GRAND RAPIDS (4/4/03) -- While U.S. troops stormed Baghdad and I trained for a race at The Hair of the Frog microbrewery, my emergency- room-nurse wife witnessed "Shock and Awe."

As she drove to work April Fool's Day, she heard a radio station broadcasting a contest in which participants held their tongues to a nine-volt battery. "The drool's reached her shoulder!" she remembers one expert analyst exclaiming. The winner of this "Shock and Awe" competition received $100 worth of beer.

Among my wife's first patients that day? You guessed it: a woman with tongue burns, joined by a worried station executive scanning the waivers she'd signed for loopholes.

"You the drooler?" my wife asked.

"Yup."

"You win?"

"Each of us got beer."

"The anesthetic may come in handy."

My wife recounted this after we'd dropped off our daughter, Flannery, 3, at Grandma's en route to the Frogger 5.5K. Dangerous Dan, who was with us, seemed perturbed at the ice storm forming.

"It's scary what Flannery picks up listening," my wife said. "I call her 'knucklehead' and she repeats it. But she says 'bucklehead.'"

"We're all buckleheads for running tonight," said Dangerous.

"We get tickets for two beers when we're done," I reminded him.

"As part of our entry fee," he answered. "The 'Shock and Awe' people didn't pay anything, didn't have to run through an ice storm and got more beer for it."

"Look," I said. "FOX-TV is here."

FOX is always here; its studios are next to "The Frog," which in turn shares a building with Hubba Tubba hot tubs, where people pay by the hour to soak themselves. What effect this might have on programming, I can't say. With roads turning nasty and local news slashed in deference to war footage, why not stay home and shoot running crazies?

WEATHERMAN (bantering with Anchor): T'ain't a fit night for man nor beast.

ANCHOR: Except for 140 running nuts taking part in the annual Frogger 5.5K ... (cut to film shot through picture window).

Inside The Frog, owner Shawn Sweet was ecstatic. "We've more than doubled last year's entries!"

"We had good weather last year," I reminded him.

"Runners do tend to be off-center," Sweet confessed.

Sex is always a question at this eccentric event, whose entry forms list four options:

* Male

* Female

* Maybe after the race

* But we hardly know each other

Rules are deviant in other ways as well. Going out too fast is a good idea; after 100 yards, the course narrows into a path between brush where passing is impossible. Though the costumed crocodiles slated to lurk here were put on ice, it remained surreal: runners sprinting into a tunnel of low-hanging, crusted branches that whipped our faces and clicked like teeth against one another.

Treachery served me only so far in the face of a stronger enemy. I'd meant to ease up on the path, but studs trapped behind began staring bullet holes in my back. Feet winged by guilt, I resumed running fast, so that when I escaped the woods even the crocodiles, jogging, passed me. My saving grace was my glasses were too steamed by now to see.

Lightning transformed buds, iced, into photo negatives. The heavens spat sleet like meteor showers ... media showers too: cameras caught me running behind the crocks. I wanted to go home and be embedded.

I climbed a gravel hill, leapt a chain gate and ran onto asphalt where the footing was nonexistent. My wife turned onto a dead end and spent an extra five minutes fighting the Sno-cone frenzy.

"I had the time of my life," she said.

Dangerous, facing a long drive home, did not want to stay for beer.

"Makes sense," I said, mourning.

Roads were a nightmare of cars in ditches, flashing strobes, broken limbs and branches. I punched buttons randomly: war in Baghdad on every station.

We three buckleheads sloshed to Grandma's to fetch a girl, who, with shock and awe, I'll tell, "Someday all of this will be yours." MR