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In a way, the boom run is tightrope running. Just as the circus performers do their stuff on the high-wire with the number-one objective being not to fall down and go boom, lumberjacks and lumberjills in the boom run must maintain their balance at all times. The difference between the boom run and tightrope walking is that boom runners are running full out while leaping from log to log. Competition in the boom run is head-to-head against another runner on a nearby length of logs. The entrant who stays upright and runs the fastest advances. The boom run requires balance and speed. It’s an agility run on logs that are lashed together in the water, and slipping is discouraged, not only if you want to stay dry but if you want to win. Anyone who falls off the log and makes a splash can continue, but only by climbing back up on the log at the point where he or she fell. The boom run looks like fun, but it is also a challenge. And it has its roots in real lumberjack work. During the winter logging season the cut trees were hauled to nearby rivers and stored until spring. The logs were penned up and circled by “booms,” and then after the chopping season, when any ice on the water thawed, the corrals were removed and the logs began their journey downriver, herded by workers known as river pigs. The sport is considerably safer than the work was, and no one has ever drowned competing in the boom run in Hayward. Jenny Atkinson, who began competing in Hayward at age ten and was about to make her twenty-seventh consecutive championships appearance 151 The Idea Is Not to Go Boom The Idea Is Not to Go Boom in the summer of 2010, discovered the boom run in 1990. She went to a logrolling contest in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and at the end of that competition officials said, “Hey, we have this fun event.” A boom run had been erected. None of the logrollers had seen it. “For everyone, it was the first time we did the sport,” Atkinson said. “It didn’t hardly exist.” The race officials loaded everyone interested into a boat and transported them to the middle of a pond. Unlike the back-and-forth boom run between docks in Hayward, this one-time event called for an all-out, one-way sprint over the logs to shore with the reward being a medal and a hundred dollars. Atkinson won. “I really loved it then,” she said. Starting the next year, in 1991, Hayward added the boom run to its program, and for four years, through 1994, the event was co-ed, men against women. Every year Atkinson made the finals, but she was the only woman. She earned the nickname “Boom Queen” for those performances because, as she said, it was “Jenny and all guys.” In 1995, the Lumberjack World Championships divided up the boom run competition into men and women, not men versus women. Mandy Erdmann Sobiech saw her first timber sports event, logrolling, in her hometown of La Crosse when she was six, went home, and said, “Mom and Dad, I want to be a logroller.” They rolled their eyes, but said OK. When she went to Hayward for the first time a year later she saw the boom run and discovered her true love. “Logrolling is fun, but the boom run is my passion,” she said. She started winning the event in 1999 and has either been a champ or a contender ever since. “I’ve always been good at it,” she said. “I love racing.” Nearing thirty and focusing on a career as a nurse in a cancer unit, Erdmann Sobiech is now living in a community without a boom run and has trouble squeezing in as much training on the logs as she would like. She runs sprints, practices logrolling, and lifts weights, but to actually get on a boom run involves driving two hours to Madison or two and a half hours to Minneapolis. Although no one has ever seemed quite as passionate about the boom run as Jamie Fischer, Fred Scheer won the first men’s title in 1995. JR Salzman, whose primary event is logrolling, won in 1996, 1997, and in 2000. On the women’s side, Atkinson, then known by her maiden name of Anderson, won in 1995 and 1996...

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