Ron Kantowski catches up with the Silverado High School 4x800 relay team, which is not an easy bunch to catch

Thursday, May 17, 2007 | 7:09 a.m.

It is the holy grail of track and field, this two-weekend orgy of running and jumping and throwing spears and assorted heavy metal objects known as the Mt. SAC Relays.

Spawned 49 years ago in Walnut, Calif., as a West Coast version of the Penn Relays back East and the Drake Relays in the Midwest, the Mt. SAC Relays have become part of the sport's holy trinity. It is the Super Bowl of running fast and jumping high, the Carnegie Hall of track and field. Only with a different baton.

Those who have competed there reads like the front of a Wheaties box. Bob Seagren, Al Oerter, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Lee Evans, Willie Davenport, Mary Decker, Mac Wilkins, Edwin Moses, Carl Lewis, Jackie Joyner, Gail Devers, Marion Jones, Maurice Greene you can almost hear the timpani of the Olympic fanfare when you recite the names.

Silverado High's 4x800 relay team didn't mention hearing the timpani, just the starting gun. And when it went off, Solomon Bennett, Josh O'Barr, Sean Whitesitt and Sean Zurko ran like the wind. Like they had a bus to catch. Or their hair was on fire.

Or whatever metaphor you choose for "faster than everybody else."

They won in 7:54.92 - which was only their second-fastest time of the season.

The night before a big meet at Arcadia, Calif., a couple of weeks before, these four amigos of the cinders - er, polyurethane all-weather surface - were talking stupid, like they sometimes do before a meet, when one mentioned how whack it would be if they could do a 7:50 the next day. Heck, let's shoot for 7:45, another one said.

Yeah, and while they were at it, why not ask Lindsay Lohan to the senior prom?

The next day, they went out and put a 7:46.12 on the board. It was the second-fastest time in the nation this year.

Ms. Lohan probably doesn't know how close she came to getting pinned with a corsage.

The 800 meters is one of the most demanding challenges in track and field. It requires the speed of a gazelle as well as the endurance of a mule. Because the 800 is two laps of the track, it combines the most exacting aspects of a sprint and a distance event into a single event.

It's such a difficult race to master, at least for American runners, that only one is listed among the Top 10 all-time performers in the event. Johnny Gray's time of 1:42.60 at Koblenz, Germany, in 1996 is still the ninth-fastest time ever recorded.

You've got to be a little crazy, or at least eccentric, to run the 800. The most famous American 800 runner of all-time is Dave Wottle, who ran it wearing a funky golf cap.

Wottle's cap made it to the track and field hall of fame in 1977. Three years later, so did he.

It used to be the 400 meters was the mother of running events because it basically was a full-out sprint over the length of four football fields. Or about two football fields farther than the fastest, finest-conditioned athletes are naturally wired to do.

These days, the 800 is like the 400. It's a full sprint the last lap. Only there's a lap before it. And whereas the first 400 meters once was used to jockey for position, now it looks more like the stretch run at Churchill Downs.

"The 800 is what the 400 used to be," said Thad Simmons, the Silverado coach.

Simmons says although there still is some strategy to running an 800, it's not exactly like playing chess or planning the Normandy Invasion.

Sean Zurko, the anchor of the Skyhawks' 4x800 squad whose national Top 10 time of 1:51.22 in the 800 has earned him a scholarship to Texas Christian University, says it pretty much comes down to this: When the gun sounds, you just run as fast as you can.

"It's basically who can run the fastest and who can hold it the longest," he said.

Bennett, O'Barr, Whitesitt (the only junior among seniors) and Zurko, the kid with the Blues Brothers sunglasses and a finishing kick like Jan Stenerud, will give Silverado a leg up on this weekend's state track and field championships at Del Sol High - not just because they have no equal in the 4x800 relay, but because they have qualified in so many other events that Simmons can spread them around like turf builder.

If Silverado wins, it will be the Skyhawks' second boys title in three years, although Simmons cautions that Cimarron-Memorial and Reno High should make it a tight three-way battle.

But if all the running and jumping and throwing spears and assorted heavy objects comes down to dialing 1-800, it could be that Silverado will have everybody's number.

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