Runners climb the 282 steps of the Mt. Baldhead Challenge. Photo by Carter Sherline / Frog Prince Studios.

SAUGATUCK (9/21) - Fellow runners, course monitors and spectators let me know of my good luck before, during and after the diabolical Mt. Baldhead Challenge.

They saw the evidence on the race tag attached by safety pins to my shirt at my belly. I wore number 1111, a gesture of good will from whatever gods of chance assign digits for pre-registered entries. "Quite a number," a monitor called from a bike as I plodded along the idyllic Lake Michigan shoreline toward the hellish dune climb that earns the race its Challenge title.

With time inexorably passing, with the clock ticking away my fate, I needed quite a number, I needed good luck. One by one the digits tell the story.

1, for the number of times I've started the 15K Challenge, my longest race to date.

1, for the number of times I've climbed the 282 steps up Mt. Baldhead in the midst of the Challenge, my first visit to the top in some four decades.

1, for the number of times I've stumbled over roots on the dune descent in the Challenge.

1, for the number of times I've finished a 15K race, albeit 13th among males in the 45-49 age bracket in 1:13:35, or 7:54 per mile.

11, for the approximate number of minutes it took me to negotiate the sixth mile with the stair climb. I expected the searing labor on the steps. The roller-coaster seventh mile passed more quickly but bothered me more.

111, for the approximate number of runners I passed along the way, having started near the back in my wonted cautious mode.

1,111, for the approximate number of runners who beat me to the finish line.

In truth I came in 95th out of 316 finishers, placing me in the 30th percentile behind the leaders, only slightly off my expectation of cracking the 25th percentile in races. So much for good luck. To bend all out of shape a quote from the poet W.H. Auden: he who runs the numbers before first running the Challenge is only serving the devil. Men's overall winner Matt Smith of Holland (53:19) slipped off my radar screen even before we reached the start line, of course, as did women's champ Jennifer Carsok of Grand Haven (1:03:27), as did my bracket's winner Scott Sullivan of Wyoming (1:04:06).

They vanished like lesser gods into the lakeshore streets about the time I passed celebrity starter Tom VanHowe, anchorman at WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids, and broke into a profuse sweat in the first mile.

Fortune smiled, and though the morning's rain clouds parted and the sun shone, the temperature stayed at less than 70 degrees.

The 15K Challenge course sets out at the waterfront on Kalamazoo Lake in Saugatuck, curls through the city streets to Blue Star Highway, crosses a bridge into Douglas, winds through the village streets to Lake Michigan, skirts Kalamazoo Lake across from the Saugatuck waterfront, leaps the 282 steps, plunges down the dune's opposite side to the Lake Michigan shoreline, undulates among woods and dunes, repeats the village streets and bridge and city streets, and finishes where it started on the waterfront.

"Here it comes," a fellow runner warned as we approached the foot of the stairs. The challenge arrived both later and sooner than I wanted.

What followed was a passage from inferno through purgatorial pain to paradisiacal relief. Whoever designed the Challenge must have sprouted horns and flashed goat's eyes at the though of routing the course over Mt. Baldhead. He must have rubbed his hands in glee, knowing his Dantesque idea would attract that hell-hungry breed known as runners.

A painting for the 2002 Challenge by James Brandess, reproduced on t- shirts distributed to entrants, etched Mt. Baldhead as a terraced black blotch under a fiery sky.

Brandess depicted the stairs, tipping to vertical in a middle passage, as rising to a dish at the dune top, an emblem of the actual tower on Mt. Baldhead that began as part of the national defense system known as Distant Early Warning, or the DEW line.

The Brandess stairs have a minor flaw in the mind of one runner in the 2002 Challenge. By my count, they total 66, nearer the number of landings than steps.

Did the digits over my belly bring good luck? One by one the digits tell the story. Runner 1110, Tracey Welsh of Grand Rapids, and number 1112, Brian Lohr of Holland, both finished behind runner 1111. Better to trust to the gods of chance than to serve the devil.