Bloomsday Perennials

Kris Olson-Wood has completed all 49 Bloomsday races, but one of her fondest Bloomsday memories didn’t happen on race day.

There’s no doubt of Steve Moe’s love for Bloomsday. It’s tattooed on his calf.

Charlie Bean has completed all 49 Bloomsdays, several of them accompanied by his wife, Carol. One year, he accidentally ran the race wearing his wife’s number, not his own, requiring a phone call to race founder Don Kardong to fix the error so he could maintain his Perennial status.

For 20 years, Bill Sleeth had a party in his backyard after he ran each Bloomsday, but he decided to quit throwing his annual bash the year the neighbors called the police twice.

Retired ophthalmologist and eye surgeon Jeff Snow is 79 now, but that doesn’t stop his body from having an instinctive reaction every time a Bloomsday race starts.

Ron Douglas was not a runner when one of his friends recruited him to sign up for the first Bloomsday together in 1977, but he went along with it for one important reason: a promised six-pack of beer at the finish line.

Bloomsday Perennial Roger Aldrich once sprinted across the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, shouting and waving his hands as airline personnel prepared to shut the doors on his connecting flight back to Spokane the night before Bloomsday. Weather had delayed his first flight from Washington, D.C.

Running Bloomsday every year has been so important for Perennial Dennis Doyle that when one of his daughters announced that she wanted to attend the University of Portland, he told her immediately that he would not be attending her graduation because the university always holds its graduation ceremony on the first Sunday in May.

Bloomsday perennial Doug Clark vividly remembers the day in 1996 when he was driving back to his Seven Mile home from a fishing trip and saw a huge column of smoke that looked suspiciously close to his house. He called his wife Pam, who said she was throwing some essentials, including all their cats, in the car and evacuating.