20 Years of Service
Photo: The bus was a center of activity for the Capital Running Company crew and a familar sight at the races.

"You're either on the bus or off the bus," Neal Cassady said famously in 'On the Road,' the bus being the literal and metaphorical ride to freedom in Jack Kerouac's ode to the Beat Generation.

So too with thousands of Washington area roadracers, who since 1986, knowingly or not, have been on the bus as data: first, on index cards and popsicle sticks, later on Tyvek tear-off tags, and more recently as bits and bytes recorded by transponders on their shoes. The bus--think bookmobile, which used the same vehicle model--was a ponderous, 30-foot behemoth of a command and control center for all things running and racing.

While the bus has been a workhorse for Mark Baldino, former owner of the Colonial Running Company, and since 1994 for Rick and Kathy Freedman's Capital Running Company, none of the principals seemed particularly nostalgic about its dramatic demise on the Beltway en route to the Virginia Run Turkey Trot 5K in Centreville last November. "I don't remember much of a noise," said Kathy, who was driving a more sensibly sized van behind the 1965 Gerstenslager. "But suddenly a huge cloud of white smoke enveloped the bus and completely obscured the roadway. It was so thick! Rick [Kathy's husband, business partner, and drawer of the short stick---he drove the bus] lost all power immediately and had to get over two lanes to the shoulder. There were cars around us when the smoke first appeared, and I don't know how they got out of the way or how he avoided hitting them. When Rick got out, another cloud of smoke followed him from inside the bus. That's when I got scared and realized that he could have been burning in there as I sat shaking in my van."

After nearly 20 years of service to the roadracing community, who could expect the bus to go quietly? But go it did, and there was no saving the vehicle, even though it had fewer than 20,000 miles on it.

"It blew a hole through the engine block, which was just barely hanging together under the hood," Rick said. "We considered trying to save it, but there was no way to get another engine in there. And the body was really shot."

As any masters runner knows, forty years of wear and tear, even with relatively low mileage, will take its toll and the bus joined the scrap heap of running history. But for happy chance, however, it might never have lumbered toward a finish line at all.

From Public Service to Public Service
Back in the middle '80s, when Baldino orchestrated the local running scene, he noticed the bus--it was hard to miss, actually-- parked for two years behind the WETA offices in Shirlington. It had served as the station's mobile broadcast station back in the days when it needed an on-the-spot production station and something to haul around full-sized television cameras.

"I drove past it all the time, thinking how we could put it to work, and finally I stopped in and asked, 'What about that bus?'"

"We ended up buying it for $8,200," said Baldino, who had the vehicle gutted and refitted inside, stripped to its aluminum body, sandblasted and repainted outside "with this paint they use for airplanes. It looked pretty good."

"We called her 'Spot,'" Baldino said. "Like a dog, it followed us home."

King of the Road
Not that Spot the Bus didn't have its drawbacks. It weighed as much as, well, a city bus, and faced truck and commercial vehicle restrictions on many of the main roads leading into Washington. Top speed was about 50 mph, once it got rolling downhill; small uphills proved challenging. "My foot was always jammed all the way down on the accelerator," Rick recalled, none too fondly.

"Going to a race wasn't a problem," Kathy said. "Driving through the streets of D.C. in the early morning hours was a breeze, with the traffic lights flashing. But getting home was another matter. Stopping for a light and starting up again in traffic was a very slow process. And most people don't realize it's uphill all the way from downtown to Montgomery County."

It took only one trip home via Wisconsin Avenue to convince the Freedmans that there must be a better way. "We ended up taking I- 395 south out of the District, across the 14th Street Bridge, all the way down to the Beltway at Springfield, and then around on the Virginia side to I-270 and up to Rockville," Kathy recalled. "Rolling along the Beltway with no stop lights, we would get home in an hour or less--about what it took to drive up Wisconsin Avenue."

And of course, you can't just park a 30-foot Gerstenslager in front of your house. After leaving the vehicle in Baldino's commercial lot for several years, the Freedmans moved the bus closer to home by parking it in Rockville's industrial areas, but not for longer than the few days allowed by the zoning laws.

"We were constantly moving it around and getting warning tickets," Kathy said. "Some areas where we parked acquired new parking restriction signs. We did that for several years, staying just ahead of the police, until finally we landed a parking spot in a public storage lot."

So after the Thanksgiving meltdown, the Freedmans did a bus makeover and purchased a 2000 (nearly 21st century!) Gulfstream Conquest, which is a foot shorter than the bus. Or the old bus.

"Even though it's so different, we're having a hard time not referring to the new vehicle as the bus," Rick confessed.

The old bus is dead. Long live the new bus.