A man, dripping in mud, approached the finish line. People lined a nearby hill to watch, prompted by an announcement to the crowd that something special was about to happen.
Luke Clavet, 49, carefully stepped through old tires, a friend holding each of his arms. Whistles and cheers followed every his step, and Clavet’s smile lit up the stormy gray day as each challenge finally was overcome.
“When they showed me the tires there at the end, I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it,” Clavet of Lewiston said. “But I did.”
Team Luke Warm, a group of 27 people, helped Clavet finish the Dynamic Dirt Challenge on June 5 at Pineland Farms in New Gloucester. They were there to support the former high school hockey star accomplish something that seemed impossible nearly 30 years ago.
In 1987, when Clavet was 20, he was on his motorcycle supporting two friends, Joe Dumais and Mike Lecompte, during a biathlon in the Lewiston area. He crashed — no one quite knows what happened, even to this day — injuring his brain stem.
“Joe [Dumais] started doing CPR on Luke directly after the accident happened and kept going despite the cops pulling him off and telling him he was gone,” Emile Clavet of Harpswell, Clavet’s older brother, remembered. “He finally got a pulse. He saved his life.”
Luke Clavet was in a coma for 19 days and hospitalized for nearly six months. After being released, Clavet had to relearn how to walk, talk and feed. Social situations had become difficult — he said people thought he was drunk because of his affected speech pattern.
Fast forward 29 years, and Clavet proudly tackled every obstacle the 4-mile Dynamic Dirt Challenge threw at him. He scaled hay bale mountains, slogged through tight, mud-filled culverts and was supported up and over towering logs and tractor tires.
“It’s been such a long time since he’s felt like he could do something like that — something that made him feel like the old Luke again,” Terry Clavet, his wife of 14 years, said. “I was so proud of him.”
“It was very challenging, but I don’t like to back down from challenges,” Clavet said. “I’m motivated, I guess. The will is there; I just can’t do what I used to do. It takes me twice as long to anything, but it’s always done right.”