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This year’s Loon Mountain Race will feature some unique awards.
As a potter, Mike Tegart has made tens of thousands of mugs. But as a runner, the dozen or so mugs he recently created for the 2014 Loon Mountain Race are likely to stand out in his mind for years to come.
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Mike Tegart at the Mount Washington Road Race.
Last fall, Chris Dunn, the owner of acidotic RACING (aR), asked Tegart if he was interested in creating awards for Loon. Tegart thought it sounded like a fun project, but he didn’t fully realize what he was getting into or just how big an honor the request was. In the days that followed, he found out that the race—which will be held July 6—would serve as both the U.S. Mountain Running Championship and the Collegiate Mountain Running Champions, drawing top runners from around the country. Once he heard that, Tegart felt “a little bit pressured,” but he was also excited that the awards he would make would be going home with some world-class runners.
Tegart joined aR because he liked the club’s focus on trails, mountains, and ultrarunning. He has run for aR for a couple of years, but this is the first time he’s been called on to use his artistic skills to help with a race. In college, Tegart studied art but never took a pottery or ceramics class. After graduation, he took a job at Simon Pearce as an assistant because it gave him a chance to work in the art world while trying to figure out what to do next.
After about a year as an assistant, Tegart landed a spot in Simon Pearce’s pottery apprentice program. He spent the next seven years “throwing” for Simon Pearce—potter’s lingo for molding simple clay into beautiful, and functional, works of art on a potter’s wheel—before moving on to other work and projects. In addition to the many, many coffee mugs he’s made, he has also created bowls, vases, and a number of other items.
For Loon, Tegart has created coffee mugs for category winners and vases for the top overall man and woman. Dunn had some suggestions, but he gave Tegart artistic freedom to design the final prizes. Tegart liked the idea of making mugs. He recalls a friend and fellow potter telling him that “a coffee mug is the most intimate of pots that you can make. . . . A mug will talk to you. It will comfort you.”
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
But once Dunn and Tegart settled on mugs, that raised the question of what the mugs should look like. First he spent some time trying to figure out the design and experimenting with glazes and colors. Although he’s an experienced potter, it took him longer than he had expected to decide on the final product, which he wanted to be functional but also unique. Of course, in a sense uniqueness was guaranteed simply by the fact that he was working with pottery. “One thing about ceramics,” Tegart explains, “is that you can do everything exactly the same way, but there’s always variability.” That’s especially true in the glazing and firing. The clay could crack, for example, or the kiln might not get to quite the right temperature, requiring a second firing.
For inspiration, Tegart turned to the name of the race. In the final product, the influence of the loon is apparent in the shape of the vases (which have a long, thin neck on a larger body) and the colors of the mugs (which are black with a white band around the top). After months of sketching, testing, and refining, Tegart had the final prizes ready. On the morning of the Ascutney Mountain Run, he pulled the final products out of the kiln and delivered them, still hot, to Dunn.
As with any project, Tegart looks at the prizes and thinks of the little changes he would like to make, but he’s still proud of his involvement. It’s pretty cool, he says, to be able to use his skills to create prizes for people he really respects and admires. And he’s excited that the awards aren’t just prizes but also functional pieces of art. It was a chance to give back and to know that he would be helping to honor and reward some of his heroes in the running world.
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