Leg 34 and beyond

Carissa had another killer of a leg, her second 7.8 miler of the weekend. Remember this is the leg I was so terrified of doing, leg 9/21/33. The last one 33 was long, hilly and hot, as it was already in the upper 70s when she started about 10:30am.  

After cheering her on, we drove ahead into Astoria to the beginning of my last leg.  By noon it was probably 80. Thankfully the leg was short, only 3.4 miles, with only a few rolling hills. The highlight was my friend Diane, aka "EndoStalker", sending me messages of encouragement that the Endomondo computer voice would read to me. Technology is cool. I finished the leg in about 33 minutes and handed off to Jenny for her last leg, another 7+ miler. 

We all noticed that other runners seemed to get more friendly as the race wore on.  On the first legs everyone is über competitive and intense. On the second leg, which was in the middle of the night for us, people were loosening up and getting chatty when you passed them or they passed you.  Maybe it was because of the isolation from running in total darkness. By the third leg everyone was cooked and just wanted to be done and didn't mind talking about it. 

After we all finished we met up with Van 1 in Seaside and crossed the finish line on the beach as a team. 

The party was huge! Big stage, food, beer and wine, and lots of vendors handing out freebies.

 

The highlight of the party was when a guy on another team proposed to his girlfriend right on the beach in front of everyone.  

Great moment. Our sports director Dan Christopherson was there covering the finish and put them on tv.

After a celebratory beer on the beach...

We went to Fultanos for some pizza then hit the road for home.  Right now I'm totally exhausted, and my legs are killing me, but if someone asked me if I will do Hood to Coast again, no doubt in my mind I will!

Leg 22

 After showers at the KOIN gym and a big pasta dinner at Ernesto's, we made our way out to The Columbia County Fairgrounds for the next major exchange. Karyn started leg 18 at about 11:15pm and we were on the clock again. 

The next three legs were really hilly and a couple of them were on gravel roads which made it really dusty.  Karyn, John and Carissa destroyed them though, and at about 3am it was time for me to hit Leg 22. 

It started to rain lightly just as Carissa handed off to me, which both kept me nice and cool and also created some great light effects in my headlamp. The moon was bright but behind the clouds and the raindrops looked like millions of tiny shooting stars flying at me. At least when you are running on 21 hours with no sleep ;)

The first mile and change was straight uphill but it's surprising how much easier a hill can be when you can't see it.  Then it turned almost completely downhill for about five miles all the way to the exchange. I LOVE DOWNHILL. somewhere along the way it started raining harder and I ended up pretty soaked by the end of it. 

After Jenny finished her second leg we stopped at the Natal Grange outside Mist. They did indeed have the pancakes out early, and they were awesome. 

Doesn't look like much but I would have paid double the seven bucks they charged. 

After Bruce finished leg 24 we drove ahead to the next major exchange at leg 30. This guy probably pays his mortgage for the year with what he makes serving coffee and food on this one day:

We are back in the van after a couple hours of "sleep".  One more leg to go. 

Leg 10

So glad to have the first leg behind me! Started leg 10 around 4pm and it was starting to get hot. About 2 miles into it the sun went back behind the clouds and it got pleasant again. Leg 10 is 5.2 miles completely on the Springwater trail in Gresham. Almost totally flat, which was nice. Finished it in right about 46 minutes , or about a 9 minute mile pace. 

We have a great van, a good mix of experienced (John is on his 9th HTC) and newbies (me, Carissa and Jenny are one our first).   As soon as Jenny and Bruce knock out their first legs we will hit a gym for a shower and grab dinner before heading out to our next exchange point. My next run should be around 2am. Woo hoo!

First major exchange

On the way to Sandy

Our personal Meteorologist / chauffeur Bruce Sussman has us on course...

The day before

So apparently this grange always has Saturday morning breakfast available for Hood to Coast runners. Sign me up. Hope they have it out early, because we should be passing it somewhere around 3:00 or 4:00am.

Race week

On Sunday I did my longest run ever, 7 miles in 1:09:44. Just under a 10-minute pace. Thanks Diane for pushing me! If I can do leg 22 as well as that, I will be happy.  Probably one more short (3-4 mi) tune-up run on Tuesday or Wednesday then I will call it good.

Freakout averted

T-9 days...almost had a full-blown panic attack when Jamie, our race team captain, called to inform me that due to an injury to one of our other runners, she may need me to run Leg 9 instead of 10, a "minor" adjustment that would have increased my 15 mile commitment to almost 21! But thanks to some strategic whining on my part, she wisely decided to stick somebody else with it and keep me on 10. Okay, before you accuse me of not being a team player, let me just say the person who will now run legs 9, 21 and 33 is imminently more qualified to do so than I am, having recently run two half-marathons.

So, officially, here is what I will be tasked with:
http://www.hoodtocoast.com/files/course_leg_10.pdf
http://www.hoodtocoast.com/files/course_leg_22.pdf
http://www.hoodtocoast.com/files/course_leg_34.pdf

I'll be in Van 2 with KOIN anchor Jenny Hansson, Meteorologist Bruce Sussman, KOIN newscast director Karyn Clark, her husband John, and Carissa Werner, the wife of our finance director (and the unlucky recipient of my rejected Leg 9). I believe Jenny is a first-time HTC'er like me, while the others have run it before. I haven't met Carissa yet but I'm sure I'll know her well by the time this is all over!

T- 2 weeks

This is the chronicle of a journey almost a year in the making, but I'm about 11 months late getting started.  I want to put it all down here not because I think a lot of people will want to read it besides my wife and maybe my mom, but because I want to preserve it for myself to look back on.

Last August, my company KOIN TV became the official television partner of Hood to Coast, "The Mother of all Relays", a 200-mile road running relay from Mt. Hood to Seaside, Oregon.  Teams of twelve complete 36 legs anywhere from three to 7+ miles in length. The whole thing takes great teams about 18 hours to complete, and takes some teams as long as 36 hours.

On the day of the race, I walked across the Hawthorne Bridge with a few of my co-workers to cheer on the KOIN team as they passed Exchange 13 on the east side of the bridge. I saw serious runners, people just out to have a good time (our team), people who didn't care how they did as long as they beat KGW (also our team), people in costume (note: when a man wears a tutu, shorts of some type are strongly recommended, in my opinion), but everyone regardless of their goal was most definitely having a great time. And so it was, that even though I had never been a runner (save for a few totally forgettable mile and two-mile races in high school track some 30 years ago), when the KOIN team captain began recruiting for runners to make up our 2013 team, I raised my hand. At this point, with a year until the next HTC, I wasn't completely locked in. In fact, there was a chance that other, more experienced runners would step up and I wouldn't even be picked to be on the team. Nonetheless, at age 46, I began training for my first Hood to Coast.

Believe me when I tell you I was starting from scratch. Up until that point, my idea of strenuous exercise was Sunday city-league softball games, or 18 holes of golf. In a cart. But since unlike a lot of guys my age, I had mostly avoided the late-forties beer belly (despite copious amounts of beer consumed in my life), I wasn't completely in the well.

We live next to a middle school with a track, so that's where I began my training. My friend Christi had recently taken up running and had completed a couple of 5k's, and she offered to run with me. Our first time out, after completing roughly 1/3 of a lap, I blurted out "Why in the HELL do you do this God-awful sport?" I'd like to be able to tell you that her response inspired me to new heights of training glory, but it was actually something like "I don't know, it's just fun." Uh, thanks, and no it's not.

Working in television, I've always been at my best working toward a deadline, so I signed up for my first competitive run - the Lackamas Lake 4-miler in Camas, Washington.   I ran with Christi, and Diane, a woman Christi knows from work. We had dubbed Diane "the Energizer Bunny", because no matter the weather, the terrain, how steep the hill is, or whatever, she just keeps going and going. I think I finished that run in about 48 minutes, which is about a 12 minute mile pace, and a good 5 minutes behind Christi. Not great, but it was a start.

I kept training as the days got shorter. Despite most of my runs having to take place in the dark, I completed the Couch to 5k program and signed up for my first 5k - the Jingle Bell Run for Arthritis, December 2 in downtown Portland. That first 5k went ok, but before I was even finished, I was already doubting my chances of being able to do Hood to Coast.  Lets see, I have to run twice as far as this, three times in about 30 hours? Never gonna happen.

But over the next several months I kept at it and it actually started to get fun.

Me and the running buddies

We did the Tulip Trot, the Earth Day run, the Vancouver Parade run, and THIS bit of awesomeness:

...the Rugged Maniac 5k run. Mud, Fire, Beer, Glory. 

I even decided to sign up for a 10k, the Pacific Crest Weekend Sports Festival in Sunriver, Oregon. Had it not been 100+ degrees, I might have actually enjoyed that one. But the important thing is, I started to build stamina and my average mile time had decreased to the low to mid 9:00's.  So I began to feel as if I could not only do Hood to Coast, but actually not completely embarrass myself.

Officially on the team now, I am tasked with running legs 10, 22, and 34. Leg 10 is 5.2 mostly-flat miles along the Springwater Trail in Gresham. I'll mostly likely be running this one in mid-afternoon - the hottest part of the day. Leg 22 is out in Vernonia and starts out with a steep uphill for about a mile, but then finishes with about 5 miles downhill.  I love downhill. The thing that will make this leg interesting is that I will likely run it in the dead of night. Then I finish up with leg 34, a pretty tame 3.4 mile course through Astoria on the Oregon Coast.