Bloomsday by Mark Stone

May 2025. In 2016 I read an article in Runners World titled "The Five Most Popular Road Races in the U.S." The first three were obvious enough: NYC Marathon, Chicago Marathon, and the Peachtree Dash (in Atlanta, at the popular 10K distance). #4 was the Cooper River Bridge Run in Charleston, SC (also a 10K). I'd only heard of it because I have cousins in the area, and one has run it several times.

#5 on the list was the Bloomsday Run, a 12K averaging over 40,000 runners, capping the Lilac Festival in Spokane, WA. My first thought was "how does a city of 200,000 get 40,000 people to participate?" I had to experience this. So in 2017 I signed up and ran, thinking it would be a one time "bucket list" sort of thing.

And it was great. Spokane hosted the 1974 World's Fair, and used the occasion to revamp a dilapidated industrial downtown into an attractive destination centered on what is now Riverfront Park, where the Spokane River runs through downtown. The first Bloomsday Run soon followed, in 1977. The city goes all out. Vehicle traffic is shut down for pretty much the entire downtown, and it's one big street party from race start at 9:00 AM until the last walkers cross the Monroe Street Bridge. They recruit local bands to play live music along the course, so there's never a point when you are out of earshot of live music.

In December of 2019 I found myself thinking about the race again, and thinking that it was so much fun it would be worth repeating. I registered the day registration opened up in January of 2020. We all know how that turned out. It ended up being a virtual race, and my time was appropriately terrible. 2021 was also virtual only, and I skipped it. When they returned to in person in 2022 I ran it again, and had a lot of fun. My time was better than my virtual race time of 2020, but nowhere near my 2017 time.

COVID has made me keenly aware of missed opportunities, so now I run Bloomsday every year. And a funny thing happened in 2023. While I did not beat my 2017 time, I only missed it by 90 seconds. In 2017 I was a good bit younger, but also new to heart rate training, and didn't quite have it all figured out. By 2023 I had a much more disciplined approach. Shaving 90 seconds off of a 7.5 mile race is no joke; that's a 12 second per mile improvement on every mile. But I thought I could do it. I looked at each mile in my race results, and mapped out a plan. And 2024 was indeed better. I missed a PR by 46 seconds.

At first I despaired. I felt I had squeezed everything I could out of my performance in 2024. But in December, as I was easing back into running and mapping out my training plan, I had a thought. The course covers three big hills, the last one known as "Doomsday Hill". They are, respectively, 4/10 of a mile at a 3.5% grade, 5/10 of a mile at a 3.0% grade, and 6/10 of a mile at a 4.3% grade. I thought if I could shave 20 seconds off of my time on each of those hills, I'd have a shot at a PR.

So I built myself a treadmill workout composed of three intervals with some warmup and cooldown time in between, where each interval was the distance and grade of each of those hills. The first day I ran that routine it felt terrible. But each week it felt better, and I got faster.

Alas, the universe had other plans. In February of 2025 I contracted pneumonia. Three weeks went by before I could run again at all, and it was weeks beyond that before I felt at all back to normal. I needed more training time to be ready, and the clock simply ran out on me.

May 4 of 2025 was not my best Bloomsday time, but far from my worst. And I ran all three hills in record time. So if I can run the flats like I did in 2024, and the hills like I did in 2025, a PR is within my grasp. 2026 will be the 50th running of Bloomsday; what a perfect moment to bring it all together.

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