Race Report: Bridge to Brews

The website made it plain that driving a car to this race was a bad idea-no good parking it said. So I had thought about using the prescribed method, that of riding the train. Trouble was that I would still need to drive for 15 minutes just to reach the light rail station, so it just added a lot of time and complexity to something that could be very easy if parking were actually available. I just couldn't believe that parking on the street would be a prob and as it turned out, I was right. No big deal.

So once out of the car, it was time to do some moving under my own power. Randy and I had plenty of time to walk around the brewery blocks and
scope things out before the race. We stood in a line to get our packets and then another for a pink bracelet which proved we were over 21 (duh) and could drink beer later. Then I checked my jacket to be held until later, which meant that I had to find some warming slivers of sun to try to keep comfortable until we started to exercise.

Some of the organization of this pre-race time gave me a feeling of amused coziness. There was some comfort in the quaint aire here and a casualness not found in bigger races. I thought it was funny that a beer sponsored event started off with a kids race, wondered why the main events were similarly sized 8k and 10k distances and really got a kick out of the announcer guy who kept giving directions such as "line up just to my left" as if more than 10 people knew where he was, could see him and knew which was his left and which was his right. If this had been a more elaborate race some folks may have been annoyed, but as it was it just added to the fun.

Finally we did start running, but after getting re-corralled at the last minute Randy and I ended up in the back of the pack as we crossed the start line. This meant the first mile or so was extremely slow as we chugged up a short hill in a huge clog of fellow runners and twisted through a series of street changes. Some people, myself included, cut corners on the sidewalks in an attempt to get past the wall of slower runners. The last minute shuffling had reversed the order and faster runners were now stuck behind the slower. Not to mention the walkers who see no problem lining up 5 or 6 abreast. This situation lasted long enough that many of us hopped up on the sidewalks once in awhile when the predicated pace was so slow we could find no other way around. It was the type of start where runners are side stepping through parked cars leaping and zooming ahead when the smallest of seams appeared. But again, it was all part of the small race experience.

But things did straighten out and the crowd did thin eventually as we headed west toward the Fremont Bridge.

Wait a minute! Time out!! Did I mention Fremont? I just can't let this opportunity pass. All two or three people who read this blog with any regularity know that I have tendency toward some things historical and one of my all time favorite figures is John Charles Fremont. Here is the short version of the story.

Randy about to cross the Fremont Bridge

When I was 14 my family moved to a house on Huntington Road in the small berg of LaPine. Not all of this long road through the woods and along the Deschutes River was modern at the time but the section in front of our house was at least paved. This road we lived along had been the major north-south path for humans for a long time. Native Americans used this trail for maybe hundreds and hundreds of years before whites eventually turned it into a road and we got there and put up a mailbox.

It was just a fluke that I stumbled upon the book about Fremont at the old Bend Public Library but was amazed to find that his 1843 expedition had come down our very street back when it was no more than a trail. The "Pathfinder of the West" had just left Ft. Vancouver and it's host John Mcloughlin and was heading home using a different southern route. He was accompanied by the notable Kit Carson and escorted by local Billy Chinook. But the thing that sparked my imagination wasn't the famous names but a piece of hardware--Fremont's cannon.

I would stare out at our road and picture them moving from right to left just inside the trees from the rivers meadow beyond. The trail was well placed; the trees offered some protection from the December weather but the water in the river was just a moment away as needed. Bringing up the rear of the party was the howitzer and it's crew.

Fremont wasn't even supposed to have the "12 pounder" which he sweet talked from a friend before leaving St. Louis. This wasn't a trip that was supposed to have the appearance of a military operation. Tensions with Mexico were high and heading toward California with a big gun was not something that helped the delicate balance of power. Fremont's intentions were otherwise, he just wanted to intimidate the natives, which he did a few days after passing our house when he approached the Klamath area. He had been warned about by the trappers back at the fort of their poor relationship with the whites so when he saw campfire smoke rising on the far side of the Klamath marsh he had the gun fired. The smoke quickly disappeared and he never did have any encounters with the locals--at least not this time.

From here Fremont turned east and the cannon was towed through three feet of snow toward the dessert where at one point it's route was blocked by a steep drop off. Snow swirled around them. Below in the dessert, the sun was shining brightly on an inviting lake and a enticing campsite. Fremont dubbed the landmarks Winter Ridge and Summer Lake, names that are still used to this day.

The party continued east and south passing the area of modern Reno, and at one resting point the official artist of the group actually sketched the cannon while it sat at the shores of Pyramid Lake, Nevada. Little did he know that the days for the little cannon were dwindling fast.

It may have been at this very camp when Fremont changed his plans. The expedition would not be heading east toward home but instead would cross the Sierra Nevada mountains in mid winter to hunker down at Sutter's Fort in Sacramento. The group barely survived the experience but the cannon was abandoned in the hills after days of struggling to get it through the snow and terrain. It was probably cached in hopes of retrieving it in the spring, but they never did go back for it. It's fate became a fascination of mine as I pictured it still buried where he left it some 150 years earlier.

The cannon that rattled past my home and it's story didn't stop there in the mountains south of Lake Tahoe. In 1856, Fremont ran for President of the United States as the first candidate of the new anti-slavery party...the Republicans. He was a national hero with ton's of name recognition so his opponents looked for things to tarnish the image. The malicious requisition and subsequent loss of the cannon made the newspapers and the debates and in the end Fremont lost the election. He didn't lose because of the cannon issue, but it didn't help.

Four years later a different candidate represented the Republicans, and he won; yeah Abraham Lincoln and the great Civil War. A small twist of fate and everything would have been so different.

Now the Fremont Bridge loomed ahead me. Approaching one of Portland's most familiar landmarks, I was just about to be mildly disappointed and then slightly annoyed. First, I had assumed that we would be running over the top deck of the bridge, going with the traffic, dwarfed and humbled by the enormous arches which support the road deck. But I was thinking like a motorist, not a pedestrian. The southern most lane of the lower deck had been coned off and we were now obliged to run through the cavernous innards of the bridge while cars came streaming at us. Yeah, the view was okay out the sides but it wasn't what I had expected.

The annoying part was that my watch needs to see some satellites to get a fix on where I'm at and how slow I'm running. By mid span I realized that the GPS was all over the place trying to get a signal, huge spikes showing up on my downloaded route map later. No accurate run data for this race, but as it turned out that wasn't such a bad thing anyway.

We shifted gears and coasted down the ramp on the west side and entered downtown Portland, familiar ground to me when road racing. Many of the roads we used now were the same ones I had seen twice before while running the Portland Marathon. The route we followed however was ever turning, reminding me of the pattern of a Egg Scrambler ride at a carnival. Eventually we spun ourselves onto Naito Parkway, the former Front Avenue, but renamed a few years back to honor a champion of Portland business who, coincidentally enough, was not Caucasoid.

The Broadway Bridge with the Fremont behind

We made a few more turns to line us up to cross the Willamette River again, this time on the red trestled Broadway Bridge. Half way across I pulled out my phone again and stepped aside so to have Randy take a picture of me with the Fremont in the background, but the photo didn't turn out.

Back on the route and having long given up on any notion of such silly things as PR's, we chugged past the Rose Garden arena and back up the hill toward the Widmer Brewery. I just stayed consistent and followed the crowd for the last mile. We ended strong, sprinting across the same line where we had started, this time aided by the down grade.

My attention now turned to my race bib. It had three tear away tabs on the bottom of it, one marked with the word "FOOD" and two with "BEVERAGE" which to me meant just one thing: Widmer Hefeweizen.

I may not have run very fast but I still got in soon enough that lines had

not yet formed for the beer.

The Fremont from the Widmer Brewery

Later, some people would not even bother getting in the long lines, or got so frustrated at the slow going that they threw their beer tickets on the ground. This was a fact that Randy and I noted and took advantage of, each of use easily finding one extra tab and got in line for another round.

The drink was good but the food was a vegetarian wrap that was a bit blah. Still the music was loud and the weather warm and the day was a good one. We walked the few blocks back to where we had wisely parked that morning and headed for home.