I’m back from a short blog-cation, having spent a couple of days out of internet range.  I’m celebrating my 66th birthday with the Hood to Coast relay behind me.  I’m sure that anyone reading this is tired of hearing about it, so this will be my final post about it.  The relay was my second greatest running challenge ever, and certainly my biggest physical senior accomplishment.  The most difficult was certainly my first 26.2-mile marathon, but I was just over 28 years old at the time and worried about turning the old age of 30.  Age 25 was probably my toughest birthday to psychologically handle, knowing that probably a third of my life had passed.  I’m a bit more optimistic about living beyond 75 now, but I was in that stage of life where 30 was old and weight control was becoming a concern.  I started running for that reason and was in peak condition in 1979-80 when I finished the Detroit and Chicago Marathons at about an 8-minute mile average pace.

I have run over 100 road races of various lengths in the last 35 years, but never was I more anxious than the 199 mile relay that we completed yesterday.   Running for time as a personal goal is one thing, but running with the interest of other teammates in mind is quite a different matter.  It was a hilly course, and I was teamed-up with people that I really didn’t know very well.  My wife works for the local FOX-TV affiliate, and the team name was “Real News – Fake Runners.”  These were people that she worked with, so I certainly didn’t want to embarrass her or myself.  I was a substitute for a staff member who was injured, so I only had a few weeks to properly train.  I do run every single day and have for the last nine years, so it wasn’t a complete shock to my system.  The problem was that I hadn’t run for time in several years and my pace was averaging about 11:30 minutes a mile, much slower than my younger team mates.   Plus, my average mileage was only about 3 a day with the challenge of running a 7.1 mile leg followed by two 5.5 mile legs over a time span of 30 hours.  There would be little sleep and a lot of uncomfortable van time waiting for other runners to finish, while my leg muscles stiffened and confidence waned.  Advil and energy supplements definitely helped, but my ancient joints ache routinely because of 66 years of wear and tear.

The event started at the Mount Hood Timberline Lodge where the outside visuals were filmed for the movie The Shining with Jack Nicholson.  We had two vans with 6 runners in each that would share driving, riding, and running time.  I was not a company employee so their insurance would not cover a spouse like myself, and there was one other non-employee in our van, meaning we only had four drivers to carry that load.  I was in Van 1 and we left the top of the mountain at 7:30 a.m.  We were scheduled to hand-over the running responsibilities to Van 2 at about 2:30 in the afternoon, allowing about 1 hour for each of our first 6 legs.  We got to the top of Mount Hood at about 6 a.m. and enjoyed the spectacular sunrise show, loud music, and festive announcements.  It was a beautiful clear morning, with hundreds and hundreds of crudely decorated vans waiting to start the 199 mile journey to Seaside, Oregon on the Coast.   Each van was issued a number and all had clever names like “The Third Leg is the Hardest,” “Growing Old but Not Up,” and “Twelve Angry Women,” to give you a couple of memorable examples.  Many sported roof-top displays that included inflatables, manikins, and even a coffin.  Windows were painted like a high school trip to the state championship.  Our rental  van simply had a magnetic sign with the station logo, but our best decoration was having their popular morning weatherman aboard, who did live television reports on our progress, ran some of our fastest legs, and was greeted at every stop with handshakes, autograph requests, and photo-takers.  The caravan from start-to-finish was like a giant parade of hot sweaty runners dragging things such as plastic feet and beer cans from the rear bumpers, like a honeymoon escape vehicles with “Hot Springs Tonight” painted on the rear window. The more competitive teams kept tallies of “road-kills” on the sides of their vans.  I’m sure that I accounted for many of these markings, as dozens of runners would blaze by me during each of my runs.

I was surprised that I had such a great time considering that traffic jams, cramped quarters, waiting in line, large crowds of people, sleeping outdoors and pain are some of my least favorite things in life.  Especially in retirement, when getting up in the morning or even going outside are considered optional activities.  Training for this event was a lot of work, but i can’t imagine how stiff I would be today if I hadn’t put in the miles beforehand.  I was able to average eleven-minute miles on each of my three legs, meaning about 3.2 hours of running to cover 17.6 miles.  There were three hours I spent in a sleeping bag under the stars in a field that looked like the aftermath of an airline crash, bodies and luggage strewn everywhere.  We stopped at a 24-hour fitness club for a quick shower, had a protein bowl at Henry’s in Portland for dinner Friday night, made several excursions to the  well-used Honeybuckets, and stopped at least 18 times for baton exchanges.  We crossed the finish line on the sand as a 12 member team at about 5 o’clock on Saturday evening, after waiting about 5 hours at our hotel for Van 2 to finally arrive in Seaside.  Of the 31 hours we were all together, half of that time was riding in the van.

I was one of our slowest runners and considered “roadkill” folly for the faster teams.  I was passed by the same people several times, after my teammates would regain the lead advantage on their respective legs.   The good news was that I also made it possible for my teammates to make multiple kills (passes) of the same runners that would eventually pass me.  I did make a couple of kills myself, but throughout this experience I continued to wonder where my leg speed had gone through the years.  It took me longer to run this 17.6 miles than it did my last 26.2 mile marathon.  I had one teammate that may have had slightly slower splits, but he had a broken toe and found himself in a lot of pain.  I now have a finishing medal like everyone else, but I’m certainly not the runner I used to be.  Climbing stairs is the most painful, but I did manage to run a mile-plus on the beach Sunday morning to extend my running streak to 3,164 days.  Many others won’t accomplish that – some probably never even got out of bed!