Paper: Oregonian, The (Portland, OR) Title: ALL SYSTEMS GO, GO, GO Date: August 22, 1999 Summary: Whether it's the Hood to Coast or his other passions, there is no stopping Bob Foote The shimmer of a full moon. The glow from a street light or two. That's all that probably will be shining when Bob Foote flips on his bedside lamp at 2 a.m. Friday, stretches his 6-foot-2 frame, rubs his pale blue eyes and wills himself awake. The hour is as demanding, as unconventional and as nutty, some would say, as Foote's reason for rising so long before dawn on the final Friday of August: He loves to hear the Hood to Coast Relay starter bark that all-important word."Go!" Thinking about his annual race-day ritual, Foote scoots toward the front of his black leather office chair and leans into his polished, orderly desk. The hint of giddiness seems uncharacteristic for a man who describes himself exactly as others describe him: a controlling, calculating, hard-driven perfectionist, a guy who makes work even of play, who loves -- above all else -- to win. With race day on his mind, he can't sit still. Though it's been 17 years since Foote started what has grown to be the world's largest relay race, the 52-year-old former architect still marvels at the grand, grueling thought of it. He tosses back his head of neatly cropped red hair, flashes a toothy smile and revels in the notion that he is able to make a life -- and a living -- from his first love: running. When the relay begins Friday, an expected 17,400 athletes from around the world -- most of whom paid $50 apiece for the opportunity -- will hit the road in three events: the 195-mile Nationwide Insurance Hood to Coast Relay , which begins at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood; the 126-mile Portland to Coast Walk; and the 125-mile Nextel Portland to Coast High School Challenge. All three end on the beach in Seaside. Foote runs over the details and recalls the relay's history at a verbal pace as exhausting as 6-minute miles. He reels through the days when he was a race committee of one; through the months when he feared his life-threatening illness could spell death for the relay; through the years when coastal officials considered squelching his burgeoning baby; through the times when Portland's running purists sniffed that someone who stooped so low as to make a buck off their hobby should be shown the door. As his storytelling slows, Foote recalls one year when he was not only the organizer but also a participant. He had the chance to recline for an hour in the middle of the 24-hour sweatfest -- to catch a catnap before he was expected to run the next of his three tough relay legs. When he awoke, his internal voice spoke in a self-defeating snit: You're through, it told him. Your muscles ache. You've got blisters. You stink, man. Quit now. Then, Foote remembers, he heard other voices -- real ones. They came from the van carrying his teammates. They cheered him, challenged him. Looking back, Foote views that moment and the relay itself as metaphorical -- a mirror image of his life. "You forget about the demons inside of you," Foote says, "and you keep running." -- Bob Foote was 14 and scrawny and he chose, in the first track and field meet of his junior high school career in Salem, to be a high jumper. The meet sticks in his mind like the taste of milk gone sour. He tried once, twice, three times to clear the opening height -- a scant 3 feet. He failed. Embarrassed and humiliated, Foote went home that afternoon, closed himself in his father's woodworking shop and built a high jump, complete with a sawdust pile on which to land. That night, he practiced jumping for two hours. "This is never going to happen to me again," he remembers thinking. Foote didn't win his next event but he cleared two heights above the opening jump and set his sights skyward: He would bust his brain at mathematics so that one day he could be an architect. And he would train his body so thoroughly that when the time came, he could compete in the Olympic Games. Eager to beef up his 90-pound, 14-year-old physique, Foote found books on lifting, broke into his piggy bank and bought himself a set of weights. "I built this odd body," he says -- one with huge, muscular legs and little upper body strength. "It was time-efficient. I didn't want to work on body parts I didn't have to." -- Foote was headed home. It was 1981. He and four running buddies, who had just completed their second Roseburg-to-Coos Bay relay, traveled the long haul back to Portland. Bored and sick of being car-bound, he thought, "Why are we driving so far to do this?" Once home, he pondered the notion and presented the idea to the Oregon Roadrunners Club, where he was chairman of the race committee: Why not, he asked, run a relay from one major amenity to another -- from the mountain to the beach? Why not plot the course along some of the state's most scenic roads? Why not make the challenge so off-beat, so beautifully brutal, that runners would find it irresistible? Like an expert draftsman, Foote took maps and markers and charted a course from Timberline Lodge to the Pacific Ocean. In 1982, 88 runners said: Let's do it. In 1983, 704 signed up. In 1984, it was 1,650. And so grew Hood to Coast. By the relay's fifth or sixth year, though, rumblings started. Members of the volunteer-based running club complained that the relay cost too much to stage, that it had become unwieldy as it pushed past 5,000 entrants, that the club wasn't getting enough in return. And so, like a traveler leaving behind unwanted luggage, the Oregon Roadrunners Club sold the event to Foote. Little did the club's leadership know that in a decade the relay would more than triple in size -- that entry fees would bring in more than $850,000. That elite runners from across the globe would make room for it on their calendars. -- Foote approached the relay just as he had approached his college track and field endeavors at the University of Oregon, as he had pursued architecture, skiing, tennis, cycling, flyfishing: with compulsive focus. As his friend and colleague Gary LaSala puts it: "Bob flies like a shooting star. He's going to go as far as he can until he drops. . . . It's no different than when he got the passion for the stock market. He goes at it 100 percent. It's like war." Foote went out for the UO track team during the late 1960s --when legendary coach Bill Bowerman ran the show. The young high jumper was good -- confident, heading into college, that he would compete in the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. But a contemporary of his at Oregon State-- a guy with an unconventional style -- would qualify for the Games instead of Foote. His name was Dick Fosbury. His success, using the famous "Fosbury Flop," dealt Bob Foote one of the biggest disappointments of his life. He never would be an Olympian. He turned his attention to architecture and worked for a firm for three years after college. When a client asked if he wanted to moonlight -- to design a 10-unit apartment complex -- Foote jumped at the chance. When the client offered him a bigger job, a 26-unit project, Foote went into business for himself. He relished the freedom. "I was at my happiest when I was by myself, creating," he remembers. "I would get into the zone -- just like in sports." Architecture, though, was a feast-or-famine proposition, depending on the economy. He savored the peaks, weathered the valleys and found distractions where he had most of his life: in sports. Inspired by marathoner Frank Shorter, Foote took up running. In 1978, he entered his first race, the now-defunct Cascade Run Off, and kept an 8-minute-mile pace for 9.3 miles. "I was crippled for a week after that. But I said, 'Hey, if I can do this without training, what if I trained?' " Just as he studied bodybuilding as a boy, Foote stuck his nose into books about marathon running. Four months later, on a February day when the thermometer read 35 degrees, the wind blasted 50-mph gusts and the rain came in horizontal sheets, he ran the Trails End Marathon. He estimates that the hypothermia hit about Mile 22, but Foote finished in 3 hours, 29 minutes -- better than his 8-minute-mile goal. In the 10 years or so that followed, Foote ran 34 more marathons, several 50-mile ultramarathons and the 100-mile Western States Ultra, a brutal trail run through the Sierra Nevada range. -- Foote won't run this year's Hood to Coast Relay. The scheduling simply is too difficult for his favorite teammate -- his daughter, Felicia, who will start her senior year at Big Sky High School in Missoula, Mont., on the Monday after Hood to Coast. Foote gushes proudly when he talks about his only child from a 16-year marriage that ended in divorce 41/2 years ago. When she was younger, he coached Felicia's basketball and soccer teams. It fit with his philosophy that sports can teach children lifelong lessons of goal setting, of fair competition, of accepting failure. Now, he coaches her in online stock investing, his current passion. They go to concerts together -- he claims he even likes The Smashing Pumpkins. They talk about her friends, her future, and how she can excel next season on her track team. "We have a best-buddies relationship," he says. During the school year, they speak on the phone daily, and Foote makes four or five trips a season to watch her cross-country and track meets in Montana. During previous summers, when the two would run together, Felicia would struggle to keep up with her dad. This summer, the tables turned. "She puts the hammer down," Foote says. "She makes me suffer." Lanky and confident, Felicia has spent this summer working for her dad on the relay staff and training before or after work with him: long-distance runs some days, speed drills on others, plyometrics to boost power, weightlifting for strength. Like her dad, she keeps a daily training diary, logging the details of her workout and her performance -- always looking for pat- terns, for clues to take her to the next level. -- Bob Foote was equally detail-oriented during his intense running days. He logged his routes, his times. He even stepped on a scale daily and jotted his weight into his training diary. So he was surprised one morning in the late 1980s when his weight was up five pounds. He felt puffy. His joints were stiff. He wondered if he had arthritis. Soon, the symptoms were so severe that Foote was bedridden. His condition stumped doctors until one figured it out: He had systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease more commonly found in women. Patients' blood vessels inflame, affecting not only the body's connective tissue, but also its vital organs. In Foote's case, the disease caused his kidneys to fail, but did not affect his other major organs. Medication controlled the lupus, but by 1987, with his kidneys shutting down, Foote went on dialysis. A year and a half later, doctors at Oregon Health Sciences University performed a kidney transplant. "From Day 1, he was unusual," says Dr. Richard Parker, Foote's nephrologist, now with Northwest Renal Clinic. He remembers that even during his exhausting months on dialysis, Foote insisted on running and lifting weights. "His response to the disease -- it's simply a function of his mentality," says Parker, who also is a runner. "He's compulsive and knows what he wants to get done. Very little seems to get in the way." After a year and a half, Foote's new kidney failed, forcing him back on dialysis for a year, until another kidney match could be found. In 1992, an accident victim's kidney looked like an ideal match for Foote. As he lay on the operating table, before the anesthetic took effect, he tapped in to the same visualization technique he used when designing buildings -- one in which he could see himself moving through a space, with all its nooks and crannies, windows and doors. This time, though, Foote pictured himself on the Wildwood Trail in Forest Park. The morning sun was streaming through the trees, and he was setting off on a five-mile run. "If I can just do that again . . . " Foote thought. After the surgery, doctors told Foote not even to think about running for a year. He lifted weights and played golf instead, exceeding doctors' recovery expectations. At the nine-month mark, they gave him the go-ahead. He could run again. "A successful kidney transplant, gives people the chance to rehabilitate their lives," Parker says. "The individual has to take that opportunity and run with it. That's what Bob has done. . . . He has pushed the envelope." -- Some say Foote has pushed the Hood to Coast envelope too far. The complaints reached an all-time high in 1990, when massive traffic jams caused by team vans created gridlock in the Coast Range. People who lived along the relay route fumed that they were held hostage on their property, with strangers' vehicles blocking their driveways, with runners leaving garbage and even human waste behind in their frenzy to reach the beach. Runners complained, too: the T-shirts were of lousy quality; the relay provided no aid stations; a serious shortage of porta-potties left participants in desperate straits. Clatsop County commissioners one year threatened to write an ordinance that would effectively ban the relay. And after the 1990 traffic fiasco -- when Foote publicly apologized to runners at the awards ceremony -- participation dropped for the first time. His ego shaken, Foote knew he had serious problems to solve or the relay would be history. He was not accustomed to losing. In business, as in sports, timing can be everything. When another architectural firm suggested a merger, Foote saw opportunity: If he could find a way to work only 20 hours a week as an architect, then he could spend the other 20 hours a week on Hood to Coast. He could refine it, could help it grow, could quiet the criticism through better planning. Besides, he figured after his second transplant, "I might not get a third chance here." With help from LaSala, his friend and financial adviser, and an attorney set to do battle with public officials about the relay, Foote did what he always has done: He found a way to win. He succeeded by leaving architecture behind altogether and working on Hood to Coast full time. A business plan followed. So did a staff, a paid board of directors, sponsorships. Hood to Coast went corporate, and the changes ruffled feathers in parts of Portland's old-time running community, which held onto its amateur, races-should-be-nonprofit philosophy as though it were a relay baton. Foote's response: Times have changed. Hood to Coast is athletic, sure, but it's entertainment, too, and entertainment costs. Besides, the relay filled so fast he was turning away teams by the hundreds. He did make a profit, but the relay also gave numerous communities along the route and charities an opportunity to raise money; the American Cancer Society, for instance, brought in $13,571 in pledges from last year's relay. The event became nearly as much a part of summer in Oregon as the Rose Festival. "I was fortunate enough to forge a business out of my favorite thing to do: run," he says. And so, Friday, when he rolls out of bed long before the sun and heads for the starting line to watch the 17th running of the Hood to Coast Relay, Bob Foote will wait eagerly for his favorite word: "Go!" Then, he says, "There's no stopping it. I just ride the wave." You can reach Katy Muldoon at 503-221-8526 or by e-mail at katymuldoon@news.oregonian.com.