I'm a runner
I still call myself a runner even though I haven't been able to run for almost 20 years. My knees are shot.
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| 1972 Olympic Trials 800 meters (I'm the Oregon half-miler on the left) Dave Wottle (in the hat) set a world record at the Trials and won the 1972 Olympic gold medal |
However my Hood to Coast experiences have taught me that running is more than just a physical activity. Running is also a mindset which has been an important thread throughout my life.
What follows are my favorite Hood to Coast experiences and lessons.
Recuiting
I took over as the Nike Tarahumara team captain for about 10 years from founder Mike Franklin.
Recruiting the right runners was always a priority. Tarahumara was in the Corporate Mixed Division so I had to look for Nike employees, six men and six women, who could handle three legs averaging 5-6 miles each. I looked for men who could run 5-6 minutes per mile and women who could run 5 1/2 to 7 minutes per mile.
In the early days, finding the men was relatively easy. Nike had a lot of former male collegiate middle and long distance runners which included all-Americans, a few Olympians, and an American record holder. However it was difficult in the 1980's to find women distance runners. The female Nike employees who could run distances didn't exist because they were in school during the 70's when Title IX was just ramping up and women in those years weren't allowed to run distance. The Olympics didn't allow women to race in distances over a mile until the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. So the women on the team had very different backgrounds including Darcy Winslow a dancer, lunchtime runners, and athletes from other sports. Compared to the female runners on other teams, the women on Tarahumara were extraordinary and the team's biggest competitive difference.
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| 1991 Nike Tarahumara team |
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| 1973 Steve Prefontaine and sophomore Paul Geis |
Recruiting wasn't limited to runners. Drivers included my wife Mary, good friend John Woodman, and Nike Historian Nelson Farris. We sought out volunteers who worked on the course. And for a couple of years we had a masseuse who gave us a recovery massage after our first leg.
Having fun ... and winning
Hood to Coast started in 1982. Tarahumara's goal their first year (1983) was simply to have fun, which they did with a Winnebago and plenty of beer. Reportedly they were dead last and didn't care.
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| Nike's first Hood to Coast team, 1983 Tarahumara |
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| 1984 Tarahumara, the first winner of the Corporate Mixed division |
Mike Franklin wanted to continue winning and started to replace the team members dropping off the team with the best runners he could find. I joined in 1985. The primary goal was to still to have fun and keep as many runners from year-to-year as possible. A secondary goal was to win the division which happened in 1984, 1985, and 1986.
Our team was slowing down each year and was caught by surprise in 1987. Hewlett Packard brought in runners from around the USA for a team-building event on the same year that Tarahumara ran its slowest race, an average 7:11 pace. Since our primary goal was to have fun, the 2nd place finish shouldn’t have been a problem. But we agreed that 2nd place wasn’t any fun and vowed to return to winning in 1988.
Tarahumara won the next 18 years in a row.
In 2006 Tarahumara had our second setback, losing by one minute to a GE team.
After hearing about the Tarahumara loss to GE, Nike VP & former Tarahumara runner, Dave Taylor challenged future teams with an email:
“NIKE should NEVER, NEVER, NEVER lose in a category in which you choose to field a competitive team. NIKE is a sports and fitness company (which evolved from a RUNNING company for those that may have forgotten). I think GE makes light bulbs. Don't say, "we didn't lose, we were beat by a recruiting process". Say, "we screwed up and it won't happen again". When you start to feel good about second place, well ... you may as well quit trying.”
As of 2018 Nike holds the course record in our targeted 6 divisions, Men/Women/Mixed in Open/Corporate divisions, plus Mambu Baddu's Men's Elite record from 1995.
Having fun ... especially when things go wrong
Of all the years that I've participated, one year was a unique problem. Everything went right! Including being within 28 seconds our predicted finish time. It was boring.
Every year we've found a place to spend Saturday night near the beach where we relived the previous hours and laughed about what went wrong. You can learn a lot about yourself and others in how you handle what seems like a crisis at 3:00 in the morning.
Here are a few examples.
The traffic lines leading up to the exchange points were extremely long and we heard that it didn't get any better. Four of us in the van still had to run and it seemed impossible to get us to our exchange points on time. So the four of us jumped out and jogged to upcoming exchange. The first runner stayed and the remaining three hitch-hiked to the next exchange. And so on until we were all at our respective exchange points. The van picked us up as they could, we didn't miss a hand off, and we tallied another Tarahumara victory.
Andy Mooney (later the Chairman of Disney Consumer Products) lost the skin off the soles of his feet running a steep downhill first leg. He somehow managed to finish the next two legs but by the drive back to Portland, Andy was in enough pain that he had to be carried from the van to a nearby bush for him to relieve himself.
Bob Harold (a former CFO at Nike and President at Laika) uncharacteristically screwed up by tipping the van in a ditch while trying to park on the side of the road. We knew he screwed up because he said so in his stream of profanity from the driver's seat. After calling a tow truck Bob and I leaned against the van looking up at the stars during the 4am stillness when Bob asked me, "Do you think people will forget this?" No, Bob.
Growing the number ... and quality ... of teams
1989 was a big growth year for both HTC and the number of Nike teams. The race outgrew the capacity of Pacific City so the finish line was moved to Seaside and the limit for the total number of teams increased from 500 to 750.
At Nike I brainstormed with fellow employees such as Nelson Farris, Dave Taylor, and Steve Roth how to field more than just the single Nike Tarahumara team. The result was 6 Nike Corporate teams; 5 Mixed and 1 Men’s.
The key in growing the number of Nike teams was the new team captains. Throughout the summer, as we were preparing to move to the new Nike campus, we met at a local tavern on Thursday afternoons over a few pitchers of beer to plan and hold ourselves accountable on follow through. We probably over-thought it because we figured out how to get things like tee-shirts, hats, vans, and rooms at the beach which we charged to the different Nike cost centers that we had influence or signing authority.
Team Name Captain
Nike Tarahumara Steve Bence
Nike Why Do It? Jacquie Anderson
Nike One Time Only Marla Murray
Nike Air Bags Doug Richardson
Nike Running Wild Dewayne VanSickle
Nike Coastbusters Arnie Gardner (Corporate Men's team)
That fall, months after HTC, I was feeling pretty proud of our six Nike teams. I started to think about how to increase the number of teams so more employees would have this great experience.
Marla Murray, who captained "One Time Only", even signed up for a second year. Their van tipped over while parking. As they were dealing with their problem and hoping no one they knew would see them, a Portland news helicopter circled overhead to document their plight for an Oregon television audience. Marla was determined to get it right so signed up her team once more, this time called "One Time Only, Again".
So I was feeling pretty good. Until I thought I'd be fired.
Del Hayes, a senior VP, on the Board of Directors, plus the man who hired me in 1977, summoned me to his office just before Christmas. I had no idea what he wanted and approached him with extreme nervousness. Del said he caught wind of what we were doing with Hood to Coast and asked the Accounting Department to pull any financial documents that referenced Hood to Coast. He spread in front of me his collection of Nike Purchase Orders and Invoices for everything ranging from tee shirts to entry fees. I thought it was my last day at Nike. Del asked me to explain, which I did, emphasizing what a great opportunity and experience it is to participate in Hood to Coast, it speaks volumes to Nike's cultural running roots, and I heard rave reviews from the employees who participated.
And then there was a deafening silence which lasted way too long.
Finally Del laughed and let me off his hook. He said that what we were doing was perfect and that we didn't need to go underground. He asked me to build out a plan for 1990 and he would pay for it. Below is my first pass of that plan with a rather urgent request for Nike to pay for the eight teams in order to secure our entries. The check went out four weeks later and our Hood to Coast participation was officially endorsed by senior leadership.
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| 1990 Draft (click on picture for a legible image) |
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| Nike paid the eight teams entry fee in time to lock in |
But Del had a second condition. We had to include his daughter, Kathy Hayes, on our HTC team which was a problem. The problem wasn't her running. She was a great runner! At the time Kathy held the UO record at 3000, 5000, and 10000 meters. Even today she still holds two of those school records. The problem with Kathy's participation was that she was not a Nike employee and couldn't run on a corporate team.
Two years later we crafted a solution. An Open Mixed team was created called Nike Team Swoosh, composed of a impressive list of mostly former UO distance runners. Kathy Mills-Parker (wife of current CEO Mark Parker) even ran. She held the 5000 meter world record 1978-1979. I can't remember what happened, but Kathy Hayes couldn't or simply didn't run. Team Swoosh easily won their division and set a course record which is the longest standing HTC record.
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18:22:22 Average 5:44 pace Course Record still stands
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In 1993 John Truax captained a non-corporate team called Nike Mambu Baddu that won the Open Men's division and the overall race. After the Nike victory, Adidas quietly plotted how they could bring in some of their best runners and steal the race in 1994. Alberto Salazar heard of the Adidas plan and in a "Just Do It" effort arranged to bring in some of the best Nike runners from around the world which set up a great race in 1994.
Nike Mambu Baddu and Adidas Rolling Thunder went head-to-head for almost 16 hours in the closest and fastest race in Hood to Coast history.
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| 1994 Overall Champion - Nike Mambu Baddu |
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| 1994 Mambu Baddu splits (Click for a legible image) |
The Monday after the race Phil Knight honored the Mambu Baddu team on the Nike campus. A new award was created called the Salazar Award, to recognize a Nike employee who "did the right thing", and Salazar was the first recipient winning a car. And then Phil went down the line of world class runners and asked them about their experience. It went something like this ...
"I loved it! Running is usually an individual sport and I had the opportunity to run as a team."
"I hated it! I'll never do it again and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone."
"I'd run it again. We covered 200 miles of beautiful Oregon scenery."
"This was the hardest thing I ever did. Worse than a marathon. I basically ran three hard 10k's over ten hours with no real rest in a packed van.
The following year (1995) Bob Foote created an Elite category. Adidas didn't put together a team. Salazar didn't run but he still put together a team that was even faster. They took 12 minutes off the course record averaging 4:51 per mile!
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| 1995 Alberto Salazar's note regarding splits |
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| 1995 handwritten splits |
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1995 Results - Click on the picture above for a more legible image
(adjusted to match the official finish time of 15:44:55)
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Fast forward twelve years from 1995 to 2007. Nike became the 3-year title sponsor and secured a record number of team slots:
- 78 HTC teams for Nike employees
- 12 PTC walking teams for Nike employees
- 50 HTC team slots for European Running Retail stores
140 teams and 1,680 participants! A record for Nike participation.
Inviting the European retailers (not owned by Nike) was a strategic move. We wanted them to visit Oregon and the Nike headquarters to prove that we were still a running company. The growing perception in Europe was that Nike was a basketball company who also made running shoes. As a result of their trip to Oregon they were convinced that we were indeed an authentic running brand and they returned to spread the word in Europe about both Nike and Hood to Coast.
The Nike teams included employees from around the world including Europe, China, Australia, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, and many more. Events were set up on the Nike campus so they could meet with the people in Beaverton and other events were designed to energize the Nike culture.
The logistics to support the all the teams traveling from outside of Beaverton was huge!
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| Rows and rows of rental vans |
Moving on
Over the years my body, in particular my knees, couldn't keep up with my desire to run.
In 1996 I turned over Tarahumara to a younger group and put together a Men's Masters team, Limp Swooshes, which competed for six years. Three of those years I had to sit out.
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| Dr. Craig Moore was a runner on the team ... and fixed my foot. |
My wife walked on a Nike Masters team captained by Lisa McKillips and I decided to give walking a try. It had much the same feel of HTC, with a wonderful group of Nike old-timers, but without the running and there were only two legs. It was an outlet for my competitive spirit and I was exercising much more than if I didn't have a goal. One year our team was a little offended when we won our division and the award was presented by ... AARP. We didn't feel old, we averaged 12 minutes per mile, and we didn't want to be patronized.
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| T-Wrecks at PTC Awards Ceremony (I'm in the middle bent at the knees) |
I've participated 28 times over 33 years: 14 on a running team and 14 walking.
17 of those years I was on a team that won its division. Can anyone beat that?
1985-1995: Tarahumara, Corporate Mixed. Won 10 of 11 years.
1996-2001: Limp Swooshes, Men's Masters. I couldn't run 3 years.
2002-2005: T-Wrecks, Mixed Masters Walking.
2006-2017: T-Wrecks, Mixed Super Masters Walking. Won 7 of those years
and sat out 2 years.
I fell in love with Hood to Coast in 1985 and it has be a fulfilling 33 year relationship. I hope I have a few more good years left in me.
1 comment:
Steve- I love this photo. I have a copy on the wall in my office. Brings back a lot of great memories. Hope you and Mary are doing well. Take care- Bob Smith.
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