A group of Sweet Home women are planning to run nearly 200 miles this weekend in the Nike Hood to Coast Relay, one of the longest and the largest relay race in North America.
The group, competing under the team name The Valley Girls, will lace up their shoes Friday and run 197 miles from Timberline Lodge on the slopes of Mount Hood, through the Portland Metropolitan area, over the Oregon Coastal range and to the edge of the Pacific Ocean in Seaside. The Valley Girls will be running the Women’s Open Classic, starting at 9:45 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 28 and finishing sometime Saturday.
The 127-mile High School Challenge Relay and the Portland to Coast Walk Relay are also run beginning Friday. Those races begin in downtown Portland, next to the Hawthorne Bridge.
High school runners from Sweet Home have run in the last four Portland to Coast relays. Two separate teams of boys and of girls are scheduled to run this Friday.
The Valley Girls team is comprised of Rosanne James, 36; Tamara Ottum, 31; Teena Collman, 35; Heather Kenyon, 39; Becky Porter, 35; Laurie Boyd, 38; Payton Ottum, 17; Christina Smith, 42; Sarah Shamek, 35; Shannon Thayer, 43; Diana Copeland, 38; and Team Captain Brittany May, 22, of Sweet Home. All are from Sweet Home except for Copeland, who is from Washington, and Porter, who lives in Lebanon.
The Hood to Coast Relay was founded in 1982 by a Portland architect and president of the Oregon Road Runners Club, Bob Foote. The first race included eight teams and ended in Pacific City. Within four years, Hood to Coast grew to 400 teams and the finish line was moved to the beach town of Seaside. Today, with 12,000 participants running and 5,400 volunteers, Hood to Coast is well known in the running community.
The first challenge for the team was getting into the race.
To keep the scale of the relay to a manageable size, each team that competes is selected through a random drawing process.
Applicants can register as early as Jan. 30, although the race isn’t held until the last weekend of August. Team applications have to be sent in within a specific time window, so team organizers sometimes have to recruit runners or juggle their line-ups between the registration deadline and the race.
Each team is comprised of 12 members, with each member running three legs over terrain ranging in difficulty from flat pavement in bright daylight to uphill runs over loose gravel on logging roads in the dead of the night.
High school runners in Portland to Coast run two legs each.
The shortest leg is four miles and the longest is about eight miles.
The Valley Girls have come a long way since Thayer and Boyd first discussed running the Nike Hood to Coast Relay at Thayer’s coffee shop. Heather Kenyon and Brittany May found enough runners to put a team together and the Valley Girls was born.
The experience level of the team members varies. May, Kenyon, Boyd and Diana Copeland have run Hood to Coast before.
Thayer, a 43-year-old former softball player who is a relative newcomer to running, says she is doing Hood to Coast because “It’s such an accomplishment at my age.”
“It’s been fun but hard because I wasn’t a runner before this year,” she said.
In order to get into shape for her relay legs, Thayer says she works with a personal trainer twice a week and runs three days a week.
Teammate Teena Collman, 35, a veteran runner, said she has had moments of doubt during the long miles of training for the race.
“You have to want to run,” she said. “There have been times when I had to ask myself why I was doing it. I’ve known about Hood to Coast, but I didn’t think it was anything I’d ever be able to do.”
Collman runs four to six miles every day, whether on the treadmill or on the road, sometimes running twice a day.
Some team members have had other challenges in getting to the starting line.
Smith got into a car accident in May and had to stop running for a while.
“I had damage to the muscle in my hip and after many weeks was able to restart training again,” she said.
Smith, whose son Nikki is captaining the boys PTC team, said she runs five days a week, twice a day, anywhere from four to 14 miles a day. She will be running the longest mileage of those on the team.
As all runners know, training can be as challenging as the terrain, but the best way to begin is to start slow, building a base and work your way up.
“All you have to do is train, eat well and listen to your body,” Smith said. “You will have good runs and runs that are not. You have to absorb all parts and learn to appreciate them.”
Team members say getting into shape and the self-accomplishment are not the only rewards.
“I’ve gotten to know a lot of people with different experiences with running,” said Collman. “When you’re running in a team you go farther than you would by yourself and you can’t talk yourself out of it.”
For others it is being around people who know what you are going through.
“Everyone is really close; it’s been a bonding experience,” said teammate Sarah Shamek.
After months of hard work, the Valley Girls are looking forward to the excitement of crossing the finish line and they say it will be well worth the effort.
“I’m looking forward to the excitement on the beach afterwards,” Smith said.