Why Team Road Relays are Flourishing
Hood to Coast started a growing trend in this genre of races
By Marc Chalufour
As featured in the September 2010 issue of Running Times Magazine
Bob Foote didn't invent the road relay, just like Bill Bowerman didn't invent the running shoe. They simply took old ideas, improved them, and watched the results spread.
Foote, a competitive runner and product of the first running boom, tired of the loneliness of the long-distance runner. There must be something else out there, something to spice things up, he thought. Then he found the Roseburg to Coos Bay Relay, a five-man, 60-some-mile race. He and his friends, invigorated from the experience, began talking about improving on that formula as they drove home. More runners, more miles -- that's what appealed to them.
Two years later, Foote looked around at the 79 other runners on the beach at Seaside, Ore. They'd just finished the first Hood to Coast Relay. "If this is ever even 25 teams, it will be a success," he thought. Five years later, 500 teams competed. Today, 1,000. Foote and his daughter, Felicia Hubber, who now directs the event, say they've never even marketed the race. For 12 consecutive years the field has filled in 24 hours, with hundreds of teams being turned away. Apparently Bob Foote wasn't the only runner yearning for a break from the routine.
By the late 1980s, Foote was fielding a handful of calls a year from enthralled Hood to Coast finishers, eager to establish their own relays back home. These weren't seasoned race directors looking to profit, but runners inspired by their relay experiences. An entirely organic movement was building as -- ever so slowly at first -- road relays began to spread from one coast to the other.
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