Hood To Coast Recap: Teamwork and Traffic Jams

Almost exactly one month ago, I ran the Hood to Coast relay as the twelfth member of the North Queens Runners (NQR) team. Whenever I tell anyone about this, the number one question I get is, "Was it fun?"

Honestly, I'm not sure.

Carly & Garen, Leg 6

For those of you who don't know what Hood to Coast is, let me summarize: on the second-to-last weekend of August, 1,000 teams of 12 runners each (split into two vans of six) start at the top of Mount Hood in northern Oregon and run 199 miles across the state to Seaside, i.e., the Pacific coast of Oregon. Each of the twelve runners runs ~15-18 miles, split across three legs of the relay, which are run in rotation, equalling 36 legs in total. If your team is walking (or running very slowly), your first runner starts at the crack of dawn on Friday, with each subsequent sendoff containing progressively faster teams. If your team wins, you will finish in about 17 hours. If not, the cutoff time to complete the relay is 36 hours. There are very few rules: you can eat and drink whatever you want, drive (almost) whatever you want, and wear whatever you want (unless you are running at night, in which case you are required to wear an LED light vest and a headlamp).

Running a relay like this was an entirely new experience for me, and I think when we have new experiences, rare experiences, or experiences we've invested a lot of time and money into, we expect (and others expect us) to "have fun." No matter how we feel during the event itself, we tend to revise our story afterward in order to make it seem like it was a total blast. After all, our audience probably didn't have this experience, so the least we can do is give them the best highlights, right?

Well, this is going to be the best and worst highlights.

First I want to say that I am very glad to have had this experience. I really enjoy new challenges, and  I've certainly never run what amounted to approximately three 10k races in 24 hours, nor have I spent 24 hours with the same seven people in one van. I also love contributing to a team, and this team was especially great; everyone on NQR was enthusiastic and supportive, while also intent on giving their best effort toward our goal of winning the mixed division (i.e., teams with at least six women). Finally, I love competing, and I was surrounded by competitors, and we were working together toward a shared goal. That was really fun.

Literally stretching my legs

However, there were a lot of parts that were not so fun. There were things I expected to be unpleasant, like wearing perpetually sweaty, smelly clothes; eating room-temperature sandwiches that have been squashed into unrecognizable shapes; "sleeping" for a grand total of one hour in a cramped van seat; and squatting in not one, not two, but three different leafy roadside "bathrooms." But then there were other elements I did not expect. For instance, I discovered I really do not enjoy running in the dark. Where I live (right outside Manhattan), it's never truly dark; there are always so many street lights and car lights and lit-up storefront displays that visibility is never a problem. However, on the uneven, poorly lit sidewalks of suburban Portland, curbs drop off without warning and you never know when a tree root will emerge. And that was only my first leg; during my second (at about 3am), I spent five miles running through a pitch-black valley of fog. (Dinky headlamp + zero streetlights + fog = unabated terror of falling in an invisible potholes.) Fear is very stressful, and apparently when I'm running, I'm scared of the dark.

The other unexpectedly stressful element had nothing to do with running at all.

When I was initially envisioning this race, I pictured running through hill and over dale. I saw trees and grass and dirt and even a few inevitable highways. What I did not picture was how 1,000 teams--meaning 2,000 vans--would get from point A to point B (and then to point C, and then point D . . . ). As it turns out, while the athletes are running through the wilderness, their vans are winding through narrow, rickety back roads that were absolutely not designed to accommodate 2,000 vehicles at once.

Driving--or, rather sitting--in standstill traffic was unquestionably the most stressful part of the whole relay. Here we were, trying to test our physical limits, to see if we could prove ourselves to be faster and grittier than our competitors, and we being hamstrung by . . . what amounted to rush-hour traffic. We left one of our runners stranded at a checkpoint, out in the cold, for over twenty minutes. And on top of that, there was no cell service, so we had no way of telling our other van (i.e., our six other teammates) that we were way, way behind schedule.

Team NQR! Clearly a photogenic bunch.

The upshot is that we lost the mixed division title by one minute. That's five seconds per runner. Less than two seconds a leg. Yet, I felt robbed of what would otherwise have been disappointment, because it didn't feel like a real loss. There was no way to know if we actually ran slower than the team that beat us, because they left in the very last sendoff, fifteen minutes behind us. Maybe, as a result of their later departure, they had less traffic, and "drove" their way to victory. (Or, alternatively, maybe we would have lost by a wider margin if they'd been in our sendoff.) Without going "head to head" with them, there was no way of knowing if we could have closed that sixty-second gap. As a result, most of what I felt, upon reaching the beach, was fatigue, and most of what I remembered was glaring helplessly at endless red brake lights.

Of course, that's not the end of the story. At the awards ceremony, there was some insane drama involving the winning women's team, but we weren't there for it, because we had rented a beach house! For the rest of the weekend, the twelve of us sat in the hot tub, ate ridiculous quantities of food, drank equally ridiculous quantities of alcohol, and slept. A lot.

Now that was fun.