She Runs: The Recap - Hood to Coast 2010

I never blogged about Hood to Coast last year. It took a whole six months out of me ~ haha. Such an amazing experience deserves to be recorded, though, and someday I'll wish I had written it down. So here goes.

Our team was from all over the country. From Dallas: myself, Debbie, Blanca, and Tracy. From Salem: Joe and Dean. From Wilsonville: Tony and Patrice. From Portland: Leslie. From New Jersey: Leslie's sister Janice. From Montana: Debbie's niece Courtney and last but most certainly not least, from Arizona, Debbie's nephew Brandon (AKA The Flash). We were a motley crew. Joe, Dean and Tony are strong runners, experienced Hood to Coasters whose regular team missed the lottery this year and joined us instead. The rest of us were all first timers with various levels of experience and speed (although several of us had walked Portland to Coast).

Hood to Coast really splits the group in two with each van becoming its own microcosm in the bigger scheme of a team. Two halves of a whole ~ separate but together. My van was Tracy, Joe, Dean, Leslie, Janice and myself. We turned out to mesh beautifully and I was so thankful for my van.

We started at Timberline Lodge on Mt Hood fairly early on Friday morning. Tracy was first out of the shoot and it was so exciting to see her off and running. She's number 698 in the picture below. Looking good, Trace! It was bitter cold up on the mountain at that hour on an August morning, but we warmed up soon enough.

My first leg was Leg 3, still running down off the mountain. I took the baton (okay, it's really a wrist-slapper bracelet thingy, but let's call it a baton, shall we?) from Leslie, and off I went. I had worked on downhill form and relaxing to just let myself go. I loved every minute of that leg. The morning was beautiful. I let gravity do as much of the work as I could and managed to set a Darcy-World-Record pace on my first leg of something like 8:32 miles. I'm an 11 minute girl at heart, so I was feeling like the queen of the world. I walked away from that leg energized and happy. Don't I look happy here? I was!

Our van continued through our legs, eventually ending up at the Fred Meyer store in Sandy? Maybe. So much of the relay is a blur and not because six months have gone by. It was a blur even then. Anyway, we handed off to Van 2 at that Fred Meyer store and spent some time in line buying sandwiches and wandering the party that was the parking lot. It was wall to wall Hood to Coast teams and the energy was so high.

As Van 2 started running, we drove into downtown Portland and found a parking spot under one of the bridges to take a nap and wait for the Exchange. We all got out and walked a bit. At one point Joe asked Leslie if it was okay to shut the back door of the Suburban and we all went on our merry way. Imagine our surprise when we discovered we had locked the keys in the car. lol So not funny. We tried lots of things ~ called a locksmith and didn't want to pay his rates, Janice tried calling AAA in New Jersey to see if they would help, this helpful fireman on the left came over from the nearby station to try to unlock it. Nothing worked. Finally Leslie had to have her husband leave work and drive to meet us with an extra set of keys. There was nothing we could do so we took a little nap in the grass under the bridge. After we were unlocked and back inside we sent Debbie a text telling her what we had done. No one wanted to tell her until it was all fixed.

We exchanged with Van 2 under the bridge awhile later and were off again. My next leg was a long one ~ over 7 miles, I think, along Highway 30 and going up and down hills. It got dark while I was out there and boy was I glad to finish. Running alone in the dark along a highway is kind of weird and those rolling hills were less than pleasant. I did okay, though. Not such a high as Leg 1, but still felt pretty good and my time wasn't bad.

Somewhere out there we saw George at his volunteer station. I can't even remember where or when we saw him, but we rolled the window down as we pulled up next to him directing traffic in a dusty dirt parking lot down in a pit off the side of the road. The very first thing he said was, "This job really sucks!" Poor George, our fearless volunteer. I may have to twist his arm to get him to do it again next year. I promise to get you a better assignment, love!

As it got darker and deeper into the night, we headed up into the west hills and parked in a field in the town of Mist. Such a romantic name for such a miserable little part of my life. haha. It was COLD that night. I mean bone-chilling, icy cold. I bet it was in the high 30's. It felt like 15. We parked the van in Mist, put out a blue plastic crinkly tarp, and threw our sleeping bags on top of it. By then I was decidedly miserable. Nothing in me wanted to try to sleep in that field, but my alternative was sitting up in the van, so I climbed into my sleeping bag and sealed it shut over the top of my freezing head. I did manage to sleep maybe 2 or 3 hours before it was time to roll again, but when I woke up I completely fell apart.

In hindsight, I didn't prepare nearly enough for the cold. I should've had winter gear for that night, but who'd have thought we'd need that the end of August? I'm also not a morning person~ waking up is hard to do in my world and it takes me a bit of peace, quiet and coffee to slowly adjust to the world. Wake me up at 4:00 a.m. in a freezing dew-covered field with no coffee and I'm a mess. I was colder than I can remember being in a long, long time. The kind of cold that makes your very bones feeling like they're shivering. My jaw was chattering, my mind was in a sleep-deprived fog, and I officially melted down. It was a quiet meltdown, I wasn't crying or anything, but I was in shut down mode. I think my whole van was worried about my ability to finish my 3rd leg, which was due to begin around 5:00 a.m. in the middle of who-knows-where. Leslie even offered to trade legs so I could wait a little longer.

My one goal when I started was to carry my own weight on the team. I didn't want to let the team down. That conscious goal and thought were the one thing that got me out of that van. I can be a pretty tough cookie when I need to be. I did the hand off and took off running, 100% purely miserable and hating every second of where I was. I held off the weepy in front of my team, but once I was out of sight I couldn't hold it back. Shortly into my run a girl ran up next to me and said something benign like, "It's our last leg ~ we're almost done!" and I almost started crying. I could hardly answer her and after she ran on I worked on choking back sobs. It sounds so pathetic now as I type it, but it was one of the hardest points of my life. It ranked right up there with natural childbirth. Only worse.

I managed to finish my leg in what I would call a successful run. I was no speed demon, but I ran most of it and finished with my head held high. It was such an emotional moment ~ I had climbed such a mental mountain. Dean walked me back to the van ahead of the rest of the group and when he told me I had done a good job, I burst into tears. Big, nasty, sobbing tears. Poor Dean. lol. We had been strangers a few hours before, and now I was sobbing. He stayed very calm (he's a Chi runner ~ and it shows in the very best of ways) and handled me very well, but later he told Joe, "She burst into tears and I didn't know what to do." haha. I'm smiling while I type it because even then I could see the humor of the whole thing.

So I made it. My van went on to finish the rest of our legs and then got stuck in a line of traffic several miles long somewhere in the mountains. We were afraid we weren't going to be there when our last runner finished, so Leslie got out and ran with hundreds of other people about a mile and a half to the exhange.

As Van 2 took over to run their last legs, we were finished. We drove into a little strip mall south of Astoria and went into Starbucks. I have never been so happy to see Starbucks in my life. After coffee we took showers at the middle school in Seaside, where very smart fundraisers were selling showers for a few bucks. Coffeed up, showered and changed, I was starting to feel human again. Out there in the mountains you really lose touch with time and civilization. It's a very bizarre mental experience. Anyway, we made our way to the beach at Seaside to wait for Van 2. Here we are at the beach: Leslie, Tracy, Joe, Me, Dean and Janice.