More of this Feature • Part 2: Photos

Related Resources • 1999 Portland to Coast • 1998 Portland to Coast • 1997 Portland to Coast • 1996 Portland to Coast

Elsewhere on the Web • Hood to Coast/Portland to Coast Relay

Because we are a fun team rather than a competitive team, we drew an early start time of 5 am. The team is split into two vans with six walkers in each, and a driver. Our drivers were Michael and Elizabeth Zimmerman. This year I was in the second van.

Van 1 must be at the starting line in Delta Park in Portland to check in and get their first walker on the road. I and the other Van 2 walkers were at home still asleep at this point. Van 1 consisted of Phil Quirk, Debbie Arrufat, Carolyn Bradley, Ariel Zimmerman (our drivers' 16 year-old daughter and Carolyn's niece), Will Glessner, and Joan Cogswell (Phil's sister), and driver Elizabeth Zimmerman.

Each walker walks 2 legs of between 4 and 7.5 miles, some very hard and some fairly flat. Each walker in a van walks once, hands over to the other van, the second set of walkers walk, hand back to the first van, and again back to the second van. Challenges include walking on the side of busy highways, up gravel roads in the mountains, in the heat of the afternoon and at night. But chiefly this is a social endurance contest - can you survive in a van with six other people for 30 hours with minimal sleep?

Van 2, my van, loaded up at 10 am to drive to the first van exchange point in St. Helens and meet our Van 1. Our gang consisted of driver Michael Zimmerman, Donna Duckett, Nancy Baird, Chris Rice, Cathy Meidinger, Hollie Butler and me. I figured that this year my times on the Portland to Coast relay would be totally trashed. First of all, my 2 legs were 5.3 miles and 6.7 miles. ALL of the training I have done all year was for marathon distances, zero zip nada for speed.

Second, I got this nasty cold 6 days before the relay. On Wednesday evening my lungs hurt intensely when I coughed - I wondered if I was going to get pneumonia or bronchitis. But on Friday morning I had simply progressed to being unable to speak above a whisper. So I had my team vote on whether I should go on the race, and they insisted I go along.

Maybe because I didn't leap out like an greyhound, I found myself clocking great times on my first leg at 4:30 pm. I was shocked! Mind you, for me "great" is 12 minute miles. But in my marathon training I was generally not doing less than 14 minutes miles, so this was quite a change. I finished the first leg with an average of 12.6 minute miles, including the several seconds where I stopped to let 2 log trucks go by.

My second leg was at 9 am the next morning, following a night with 3 hours of sleep - I awoke before our 2:30 am get-back-into-the-van alarm with hacking cough and post-nasal drip. So I thought I would go a bit slower, and I was doing 13:30 miles and 13:00 miles until I passed the high school runner passed out at mile 4.5, which was 2.5 miles from the nearest road either direction. I sped up to try to get into radio range with my van to make sure somebody had called 911 (there were 3 other walkers tending him, one of whom was an ER nurse who said that yes, they wanted 911). Well, somehow I forgot my own body and finished with an average 12.9 minute mile (definitely negative splits on that leg). I couldn't get in radio range until a half mile before the exchange. The ambulance finally was coming up the road as we pulled out, at least 40 minutes after I passed the kid. He hadn't had any fluids for several hours before running, and he recovered - I saw him hours later at the finish, looking sheepish but OK.

So - this turned out to be my best times on Portland to Coast in the past 3 years! I credit my marathon training. I have been concentrating more on good racewalking form and distance all year, not at all on speed. But that seems to have done me well for speed over a 10K distance.

While walking, despite the head cold, I felt pretty good and enjoyed the actual walking. The same wasn't true the past 2 years. I think I also just relaxed and let my body go a good fast pace without forcing it. We also had perfect weather - in the high 70's max, sunny, nice. The beach at Seaside was glorious, sunny, no wind. Our Team Walking.About.com placed 326 of 386, as expected, finishing 128 miles in 30:45:20. A good time was had by all. We had 4 first-timers along.
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Photos © Wendy Bumgardner