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Zane Runyan - Rugged Rancher - Natural Shooter

 

“Who are those guys?”

 

Remember “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”?  The boys have just pulled off a train holdup when a super posse charges out of a boxcar and heads straight for our heroes. Butch and Sundance do everything possible to ditch the lawdogs—splitting up, going through streams, riding over steep rocks.  And they just can’t lose their pursuers. So the running gag: at various points, the outlaws look back and see that the posse is still coming, and rhetorically ask, “Who are those guys?”
 

The same basic thing happened at Worlds last year in Las Vegas, as a Level 3 cowboy seemingly came out of nowhere to take the Reserve Championship.  And second in the Colt Eliminator. And third in the Wrangler Pro.  The big names in the sport just couldn’t shake him. You can’t blame them for shaking their heads. “Who is this guy?”

 

He’s Zane Runyan.  That’s who.
“He’s a really good cowboy, and all that experience on a horse helps—being able to move around on the horse, roping, that sort of thing.  It makes it that more natural for him to get into the shooting.”

 

Zane Runyan is a born cowboy. He’s spent almost all of his 29 years on a 32,000-acre ranch outside Roswell, NM.  His folks had him on a horse almost from Day 1; he was riding by himself by age 3. His mom Jan says that it wasn’t long before he was competing in roping events: “His dad and I both had rodeoed, so we began him doing that at an early age—he was probably six at the time.”
Alan Eggleston, 2006 Men’s 4 National Champion and fellow New Mexican

 

And he was good, a natural athlete with a talent for riding and being a cowboy. It was a talent that got developed by necessity.  His dad trained horses—still does—and Zane was expected to help out.  Usually about 500 pairs of cattle roamed the ranch, and young Runyan worked them on horseback, learning to rope and cut in a quick and efficient manner.

 

And he learned how to shoot.  “I was an only child, so growing up guns were my babysitters,” he remembers.  “If you weren’t working, you were entertaining yourself by shooting something.”  His mom agrees: “He made his first holster out of leather and nylon cord when he was 10. And he took a .22 pistol and went out with the dog riding on the back of the horse.  So he’d be riding on the back of the horse and shooting up a storm.  I didn’t think it was a very good idea, but his dad okayed it.
All of his cowboying paid off when he was given full rodeo scholarships at Western Texas College and Eastern New Mexico. Originally, he was studying to be a dermatologist (!?). But stuff happened and he ended up back on the ranch, with wife Shawna and two little girls.

 

About four years ago, Zane took a job with the Roswell Fire Department—it helped bring in some extra money for the family.  It also connected him with mounted shooting. “The guys at the fire department call it ‘cowboys and balloons.’  Anything they can harass you about, they will.”

 

It was November 2005, and a guy at the fire department told him about mounted shooter Paul Whitwam. Paul said there was an upcoming shoot in Las Cruces; he and Johnny Nelson offered to let Zane use their equipment.  He did.  By the end of the two-day match, Runyan was a Level 2.

 

And after a couple more shoots, he qualified for the 2006 Worlds.  It wasn’t exactly a triumph. “I had a brand new set of guns that didn’t have action jobs on them, so they screwed up and cost me a couple of balloons, which sure would have helped my finish.” For the record, Zane came in 89th in the Overall and 8th in the Men’s 2’s.

 

Now you’d think that would motivate a competitive guy—and pal Chad Little will tell you that Zane is very competitive—to work even harder, go to as many shoots as possible, and get himself in position to jump up the rankings in 2007. 

 

And you’d be wrong.

 

Zane went to only two or three matches after that, just enough to qualify for the Worlds.  He had plenty to do at the ranch and the fire department. And his two girls, 7-year-old Michelle and 5-year-old Blaze (I know what you’re thinking—but he named her before starting work at the fire department) go to 30 or so competitions a year, from rodeo to hunter/jumper to mounted shooting.

 

So what the heck did he do to get ready for the Worlds—and to finish so well? 

 

Well, he rode his horse Spat pretty much every day on the ranch; it’s the same horse he rode at that first match in Las Cruces in late 2005. Then he figured out a way to use some dead time to improve his aim.  “I made little metal targets that I can hang on the fence, and when I’m driving to work I’ll go by and shoot them with a .22 pistol that has the same frame as my .45s.  If you can hit an 8 by 8 target with a .22 at 70 miles per hour, you can hit a balloon on horseback at 30 miles an hour pretty easy.”  It must have worked—Zane hit all of his targets at last year’s Worlds.

 

But there’s another likely reason for his success.
“Competition was always very easy for him.  He never got nervous.  He’s got a very laid back personality. It really didn’t bother him a whole lot whether he won or not.”

 

Jan Runyan, Zane’s mom
Zane Runyan is a stereotypical cowboy. He’s quiet.  He doesn’t let things bother him.  He lets his actions speak for him. And he’s got guts.  Check out this list of jobs he’s held at various points in his life:

 

• Stuntman at an amusement park Western show. Among his duties—getting shot and falling from a two story building into the street.
• Erecting and maintaining communication towers. He actually saw airplanes flying below him.
• Handling explosives at construction sites. Children, don’t try any of these at home.

 

Needless to say, a person who can do those things won’t feel much pressure on a mounted shooting course.

 

“I couldn’t do that. Could you do that? Why can they do it? Who are those guys?”
 Butch Cassidy, from the movie

 

Well, Butch, quite simply, Zane Runyan is a top mounted shooter because he’s a real cowboy. And he’s not going to change.

 

He doesn’t plan to increase the number of matches he enters. His kids are doing too well in their competitions (Michelle and Blaze have both won their share). And those are great family weekends. He’s studying to be a paramedic.  He’s “the top hired hand” on his folks’ ranch. And he seems pretty well satisfied with the status quo.

 

Except that he’d like to win the 2008 Worlds.

 

And if that happens, nobody’s going to ask, “Who is that guy?”

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