Gabe’s Race

How a runner from Paradise High who lost everything, and his rivals from Chico, ran the unlikeliest race to qualify for the California State Meet

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Story By Dave Devine of DyeStat

Gabe Price was hurting. 

The pain was setting in for the senior from Paradise High, and those running around him could tell. Charlie Giannini could definitely tell. 

If this had been a typical cross country race, Giannini, the top man on Chico High’s team, might have taken Price’s grimace as a sign to ratchet up the pace on his sectional rival. 

But this wasn’t a typical race. 

Giannini wasn’t even competing; he was attempting to pull Price to a time that would qualify him for the California State Meet. The two boys, along with five other varsity runners from Chico’s squad, were running a three-mile “race” cobbled together for Price after he missed the Northern Section qualifier for the CIF state meet due to a wildfire that tore through his town the day of the sectional meet. 

An inferno that, in the coming days, would scorch more than 140,000 acres, level the city of Paradise, home to more than 26,000, and become the deadliest in state history. 

Based on an exception granted by the CIF state office, Price needed to dip under a cut-off time of 17 minutes, 41 seconds in order to qualify for the state meet Nov. 24 at Woodward Park in Fresno, well within his abilities as the top-seeded Division 4 runner from the Northern Section. 

But as Price burrowed into the difficult second mile on the course at West Valley High in Cottonwood, doubts crowded out the determination he’d brought to the starting line. 

He could feel the race, like so many other things in the past two days — his home, his scattered team, his decimated town — slipping away. 

He thought of the people who’d come to cheer for him on this Saturday morning, in the middle of everything else happening. His parents, his coach, Northern Section meet administrators, the starter from the local USATF chapter — and these kids from Chico that were trying to pull him along. 

Guys he usually raced against. 

What if I blow it in front of all these people? 

With the worst of the hills still to come and his breath turning ragged, it was easy to focus on all the things he was missing: the hours of sleep, the preparation, his teammates, his familiar racing spikes. 

His home, and all of his belongings. 

But he’d also put in too many miles, ground out too many workouts, to miss the state meet his senior year. 

And he’d been given this second chance. 

And there was Giannini, a guy he’d chased in so many races, only a few strides ahead now, checking his watch. Hollering back to him: 

Get up here, Gabe! Let’s go! 

*          *          *

Firefighters are working to access a fire in the Camp Creek Road area near Highway 70 in the Feather River canyon. Estimated 10 acres and spreading. #CampFire

— CAL FIRE Butte Unit/Butte County Fire Department (@CALFIRE_ButteCo) November 8, 2018  

*          *          *

On Thursday, Nov. 8, Tommy Harris, the first-year cross country coach at Paradise High, took the day off from work at his construction job. His team was due to compete in the CIF Northern Section championship, and with the afternoon meet 90 minutes north at West Valley High, there was plenty to do. 

His Bobcat boys were the top-seeded Division 4 team in the section; expectations were high. 

“This was our big day,” Harris said. 

As he went about his morning routine, a co-worker called with a few work-related questions. Near the end of the call, the co-worker asked about a fire that had sprung up nearby. 

“Looking like it’s coming towards you,” the friend said. 

Harris was used to fire warnings, had weathered plenty of previous threats, and didn’t think Paradise would be impacted by the fire currently blossoming to the east. 

But when he sat down with his coffee a short time later, the friend called back, saying the fire was “moving pretty quick.” 

“At that time,” Harris recalled, “I looked out my window, which was a little after 7 in the morning, and I said, ‘I need to go get these athletes. We’re going to West Valley, regardless.’” 

Arriving at Paradise High an hour later, Harris found a frenzied scene. 

“It was chaotic, embers were falling on the school by that point.” 

Harris pulled as many members of the team together as he could and informed them that the squad was leaving for the sectional meet immediately. But with conditions worsening by the minute, he had other, equally pressing, concerns. 

“My wife’s in my other ear, saying, ‘Tommy, we need to go. This fire’s coming.’ But I felt like I had a commitment.” 

It was too late. Students were already dispersing; family members were rushing to the school to retrieve children and race from town. 

Thirty minutes after Harris had arrived at Paradise, he left to get his work truck and evacuate his family. 

“It just came so fast,” Harris recalled. “I barely had enough time to get my wife and our kids and some of our animals out of town.” 

If any of the Paradise runners were going to make it to the sectional meet, they’d have to make it on their own. 

Harris’ top runner, Gabe Price, wasn’t at the high school that morning. 

Enrolled in a College Connections program through Butte College, Price was at home; his only class for the day had been cancelled. 

As the threat from the fire grew — around the same time Harris was rushing to evacuate his family — Price received a call from his father, Bo, urging him to gather a few important items from the house and head south to his grandparents’ home in Oroville. Price grabbed his school bag, the running gear he’d packed for the sectional race, and a lock box with important family documents. 

His father met him in Oroville, but they were unable to reach his mom, Sandy, who had raced to pick up his younger sister, Hope, from school. 

The championship meet became an afterthought. 

Late that afternoon, Sandy and Hope were able to escape the flames and make their way to Oroville. 

“After my mother and sister were back together with us,” Price said, “and we knew we had a family, that was right after the race had happened, so I was like, ‘Well, that kind of sucks.’ I just came to terms with it given everything that was happening.” 

He figured his chance to qualify for State had slipped away. 

Out of 27 runners on the Paradise team, only six made it to West Valley for the sectional. Price’s teammate, Patrick Roehling, finished 19th overall in a race that combined all divisions, claiming the fifth and final qualifying spot to State among Division 4 runners. 

But if Price had started to accept the bitter pill of missing the state meet, his coach wasn’t quite willing to let it go. 

In the chaos of that day, Harris had requested, via an email to meet director Scott Fairley, that the meet be postponed. He noted that his team, and possibly others, would be unable to travel together to the championship. But with teams already arriving in Cottonwood, and the first race imminent, rescheduling became impossible. 

So Harris turned his attention to the fate of his top runner. 

“I needed to get Gabe in there,” he said. “Gabe deserved it — his times all year, all the work he’s put in, it just wasn’t fair for a kid who’s going through this to not be able to do what he loves.” 

As Harris set the wheels in motion for a possible special race for Price — eventually texting his runner that he was likely to be offered a second chance — one of the teams that had been able to race at the sectional (albeit arriving in a caravan of parent cars after a last-minute bus cancellation), was heading for home. 

The victorious Chico High boys, Division 3 sectional champs behind individual winner Charlie Giannini, could see the fire raging on the horizon as they pulled from the freeway into Chico on Thursday night.    

“There was this giant line of fire off in the distance,” Coach Kevin Girt recalled. “You could see the red glow — it looked like Mordor, it was insane.” 

The next day, hoping to escape the smoke from that fire, Girt plotted a Saturday practice that would have the team driving somewhere north for clearer skies. 

When he heard from Tami Farrell, a co-worker at Chico High and the mother of twins Bretton and Riley on his team, that Gabe Price’s dad had texted asking if anyone from Chico might support Gabe in a special race at the West Valley course on Saturday morning, Girt knew his team’s Saturday destination. 

“I told the runners who qualified for State,” Girt said, “maybe we could go up there for practice, and at very least cheer for him, and then go for a run. And they jumped on it. They were very much into it.” 

*          *          * 

“[T]he reality is, I think, everybody would go back to the school. But where will they live? There's literally no place to live in Paradise. There's no homes. There's no temporary shelters. There's no motels. There's nothing. And so, I don't know who would go to the school.” 

- Paradise H.S. Principal Loren Lighthall, NPR interview, Nov. 11, 2018 

*          *          *

Saturday morning, the contingent from Chico High arrived at West Valley shortly before Price and his parents. 

When the Paradise senior straggled toward the small group that was assembled to welcome him, clutching only the black duffel bag he’d grabbed on his way out of town, rivalries fell away. 

“Gabe was very emotional,” Coach Harris said, “as we all were. He was just very thankful. He had no clue who was going to be there.” 

“That was pretty amazing,” Price recalled. “A lot of the stress was taken off. On one hand I was thinking, ‘Sweet, I’ve got people to pace me,’ but on the other hand I was like, ‘Man, that’ll really suck if I miss the time with all these people coming to support me.’ But it was more alleviating than anything. I was just happy to see other runners.” 

That connection between runners, the feeling of being embraced by peers who understood the difficulty of what he was trying to undertake, made a deep impact on Price. 

Girt, the Chico coach, knew that hitting a specific time on West Valley’s rugged course, especially after everything Price had been through in the last 48 hours, would be a tall task. 

“If you know anything about running,” he said, “you know the plausibility of that happening is pretty slim. He didn’t just need to record a time, he had to better the time of the fifth-place finisher in his division. But by yourself…his home is in ashes…his dad’s business is gone…he hasn’t slept very well the last two days…all that going on, and he’s supposed to show up and run the expected pace for the race. By himself.” 

While they waited for Price to arrive, Girt had floated an idea past Fairley, the meet director from West Valley. 

His boys wanted to pace Price to the 17:41 qualifying mark. 

“I asked Scott Fairley what the plan was,” Girt said, “and the answer came back that it was unprecedented. ‘If you guys want to run with him, that’s totally up to you.’” 

Giannini, only two days removed from his own sectional race, was keenly aware of the support Price would need. 

“We wanted to do it,” he said, “because the nature of the course is really hard, especially when you get out into the middle miles with all the hills — it’s extremely difficult to go at it alone — so that was something we all wanted to do.” 

Pacesetting wasn’t the only support the Chico team offered. 

In his rush from the house, Price had only grabbed one racing flat. Chico’s Rory Monninger brought an extra pair that he gave to the Paradise senior. 

When Price and Coach Harris prepared to do Paradise’s traditional pre-race cheer, a haka modeled on the traditional Maori dance performed by New Zealand’s rugby team, the Chico boys asked to be taught the moves. 

“It was just going to be Gabe and I,” Harris said, “because it’s our tradition and we weren’t going to stop doing it, and when the Chico runners asked to learn it, it was big. They’re our rivals, so for Chico to come up and want to learn the haka, it meant a lot to Gabe. It was so classy of the Chico athletes.” 

For Giannini and his teammates, it was simply another way to support a fellow runner at a difficult time. 

“We wanted to give him the experience that he was running with a team of guys, as much as we could,” he said. “It definitely was out of our comfort zone, and we’re used to being goofy, but — it was fun.” 

After the cheer, a handful of figures assembled at the starting line, and the gun was fired. 

Giannini, with a personal best well below the expected 17:41, was the only Chico runner who planned to go the entire way with Price. The others ran segments, as the family and fans in attendance sprinted to various places around the course to shout support. 

Even though Giannini wore a watch, he didn’t share pacing information with Price. He mainly tried to encourage his rival, helping Price to keep an even keel when the going got hard. 

“I was making sure we were under pace,” Giannini said, “or at least on pace, to get the time. Gabe didn’t talk to me, but we were yelling at him every once in a while: ‘Get up here, Gabe!’” 

Price acknowledged there were low points in the middle of the race. 

“Everything after one mile was pretty brutal,” he said. 

The self-talk turned negative in the second mile, his mind turning to the uselessness of tapering and then not racing, the stress of fleeing his house, dealing with smoke in his lungs, struggling to sleep as he pondered the fate of his hometown. 

“It was not comfortable, but I had Charlie up there yelling at me, so that —” he said, pausing to find an appropriate word to capture how he felt mid-race. “That made it even worse,” he concluded, laughing. 

When Price and his pacers crossed the two-mile mark, Girt noticed the runner’s downcast eyes and ashen face. 

“I could tell he was hurting,” Girt said, “trying to keep it focused. But with the guys around him, and Charlie keeping his eye on the watch, they turned with a quarter mile to go and it was hard to tell — ‘Is he gonna make it? Is he gonna make it?’” 

Price’s own coach, Harris, watched that turn toward home and harbored similar concerns. He realized the senior only had two minutes to cover the remaining distance. 

“And it’s every bit of two minutes to finish from where he was at,” Harris said. “We thought it was going to be close.” 

The race concluded on West Valley’s track. As the runners hit the final straight, Giannini and his teammates dropped off to allow Price his singular moment. 

“As much as we were running the race with him,” Giannini said, “it wasn’t really our race. So, we all peeled back and it was his sprint to the finish.” 

Price’s mom was running down the homestretch, tears in her eyes. 

His coach was imploring him to dig deeper. 

He crossed in 17:12, well under the required time. 

“Everyone was hugging and high-fiving,” Girt recalled. “It was a pretty cool moment.”

As Price spun through the finish area and absorbed what he’d done, for a few minutes at least, he was able to think about something other than the wildfire that altered his world two days earlier. 

“I’d say at that moment, I wasn’t thinking about the fire or anything else that happened. I was just happy to be there, happy to hit that time and to have a second chance.” 

*          *          * 

“This is an unprecedented event.” 

 - Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea, Nov. 12, 2018. 

*          *          *

The Sunday after Price’s race, with classes cancelled through Thanksgiving for all Chico district schools due to the fires, Girt’s state-qualifying boys headed 200 miles northwest to Arcata, along California’s coast, in search of smoke-free training before the state meet. Giannini’s grandparents live there, and own several unoccupied rental units where the boys and Girt were able to stay. 

They invited Price to come along. 

Initially reluctant, due to family concerns back home, he was encouraged by his parents to join his new friends at the coast. 

“They were friends before,” Girt said, “but more like competitive friends. But now, because of this, they’ve been spending a lot more time together.” 

With Price’s own Paradise team scattered to makeshift arrangements throughout the region, one of the benefits of his stint at the coast has been a chance to run and hang out with teenagers who hold the same passion for running. 

“It’s been overwhelmingly helpful,” he said. “Especially when you’re grinding in a workout with these guys, and you’re not thinking about anything else in that moment. When you’ve got a bunch of other dudes that are hating life with you, it’s a good feeling.” 

The group plans to return inland Thursday, and then Price will stay with his grandparents in Oroville. He’s hoping to reconnect with Paradise’s other state qualifier, Patrick Roehling, once he’s back in the area. 

Ideally, he’d like to continue preparing for the state meet with the Chico crew, as well. They’ll race in different divisions at the state level, so they won’t meet again on the course. 

Which means they’ll be cheering for one another in a way they likely never would have before last Saturday.                       

“That’s the cool thing about this sport,” Girt said. “It’s not like other sports where you can trash talk your way — you have to show up and you have to run your race. And that’s kind of how these guys have seen each other all these years, but now that they’ve actually gotten to know each other, they realize they really are friends.” 

Relaxing between runs, the boys have been playing cards and dominoes, giving Price a hard time about the sheer number of interviews he’s given since his story spread in recent days. 

Price, for one, has been surprised by all the interest. 

“I never really thought this would resonate with so many people,” he said. “This story and what happened — I never saw that happening. I guess people, I don’t know, want to hear something good in all of this.” 

For Rory Monninger, the Chico runner who brought the extra racing flats, and his teammates, the attention has been equally unexpected. 

“In the moment, we were just trying to do the right thing,” he said. “We never really thought it would become a huge story, we were just out there supporting a fellow runner.”