Kardong Still Merits Most Of The Credit

Let’s try one of those “It’s a Wonderful Life” tricks, where they take Jimmy Stewart back and let him see what his town would have been like if he’d never lived there.

Except we’re going to do it with Don Kardong.

Come with us now, it’s Sunday morning, May 7, 1995.

Like most sleepy Sundays in the spring, the streets of downtown Spokane are deserted.

Shops are closed. There’s never much business on Sundays, you know.

Elite road racers all over the world are off on training runs in their hometowns. After all, there are no good races anywhere today.

Sixty thousand or so people sleep in late, scarf down giant artery-clogging breakfasts and casually read the Sunday paper - maybe with a coffee and a smoke.

No discarded clothing is hanging from the trees of Riverside Avenue. Not a single porta-potty can be seen. No beach balls, no vultures, no cheering nuns.

And in the minds of people from outside the area, Spokane seems like a nice town, sure, but one that just doesn’t quite have an identity, doesn’t really have an event to define its personality.

None of which is the case, of course.

And as much as he wants to downplay his involvement, Kardong, the founder of the Bloomsday race, is the reason.

“The little nudge I gave it at the beginning, I’m pretty proud of that,” Kardong said of the event to which he gave birth, nurtured and watched grow into the largest timed road race in the world.

“I never really thought it through. I just said, ‘Hey, let’s do this little thing downtown,’ ” he said. “The thing that is impressive is that that the community, and specific individuals in the community, saw that it could be a good thing.”

Veterans of the race know that Kardong - an Olympic marathoner in 1976 - supplied far more than a “little nudge.”

“Don is very good at deflecting praise,” said two-time Bloomsday winner Jon Sinclair. “He’s very modest and is the first to say this is a committee effort, and the whole thing was just an idea he tossed off and other people picked it up and ran with it.

“But I hope everybody knows that without Don, without his ideas and his energy, his insight and his brilliance, this race would never be where it is.”

Now, Kardong is responsible for bringing in the field of elite runners - those who are toweling off at the finish line at about the same time the strollers are getting up to the starting line.

“There are a lot of races I go to that have a lot of money, but they never reach the magnitude of this one, and most of that is because Don does such a great job providing the environment for great racing,” Sinclair said.

No one, certainly, has such a visceral understanding of what this race - which in so many ways captures and focuses the energy of the community - has become.

In 1987, Kardong wrote about the race for this paper - in a style arguably better than the rest of us here use on a daily basis: “Did you ever think it would get this big? folks inquire these days as if asking the doctor in a sci-fi movie about the quivering blob of protoplasm that is slowly, inexorably, devouring the city (not a bad description of Bloomsday, come to think of it.)” he wrote.

Top-rate writing. And not bad running, either.

Decked out in a singlet that had more colors than a USA Today weather map, the 46-year-old Kardong covered the familiar 12-kilometer path in 42:18.

“I never fail to set my goal too high,” he joked, having hoped to crack 42 minutes.

But that was a strong effort considering the organizational distractions he must face.

More importantly, Kardong’s mind was back in the pack with his wife Bridgid.

Bridgid had promised to run this race with their youngest daughter. This spring, though, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. And although she started chemotherapy treatments 10 days ago, she completed the event and fulfilled her promise.

The prognosis “is very good,” Kardong said, adding that it might serve as a lesson for other women. “It was early detection, so we’re feeling very positive. It was detected a year earlier - with a mammogram - than it would have been otherwise.”

It’s the type of development that leads some to reevaluate priorities and question their direction. Kardong doesn’t have to. “I think I’ve always known what the really important things are for me.”

Maybe that is the best legacy a man can have.

In Kardong’s case, though, as long as a race is run in Spokane on the first Sunday in May, his name will be inextricably linked with it.

“I think I’m too young to think about that,” he said. “The thing is, I’m still astounded when I see this thing and how it works and comes together.

“That’s a real thrill for me. And I take a lot of pride in whatever part I’ve played in that.”

He should, because it’s a wonderful race.