Why a cop, services providers and homeless shelter residents will run through the mud this weekend

There was a time, not terribly long ago, when 52-year-old James Youngs lived along the banks of the Puyallup River.

For the past year, Youngs has resided at the Dome District stability site, a shelter opened in 2017 shortly after the city declared homelessness a public health emergency.

Never in Youngs’ wildest dreams, he says, did he think that one day he’d be collaborating with Tacoma police officer Craig Bennett, a member of the Homeless Outreach Team.

There was a time, Youngs says, when he saw Bennett as an adversary of sorts.

Things are different now.

Since spring, Youngs and Bennett — along with another resident of the stability site and two employees of Catholic Community Services — have become a tight-knit team of five, training and taking part in a three-part series of Spartan Races across the region.

For the uninitiated, Spartan Races are essentially a branded version of what’s more commonly known as mud runs — utilizing courses of different lengths filled with a dizzying and intimidating array of obstacles. Think walls and ropes to climb, barbed wire to crawl under, and — in the case of the 13-mile course they’ll take on this Saturday in Snohomish, known as “The Beast” — pits of fire to jump over.

Having completed the 3-mile Spartan Sprint and the 8-mile Spartan Super earlier this year, Bennett calls Saturday’s final test “the big one.”

The race will require team fortitude and the kind of collaboration not usually found between the homeless, service providers and a no-nonsense cop like Bennett.

“I knew James when he was living in a box down there by the river,” Bennett says. “That damn guy came to the first 8-mile race wearing cutoff jeans, his old shoes, and he had mustard packets in his pockets. And he finished the entire thing.

“Who would have ever thought that you’d have a team running a series of very hard races with two guys living in a homeless encampment, with a police officer that helped put them in the homeless encampment, and a case manager who’s down there trying to help them get out of the stability site?”

The unlikelihood isn’t lost on Youngs.

“I think the irony of it is, for the three years I was down by the river, and the officer that I’m now teammates with used to come and harass me and tell me to leave,” Youngs said this week from just outside Tacoma Strength, where the team has been training since July.

“In one of the races we were in, one of the harder obstacles — he actually helped me over so I could finish it. So it goes from him chasing me away to him helping me with the hurdles I have going on in front of me. It’s crazy great how things can turn around.”

Crazy, perhaps, but not purely by chance.

Joshua Waguespack is the director of operations for Catholic Community Services. Waguespack manages the Dome District stability site as well as Nativity House downtown and Benedict House in Kitsap County.

A veteran who spent eight years in the Army and was wounded in Afghanistan in 2009, Waguespack first pitched the idea of forming this team earlier this year. He believed some of the most crucial things he learned in the military — like the power of giving people “purpose, direction and motivation” — would serve residents of the stability site well.

“It’s kind of hard to do it with a population that really doesn’t have anything else to strive for, that’s kind of been beaten down,” says Waguespack, who is joined on the team by Catholic Community Services case manager Sarah Stutzke. “So this was an opportunity to, one, say ‘You guys are tougher than what you think you are. You go through a lot.’”

Michael Ramos, 35, has lived in the Dome District stability site since it opened. Ramos is battling a form of hereditary blood cancer and in active recovery from addiction to cocaine and methamphetamine.

“It’s been crazy. It’s been bumpy,” Ramos says of his time at the stability site. “But working with these guys — it’s been good.”

For Ramos, joining — and sticking with — the Spartan Race team has helped bolster his motivation and resolve to turn his life around and one day see his son again.

“I can’t see him until I fix my life. So this has got me going good,” Ramos says. “It’s got me off drugs, and it’s keeping me right.

“I know I can beat a lot more things now, like this cancer — I’m going to beat it. I finally feel like I have a family.”

In this, no matter what happens Saturday — or how long it takes this unorthodox team to cross the finish line — it’s clear all of the sweat and effort has been worth it.

Forming a connection like this, after all, was the point.

“We just kind of formed a team, and we’ve grown together,” Waguespack says. “That’s kind of the thing with me and Bennett. We just want to spend time with people, and we believe through that interaction we can help people. I’m just not in the business of giving up on people.

“I would ask the same thing from our community.”

This story was originally published September 7, 2018 at 6:15 PM.