Belle Brigade 2024

We raced back in August, but I am catching up. We are already accepted into the race for 2025, so you’ll hear from me on this topic again next year, too!

Belle Brigade is the name of our Portland to Coast team that speed walks 120 miles from the city of Portland to the coastal town of Seaside every August. We’ve done it four times now and I’ve been with the team since the early days, when we formed as a group before the pandemic, got chosen in the lottery, then couldn’t race because of the pandemic.

It was my second year as Captain, and it’s time to pass on the reigns to the next woman. In 2025, our Captain is Alexandra, in the photo above, she’s the red head on my left. Alex has our total support and she has already launched herself heartily into the role. It’s a tough job, wrangling a team of 12 busy female veterans all year long, trying to keep us interested, in shape, and getting prepared for the grueling 2-day race. The Captain also has to find 3 volunteers, 2 vans to carry us all, and 2 drivers. We promised to have her back and I know she will do a great job.

My regular readers have heard about this race from me, so it’s old news. But if you didn’t know, there is a gigantic running relay race every August known as the Hood to Coast, that covers 190 miles from the Timberline Lodge on the slopes of Mt. Hood to the sandy beaches of Seaside, Oregon. There is a simultaneous race called the Portland to Coast that covers 120 miles, consisting of walking teams, and that’s what our team is. Everyone around here has heard of it, even if they have not been involved, because for two days you can see the runners and walkers beside the road. There are about 18,000 participants, plus organizers, volunteers, and crews supporting them, so that is like a whole additional city that scoots slowly along the highways and backroads and neighborhood streets from point A to point B.

Van 1 starts us off, at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), beside the Willamette River in Portland. Each woman speed walks her segment, which is from 3.5 miles to nearly 8 miles long (depends on terrain and safe places to put exchange points), then hands off a slap bracelet to the next woman. (I’m saying “woman,” but one person on our team is non-binary. They told me it’s ok to keep referring to it as an all-woman team.) When the sixth woman finishes her leg of the race, she slaps the bracelet onto the wrist of the first woman on Van 2, and then all the ladies in Van 1 go eat and rest for about 7-8 hours, till it’s time to take over again.

Each person on the walking teams has two legs, and each person on the running teams has three legs. There are special exceptions for teams that can get permission to have 8-member teams, and I spotted a van that had only 6 members.

As you have noticed, we are glaringly purple-themed. Since we’re all veterans, we chose the purple camouflage, and then anything else purple we can wear, like purple shoes and purple earrings and purple tutus. (Even the van driver wears purple!) Many of the other teams have their own themes, and there is often an element of humor.

In the photo above, you can see the vehicle magnets I made for all our sponsors on the back of the van. We have been asking veteran-owned or -centric businesses for sponsorship, and we get more support each year. This is the first year we have not personally had to spend anything on this very expensive race.

This year it was already becoming daylight when Alexandra started us off at our official start time. Usually, we start in the dark. But a two-day race means that we experience all times of day and everyone ends up in the dark eventually. I am on Van 2, and our van starts during midday on Friday. Last year, temperatures were in the 80s (27-29 C) and racing in the direct sun was really hard on us. It was even hard for me and I LOVE the heat and sun. This year was cool and rainy, and my ladies were SO HAPPY. I thought they were nuts to prefer rain, but as long as they are happy, I am happy.

The next time we handed off to the other van, it was total darkness. Now, imagine a wide field of grasses and blackberry bushes holding a thousand team vans and many thousands of people. Imagine that it is the middle of the night and raining, and you have to park your van and begin wandering through the sopping wet grass, shielding your eyes from the rain and the glaring headlamps that everyone wears, looking for another van with purple stuff on it. It’s madness.

We came up with a trick two years ago: Big giant white blow-up tubes that light up inside. We call them the tampons. We put pompoms on ours for hair, gave her a hat, and called her Tina, because Van 1 had named theirs Tammy.

I don’t know about the people in the van, but I put in earplugs to deal with the noise, and my sleeping bag over my head to deal with the light, and I slept remarkably well. My phone alarm woke us up after five hours, and we packed up our wet camp gear and dragged it all back to the van. It was time to begin racing again.

By mid-afternoon we had finally come down out of the mountains and were at the beach.

Our final racer this year was Steffanie, and when she was spotted on her approach to the finish, a man with a loudspeaker called out our team number, and we gathered into corrals beside the finish line to wait for her. When she reached us, we all entered the race course and finished together as a team, the drivers too! We also invited Ashley’s son, Beau, to finish with us.

The finish line is in the middle of a humongous beach party, with not only the thousands of participants, but their thousands of supporters. It is madness, and not many on our team are interested in joining them while we are exhausted. We usually make our way through them all, and off to the beach. Because, the ocean is right there and we want to touch it!

Thanks for coming along! What a crazy fun adventure this is, every year. It’s always uncomfortable, and we are always hungry, and stinky, and cramped, and inconvenienced. And it lasts nearly three days because we gather on Thursday to get our gear loaded, and our uniforms and bibs, and pack the vans, and decorate, then eat, and hug everyone goodbye and a few hours after that Van 1 begins. So why do we do it?

Because somehow, all that craziness is fun. It’s fun to be stuck walking in the pouring rain and to have the story to tell. It’s fun to take a chance on a $15 cruddy microwaved hamburger at 1:30 am because you’re starving, and it turns out to be the worst burger you ever choked down, but you tell yourself you are glad to have donated to the kids’ ball team that the money went to. It’s fun to sleep in a wet field of blackberry vines. It’s fun to smoosh yourself into the back seat of a van between other people’s elbows and BO and accidentally sit on a cinnamon gummy bear and accidentally drink from the wrong water bottle that has a weird flavor of electrolytes mixed in the water. It’s fun to live on a diet of terriyaki jerky, ginger chews, cheddar cubes, hummus and carrot sticks for two days (except for that burger, which was awful).

Because everyone else you meet is having a blast and you realize you are too. Everyone is laughing in line at the foul porta potties, at each other’s funny team names and great van decorations, at each other’s yawning tired faces, and crazy messy hair and smeared makeup, and at 14 layers of clothes because we didn’t realize how cold it would get and didn’t bring a jacket. It’s a shared event of myriad miseries, like the military itself actually, and it’s those kinds of events that bond people to each other.