Hood to Coast

Scott has been training all summer (well, whenever time permitted) for the Hood to Coast relay.  Hood to Coast is called "the mother of all relays" for a reason!  It is the largest relay in the world covering 197 miles.  The race begins at Mt. Hood and ends at the Pacific Ocean in Seaside, Oregon.  There are over 12, 000 runners and they require 3,500 volunteers to make it all happen.  The 197 mile course consists of 36 legs, of which each team member must run at least three in rotation. The legs vary in length from 3.52 miles (5.66 km) to 7.79 miles (12.53 km), and the terrain for each leg can vary from level terrain to steep uphills and/or downhills. Teams in Hood to Coast must complete the course within a 31 hour time limit (an average team pace of 9 minutes 30 seconds per mile).  

The day of the race, I went to drop Scott off at the Wilhelmsen's house.  My plan was to send him on his way with a good luck kiss, a carb-laden lunch and then head back home for a lazy weekend.  I still hadn't recovered from our trip out to Utah and was looking forward to some down time.  As much as I miss Scott when he is gone, I have to admit there are some things I look forward to when he is gone.  I don't do my hair, shave my legs, cook dinner, or clean house.  I can facebook, blog and play spider solitaire until the wee hours of the night.  I had big plans for a night full of movies and then a good dose of tylenol PM to help me sleep in the next day until the sun was on it's way back down.  Turns out, that was all they ever would be...just plans.

While dropping Scott off, his other 5 teammates mentioned how they didn't have a driver for their van.  They continued to mention, over and over again, how nice it is to have a driver and how they would give anything to have a driver. Of course, they are staring at me directly while they are telling me over and over again how much they would love to have a driver.  What was I to do?  I tried every excuse I could think of..."I don't even understand what this race is"..."I haven't made any plans for the kids"..."Too bad I didn't have more notice"..."I haven't packed any food".  None of it worked.  They assured me they would explain it all to me, navigate the whole 31 hours, the kids would be fine overnight, they had plenty of food packed to share with me and all I needed was a sleeping bag (which turned out to be the one thing I didn't get any use out of!)  So they followed me back to my house and waited while I ran in, told the kids I was leaving, I grabbed a sweatshirt and a sleeping bag and we were off.

It wasn't too long into this adventure that I realized that driving a car for 30+ straight hours was not what my back needed.  I was still recovering from back pain from driving to Utah.  It was a very long and stressful 31 hours of driving but now that it is said and done, I am glad I got to be a part of it all.  We were in good company and it was fun to see first hand what Scott was experiencing.  

The race is not only tough in that you are running three times within a day or so, but you have to not only do it all in day but in the middle of the night, wearing reflector vests, head lamps and on no sleep.  I laughed when we had our first break between rotations and we were sent to the fairgrounds parking lot to "sleep".  We pulled into this extremely crowded lot about 12:30 a.m. hoping to sleep for about 2 hours until it would be our turn to run again.  Due to teams staggering their start times every 20 minutes, there is a line of vans about 1 mile long waiting to enter the parking lot all night long.  Then you also have vans leaving the parking lot all night long to start their runs again.  But we parked, got out the sleeping bags and plopped right down there under a lamp post of light with vans driving all around us, runners coming and going, celebrating and music loud speakers and tried to sleep.  I knew they minute I saw this that I was not going to sleep at all on this little adventure.  And sure enough, at 2:30 a.m. it was our time to head out again.  Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep but felt like a good helper when I was driving and would look in my rearview mirror and see all my runners snoozing while I was driving to the next exchange point.

This is Scott's half of the team waiting outside Fred Meyer for their first rotation to begin. They were all so happy, rested and had so little body oder then!

All dressed in his pajamas for a good sleep in a busy in parking lot!

Scott finishing up his leg and passing off the bracelet to the next runner on his team.

We finally made it to the beach!

Our van of runners finished the last legs of the race that took us all the way to the beach in Seaside, Oregon.  The other half of our team was there waiting to join us and to run through the finish line together.

This is the entire 12 member team with one alternate.