  You guys rock!

Finally, Steve, thanks for the sleeping bag to kneel on.  I would have never made it on bare asphalt.

It warms my heart to know that I have so many friends and people that care enough to go out of their way for me with absolutely no benefit to themselves.  I am overwhelmed by how blessed I am to have such a family (and I also mean friends that are like family), who are willing to take time and money out to rally around me for something as unimportant as furniture... if it ever really DID matter on a significant scale, I know I would have so many people backing me up that I could get through anything. Anything!

THAT was one of the strangest, stupidest, craziest, most difficult things I've ever done in my life.  And if I ever hear of another "Hands On" contest, no matter how great the prize, I am running in the other direction as far and as fast as I can.

There is no way to give a play-by-pay of the whole 48 hours, primarily because describing a contest where people hold their hands on a mattress for two straight days would be about as exciting to read as a play-by-play of paint drying.

Secondly, to say that the last 48 hours are a painful blur would be putting it lightly.   Even now trying to recount the ordeal to write a few things about it is like trying to remember a dream that evaporates the minute you wake up... But this was not a dream, it was a nightmare.

The whole thing was pure torture, primarily because of the duration of time I spent hunched over, without being able to straighten my back or my legs, or kneeling on the ground without being able to lean on anything for support (no leaning on the mattress!)... not to mention the thirty-degree weather and the continuous soaking rain.  My mouth is raw inside from all the sunflower seeds I chewed to stay awake, and I'm dehydrated from not drinking (so that my bladder wouldn't get me eliminated between bathroom breaks).

The hardest part of the entire day, ironically, was before we even started, when, just minutes before we placed our hands on the mattress, they showed us the furniture we were actually competing for, and it was NOT what the radio had advertized!

NOT a king bed, the dining set was more of a "breakfast nook" table (about the size of a card table, not extendable), and all the furniture was lower-end and solid black.  Not quite as big, not quite as much as it was made out to be.  It was disheartening from the get-go to know that I had rallied so much effort and support for a less impressive prize than advertized, but they told us it was still worth $2400 all together, and I figured that we could still sell it and buy something later that would actually be useful to us.

Whether it was seeing the prize or the mattress out in the parking lot that would be our home for the next two days, two people backed out right there, which meant we started with only 18.

The first eight hours were crazy with all of us crowded around a queen mattress, the most difficult part being the lack of room to stand, crouch, kneel, or do anything with that many people reaching in to keep a hand on.  It took eight hours for the first person to leave when the radio DJ started offering small bribes to quit, like a six-pack of tickets to Disney on Ice, or dinner at Hamilton's and tickets to a movie.

By the 19th hour (Saturday morning), we had slowly whittled the numbers in half.  At hour 20 I was sensing that there were people there who had showed up with easily as much determination to win as I had, and this would be a far more difficult battle than I had anticipated...

With the fatigue of 24 hours without sleep came discouragement, and the realization that if I were going to win, I would have to endure for possibly days more for these people to come down off the gallons of AMP, Monster, Red Bull, Rock Star, and various other drinks that they were imbibing continuously.  I began to SERIOUSLY doubt my ability to stay awake long enough to win.

But, even though I was sorely tempted to salvage what was left of my weekend and go, I decided to stick it out.  If I could not win, then I would pass out trying.  And I made this decision because of the aforementioned selfless support I had from all of my friends and family that rallied to cheer me on.  I couldn't just quit after everything that everyone had done to help me!

It is obvious that the furniture store judges had never sponsored or even seen a competition like this before, as they seemed genuinely shocked at how long it took for people to drop out.  They were actually looking worried after the first day with just under half of us still hanging on.  At that point, they ratcheted up the rules to make it harder.  They put greater constraints on how we could stand, sit, and kneel, shortened the bathroom breaks and started spacing them eight hours apart, and generally made things much more physically uncomfortable.  We lost three more shortly after that, and by early Saturday afternoon, we were down to five.

But this was a determined, stubborn final five.  By 10:00 Saturday night, it was obvious that NOBODY in this group of five was going anywhere, so they ratcheted up the rules another notch, pushing the level of discomfort closer to a prisoner of war camp than a furniture store competition.  The night was a living hell, and in all seriousness, I caught a glimpse, however small, of what it must have been like for those prisoners of war who are confined in cells where it is impossible to stand up straight or even stretch their legs.  We were not allowed to sit or even crouch. We could kneel on the ground but we could not bend our knees past 90 degrees, meaning that we could not "sit" on our feet, we had to kneel upright.  Or, we could stand, but we could only bend over and touch the knee-height mattress with one hand.  We could not lean on it or we would be disqualified.

At that point, it was a matter of enduring one uncomfortable position for as long as possible, then shifting to another uncomfortable position in order to temporarily shift the stress and burning to another part of the body.  After a while, though, no position could be endured long enough to rest from the burn of the previous, and it became one continuous, painful dance of confined movement.

At the onset of the competition, there was a lot of conversation and lively banter.  By midnight in hell, all of our "support groups" had either fallen asleep in chairs around us or gone home for the night.  At thirty six hours into the competition, nobody spoke.  The only thing that could be heard was stifled grunts of pain.  Not only had it long ceased to be a fun event, we were now each thinking about how much we wanted our competitors to fall asleep and be eliminated.  Talking only kept the competition awake. 

After 41 hours, even in an awkward bent position with knees and back on fire, outside in thirty-degree weather with the bare "mattress hand" completely numb from the cold, it became nearly impossible to stay awake.  I have never, ever, EVER tried to stay awake that long, and it was a battle against sleep that I have never fought with such intensity.  Apparently, 41 hours is also when energy drinks cease having any effect on the human body and all of us but one were in a continuous battle to keep our glazed eyes open.  At one point I came so close to going down that I had to call my Dad and chat with him for a while to stay awake.  It kept everyone else awake, too, but at least I did not fall.

They furniture store guy brought out a bribe to quit: a two-night paid hotel room at any one of various vacation destinations throughout the western states.  To our surprise, the one that we all feared would be the toughest contender took the offer, and it was down to the HARDCORE FOUR!

After enduring an eight-hour stretch, they gave us a seven-minute bathroom break at 5:30 in the morning.  It was difficult to make it to the bathroom because of the loss of feeling and function in various joints that had been tortured through the night.  Then, to our utter shock and great relief, they changed the rules again allowing us to actually sit on the ground.  They wanted to make us now ever so slightly MORE comfortable, with the hopes that we would start quickly succumbing to sleep.  And it would have worked, except that with dawn approaching, the four of us snapped out of the pained and silent stupor of the night, and we began laughing.

I have never been awake that long, so I never knew how confused the mind is capable of becoming when deprived of sleep for that long.  The four of us that remained began laughing about our situation and our mild hallucinations, how none of us could remember for a while which city we were in or why we were here. We laughed at each other; we laughed at ourselves.  We laughed at the judges.  We laughed at everything.  We laughed so hard that we could barely breathe.  And, as the sun came up, on a beautiful new day, we were all wide awake and silly.

...But perhaps not as wide awake as we felt, because the last girl in the contest, suddenly, without thinking, reached for her iPod with the wrong hand, taking her hand off the mattress and getting herself disqualified after 44 hours.  That left me and two other guys my age, Rob Tripp and Dave Munk.

After all that we had endured together, we had become somewhat comrades, and friends of a weird sort, that is to say that although we had quite amicable feelings one toward another, we wanted each other gone so that we could win and go home. (We laughed about this some more.)

The furniture store judges by this point were also ready to go home, and so we began discussing the possibility of adding an extra challenge to make elimination quicker and just get this whole thing over with.  We all agreed that this would be better than sitting there for another day.


SO, we began torture trials.  The judge decided to make us pick a knee, already burned out from the night of POW camp exercises,  and balance on that one knee for an hour. Hand still on the mattress, of course, but we could not use it to take pressure off the knee.  This we undertook to do, and my knee is still in a great deal of pain from it.  While we were all straining in agony and trying not to cry, the judge came out with a new bribe: An overstuffed rocker-recliner armchair if we would quit and go home.  All three of us declined the offer.  We had not come this far and endured this much to bow out now!

BUT... the truth of the matter was that we were really sick of it all and wanted badly for the suffering to end.  All three of our wives were there (the wives had come and gone at various points), and for a brief moment, Rob said that he was taking the deal quitting, and I thought it was down to just me and Dave, but Rob's wife wouldn't let him quit so we kept going. Nobody was taking bribes and nobody was backing out! 

The three of us were tired, hurting, and ready to go home.  We began negotiating.  Perhaps we could end this with a compromise and split up the prize.  We laid all our cards on the table.  I finally revealed to them that I was not completely enamored with the prize furniture, that all I really wanted was the mattress set, and that I really only wanted to win on principle because I had now come so far and involved so many friends, that I could not quit and let them down.

Then the judge said he'd throw in ANOTHER matching recliner and we could pick the fabric and color. Worth $500 for the set of two. Jaicee and I decided that we ultimately needed/wanted the recliners even more than the mattress set.  So, we settled it.  I took my hand off and claimed the recliners, Rob took his hand of next, letting Dave take the official win, then he and Dave split the rest of the furniture.

So, though I did not win technically, it was a victory for me because I lasted until the end, and I got what I wanted out of it.  Sure, I could have tried to drag it out and take the whole thing, and I feel pretty confident that I might have been able to do it, but it just wasn't worth it.  And a technical victory is not as good as a practical one.  Therefore, it was a three-way win for Rob, Dave, and me, because we all got new furniture.

And thus it ended, after 46 hours with a hand on the mattress.

I came home and got just a nap this afternoon so that I don't blow my sleep schedule completely, but I can tell you: I am going to sleep tonight!!!  Good thing I thought to get work off tomorrow just in case...