Donnie Iris - Ah! Leah!

What does this 1980 classic rock ode to lust ❤️‍🔥 🍆 have to do with me participating in a Spartan race? Read on to find out.

PART ONE

Recently, fellow Substacker Brad Kyle messaged me to see if I was interested in collaborating with him on a new piece. Brad is essentially a living, breathing rock and roll historian, so I knew that whatever song we decided on would have to be a legit earworm and summon a personal story out of me.

Two different earworms were competing for primacy in my head at the time, both of which I figured Brad had already written about. The first was ELO’s “I Can’t Get It Out of My Head” (which, considering the topic of this newsletter, is shocking that I hadn’t written about it yet).

The second song on mental repeat was Donnie Iris’s 1980 hit, “Ah! Leah!"

I shared both song choices.

Within 30 seconds, Brad responded with:

"Ah! Leah!” No question. No more calls; we have a winner!

A few days later, Brad DM’d me, letting me know that he was just about ready to post his new piece featuring both Donnie Iris’ “Ah! Leah!” and The Kings’ 1980 hit “This Beat Goes On/Switchin’ To Glide.” Was I ready to send him my take on the song? Or, better yet, might we post simultaneously?

Shit. I hadn’t written a word.

I was ear-deep putting together my 22 songs 2 celebrate 2 years on Substack piece. I knew Brad would have covered the history and trivia related to Donnie Iris and the song “Ah! Leah!” including the fact that both Donnie Iris and Mark Avsec (co-writer/producer of the song) were members of Wild Cherry (“Play that Funky Music”). I was right. I would have to make my contribution more personal.

I quickly scribbled together a couple of paragraphs, which Brad graciously included in his piece. In it, I tell the story of how, until a few years ago, I’d thought the song was titled “Ah Li Ya.” Made up syllables, something akin to The Police’ “Da Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.”

When I realized the actual title was “Ah! Leah!” a couple of years ago (when I saw it appear on the screen of my car stereo), I felt like an idiot.

My presumed idiocy was redeemed, though, when, during my allotted 20 minutes of research, I learned that the song had originally been conceived as an anti-war anthem. It was never meant to be an ode to the power of sexual chemistry. Avsec, who wrote the initial draft of the song, said that he intended the words that would become the song’s title to be a chant. A war cry. I don’t know if he wrote it down as “Ah-Li-Ya,” but it had to have been something close to that.

When Donnie Iris heard Avsec’s demo of the song, he said the chant sounded like a woman’s name. Leah.

There is no lyrical residue of the anti-war anthem that once was. I do wonder, though, what had been written before these iconic lyrics would be sung in full voice from mustachioed mullet men in muscle cars across the world, unaware that they were singing along to Buddy Holly with a perm and a bow tie.

I see your lips
And I wonder who's been kissing them
I never knew how badly I was missing them
We both know we're never going to make it
But when we touch
We never have to fake it

If I do discover the original heartfelt, anti-war words somewhere online, I will let you know in a future post. Or maybe it’s best that we let that remain an unsolved mystery.

If you are not familiar with the greatness that is “Ah! Leah!” (the only song title I can think of with two exclamation points that are not next to each other), check out the song and the extremely cheesy video below. If you aren’t bopping your head and singing along with the chorus, you are likely dehydrated.

You can read Brad Kyle’s piece, which includes my excerpt, at the link below.

🚢Yacht Pop Anchors #5: The Kings ("This Beat/Switchin' to Glide"), Donnie Iris ("Ah! Leah!"), 1980

PART TWO

My personal connection to “Ah! Leah!” is dubious at best.

For one, I never dated a woman named Leah, Lea, Leia, Leanne, or anyone of any gender with a name that could possibly be mistaken as Leah.

Furthermore, the song’s theme, namely that of having a sexual relationship with someone who you have nothing in common with other than what occurs between the sheets, does not describe any scenario of my rather chaste life.

And then it hit me.

Before I started my dog-walking business, I worked as a videographer/editor at a non-profit organization for 12 years. Sometime around the mid-2010s, I became aware that a few of my coworkers were training together to participate in a local Spartan Race.

I was fairly athletic — I went to the gym a few times a week and played tennis regularly — but I didn’t run unless I was being chased, and I never had the desire to climb over walls and under barbed wire in a field of mud.

But I did love obstacle courses and was a fan of both the Japanese and American Ninja Warrior competition TV shows.

In 2017, my coworker Mick invited me to join the crew for the next Spartan Race, which was three months away. He’d asked me twice before, and I politely declined, feeling too out of shape and busy to do the necessary training.

Mr. Octopus (in the clip below) is 63 years old and a badass role model. When I saw him (and other wannabe ninja warriors) attempting the seemingly impossible to navigate obstacles in from of him, it convinced me that if he could almost win Ninja Warrior, I could certainly handle a Spartan race.

So, the third time I was invited to join my coworkers in the Spartan Race in Sacramento, I agreed.

Can you guess the name of the coworker who finally convinced me to sign up and train with the crew? Yep — Lea. No ‘h’ at the end, but it’s pronounced the same.

Lea was even shorter than me, probably 5 feet, and the fact that she’d completed two races already dispelled my worries about not being physically able to finish the race.

“Everyone is there to help each other,” she said. “People give you a boost and pull you up when you fall. You’re going.”

I was going. Three months later, I went.

Before and after the race

What is the Spartan Race?

The Spartan Race has several difficulty levels: Sprint, Super, Beast, Ultra, and Kids. Other specialized races are for elite athletes.

Here’s how the website details the differences between Sprint, Super, and Beast.

The Spartan Sprint is a 5K (approximately 3.1 miles) trail run, held on off-road terrain and featuring mud and water. Racers have to overcome 20 unique obstacles — including walls, the Barbed Wire Crawl, Monkey Bars, and the Spear Throw — or face a 30-burpee penalty.

The Spartan Super is double the Sprint’s distance — approximately 6.2 miles — features 25 obstacles, and will be the most challenging 10K you’ve ever done. You can also count on some incredibly demanding elevation gain.

You’ve never run a half marathon like this. The final piece of the Spartan Trifecta puzzle, the Beast is exactly as it sounds: beastly. We're talking 21K — a little over 13 miles — and 30 obstacles. Our Beasts are rarely on flat ground, so you can expect your legs to burn as you traverse brutal ascents and descents.

The above video will give you a good idea of what many of the obstacles are in the race.

It’s a Sprint, Not a Marathon

Our race would be the Sprint. A 5k, even in mud and on steep terrain, seemed feasible. Also, it wasn’t a 5k all at once. It was divided into three 1-mile-ish sections between obstacles.

I didn’t consider what it might feel like to run a mile covered in wet mud, though. It was tough, but honestly, several of the obstacles were much tougher.

For this obstacle you have to swim in mud under a wall. Here I am on the other side. I was determined not to get mud in my mouth.

For the first third of the race, our group stuck together and helped each other through obstacles that were not friendly to the vertically challenged. Mick gave Lea and me a boost to get us over the 7—and 10-foot walls. The faster runners would wait at the next obstacle for the rest of the group to catch up.

But at a certain point, the more experienced Spartans needed to let the newbies figure it out for themselves. We agreed to meet at the spear-throwing station near the end so that we could all accomplish the last obstacle—jumping over a fire pit—together.

We completed this race in November of 2017. It was a tough time in my life. My sister was in the hospital, in the late stages of Pulmonary Hypertension, kept alive by an ECMO machine functioning for her heart and lungs, awaiting a double lung transplant.

As much as I was doing this race to prove that I could test my body's limits, I was thinking of my sister and how her body’s limits were being tested in a completely different way.

I am so grateful to Lea and Mick for convincing me to train and participate in the Spartan Race. It was way more fun than I could have imagined.

I have not attempted another Spartan race since then, and I’m not sure if I ever will or if I need to. It was more of a bucket list item than a new way of life.

Perhaps starting this Substack and keeping it going for more than 2 years is my most recent variation of the Spartan Race. (Though this is more of a marathon than a sprint).

If I had thought back then that one day I might write about Donnie Iris’ biggest hit in a story, I would have cried out, “Ah-Li-Ya!” as I jumped over the pit of fire at the end of the race so that I would have the perfect moment to bookend a Substack post!

• Have you ever participated in a Spartan Race or a Tough Mudder? Or accomplished something similar? What about running a marathon or a triathlon?

• Have you watched Ninja Warrior (either Japanese or American version)?

• Do you know any other songs that have more than one exclamation point in the title?

• Is this Donnie Iris song not one of the greatest earworms ever? I haven’t minded it being stuck in my head for weeks.