Stories on the run

Well, that was cooler than I thought it would be.

Forty-thousand people lined up to run or walk through the Bloomsday course looks like way more than you’d think. At the start-finish line, Spokane’s Riverside Avenue was a sea of human bodies. This picture does it no justice.

I covered the elite women’s race for the S-R, riding in the bed of a pickup truck through the 7.46 mile (12K meter) course that winds around what is probably the hilliest part of Spokane. The top runners were mostly skinny, 90 lb. Kenyan women, which made interviewing slightly tougher.

If you subscribe to S-R.com, you can read my article here.

But the coolest thing about Bloomsday, I thought, was that as you meander down the race course, you pass at least a dozen garage bands just jamming along the side of the street. In driveways! On street corners! On those little islands in large intersections!

Anyway, for some reason I didn’t take a picture of any bands. But they were there.

And I had to take this picture on my drive back home to Pullman. It was such a nice day.