Running is just about the most natural sport possible, the sport our pre-Industrial ancestors did, the one that doesn’t burn any fossil fuels. You’d think that fun in the time of global warming would make liberal use of running — and it would, but you’d need to rethink Hood To Coast.
Hood To Coast is the signature Oregon relay race, the biggest relay in North America, that takes place every summer on the weekend before Labor Day. Twelve-person teams are divided into two vans of six runners who take turns running legs of three to seven miles, handing off a bracelet at interchanges. It starts at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood and ends at the coastal town of Seaside.
You run and drive through the night, you love and hate your teammates by turns, you pee in the grass when the Portapotties are full, you get exhausted, you get elated, you party like crazy once you get to the beach, you get a medal. I have three Hood To Coast medals I earned in the 90’s. Hood To Coast is big fun, and almost every Oregon runner I know has done it, with many out-of-staters also being loyal devotees.
It’s also an over-the-top creator of carbon emissions. About a thousand vans are driving about 400 miles each, and spending hundreds of hours idling in the traffic jams they create for themselves, to allow the runners to do their running. In terms of fossil fuels, you might as well be having a massive jet-ski race.
I’m pretty sure global warming and what causes it was unknown when Hood To Coast was invented. But those things are very known now, and in my view the event has got to be revamped to reflect the sharp reductions in carbon emissions that science has found essential to avert global disaster.
Ironically, the event’s sponsor is Nike, an Oregon-based company that is unusually committed to sustainability. Which goes to show how complex both life and sustainability can be.
On the other hand, we humans cry “complexity” when we don’t want to know what we know and act on what we know. The running part works fine, but the driving part does not. Fun in the time of global warming can’t be the same as it was in the time of our ignorance, with thoughtless use of gasoline. It involves sacrifice of some old ways, and creation of some new ways.
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1 response so far ↓
1 bottleman // Jun 25, 2008 at 8:13 am
It’s funny, I started a thread about the environmental aspects of HTC last year on the “Relay Running” bulletin board on Yahoo (which seems to have disappeared now). Basically all I suggested was that it might be fun to form a team that would try to do the race in a carbon-neutral way. I figured out that some combination of biking, public transport, etc. could do most of it.
I was shocked when this suggestion generated some really reactionary comments, as all I had suggested was a kind of stunt or promotion to show that it could be done better, not a global rule change for everybody.
But I think the lesson I got from it was that HTC (and other events like it) have two qualities that pretty much make them unchangeable… 1) they’re huge institutions with their own traditions; and 2) people have huge emotional connections to them. HTC, like other “transformational” cathartic events, has a emotional payoff that seems to justify any material indulgence.
#2, the emotional payoff, is what people really love about HTC. I’m sure an event could be created that provided that without the conspicuous consumption of gas. How about the circum-Portland crawl?
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