Body Tech’s Pump ’n’ Run Event Was Not to the Swift
Caroline Cashin, who is in Tel Aviv with her husband, Ed, competing in the Epic Israel three-day mountain bike race today, recently became the first female ever to win Body Tech’s Pump ’n’ Run event at Amagansett’s Atlantic Avenue Beach.
“It’s strength, not speed,” she said during a conversation at the Truth Training fitness studio she and her husband run in East Hampton, down an alley between Mary’s Marvelous and the Villa Italian Specialties store, opposite the East Hampton railroad station.
“I’m going to have to change the rules,” Body Tech’s owner, Mike Bahel, said, with a broad smile, before saying he was just kidding.
Bench presses, the event’s first phase, require men to press 60 percent of their body weight and women to press 35 percent of theirs, with three seconds per rep being deducted from the ensuing two-mile beach run between Atlantic and Indian Wells and back.
Cashin, 41, who had trained for the competition — three times a week at Truth Training, and weekly on the beach (with Beth Feit, Holly Li, and the Cashins’ 11-year-old daughter, Dylan), where they’d do push-ups, sprints, and planks — blew everyone away with her 172 reps, her previous best being 115.
Not that she could have walked the beach run, but the eight and a half minutes she’d banked pretty much assured her the victory — over Neil Falkenhan (71 reps), the perennial winner in recent years, and Mike Lentz, who she said was the fastest runner, among others.
In an account of 2015’s Pump ’n’ Run, Bahel said Cashin, whose reps had subtracted five minutes from her run that year, could have won it had not “her motherly instincts taken over.” He was referring to the fact that when Cashin’s then-8-year-old son, Liam, a late arrival from a junior tennis camp, had thrown in the towel after rounding the Indian Wells lifeguard stand, she tended to him rather than leave him in the dust, as it were.
As for the women this year, Amanda Calabrese, a three-time national lifeguard tournament champion in beach flags who represents the United States in international lifesaving competitions, was second, said Cashin, Feit, who like Cashin is in her 40s, was third, and Dylan (85 reps) was fourth.
Body Tech’s website in May, in order to contradict “false rumors,” posted the following: “Ladies, lifting weights won’t make you big and bulky. You won’t look like a man. You don’t produce enough testosterone. It will actually enhance your feminine curves. Stop believing the false rumors.”
Cashin, who left for Tel Aviv on Sunday, is among a number of 40-somethings, Feit, Sinead FitzGibbon, Li, and Sharon McCobb among them, who need no such reminding.
“There’s lots of us,” Cashin said, with a sly smile. “We’re kicking butt.”
She has done these Epic mountain bike races before: with Bahel in Cape Town in 2014, and with Dan Farnham (the acknowledged top mountain biker out here) in 2015.
The Epic races are said to be “the Tour de France of mountain biking.”
The ones in Cape Town are eight-day stage races in mountains and valleys. After the 2015 one, Cashin said, “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done . . . apart from childbirth. That was the toughest.”
Next up for Body Tech is its Serpent’s Back Duathlon at Ed Ecker County Park off Montauk’s Navy Road on Oct. 8 at 10:30 a.m.