‘I’m all out of T-shirts’: Jack Tenold plans to finish 49th Bloomsday, cancer be damned

Jack Tenold isn’t sure if he’ll be able to make it to the starting line for the 50th Bloomsday, but he knows he’s finishing his 49th, oxygen concentrator and batteries on his back, family by his side.

He was a 31-year-old lawyer when he ran the first Bloomsday in 1977, back when it was a full 8 miles and the route went over the Maple Street Bridge, 1,100 people scampering along the narrow path next to traffic – they didn’t close down the streets back then – as the bridge’s streetlights swayed to their collective gait.

He insists he was never a real runner, nor did he particularly train for the first or the next 47 Bloomsdays. But that first race he lined up just behind elite women runners, thinking he could keep pace awhile.

“I never even saw them,” he said. “That gun went off and all you say was dust and legs and arms and they were gone.”

Jack managed, however, to finish the inaugural Bloomsday in about an hour.

He ran again the next year, and the next. By the fourth Bloomsday, he was running with Tana, a woman he had gone to high school with and by then planned to marry.

“I used to dip her pigtails in the inkwell,” he grinned during an interview.

“I never had long hair,” Tana Tenold quipped.

“And there wasn’t any ink in the inkwells,” Jack admitted.

He kept running, year after year, not because he had anything to prove, he said. It was a community event, one of the best to ever come out of Spokane. The free T-shirts at the end didn’t hurt, at first just one at the end of each race, and eventually two, when Bloomsday organizers began recognizing the perennials who had participated every year since the start.

“I’ve got so many shirts, I’m giving them to people all over the country,” Jack chuckled.

By 1980, running Bloomsday had become a habit.

“One time I said, I quit, and then at the last day or so Tana said, you can’t quit, you have to keep doing it now, so I paid the late fee and did it,” Jack said. “One time I slept in past 9 o’clock, and the starting time was nine – there was only one starting time then – but I got up and ran down to PM Jacoys there at Sprague and Washington, and there they were, the last people crossing the starting line.”

He’s run with the flu, when it rained and even when it’s snowed.

“The tough part about being a perennial is doing it every year, no matter what,” Jack said. “That’s the real thing about Bloomsday, you are there at that moment, and you have to do it now. It doesn’t matter if it’s raining or snowing – you had a conflict? Well, now you’re not a perennial anymore.”

In October 2023, Jack was told he had bronchitis. It lingered through the winter, into spring, through that year’s race, which he completed in two hours and 40 minutes.

In May he called a lung doctor and was told they could get him in that September.

“I said, September? Has anyone ever died waiting to get in there?” Jack recalled. “Anyway, I held out three of the four months.”

Last August, he walked out of the house and down the hill a short way to grab the mail. He couldn’t walk back up the hill.

At the hospital, doctors pulled two and a half liters of fluid out of his lung – five pounds of fluid, Jack remembers. He was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. Not long after, he fell and broke a knee and his ribs.

“I wasn’t sure I was gonna last two more weeks,” Jack said. “I didn’t feel that bad, I was just beaten up. I could hardly breathe, and I looked pretty bad.”

“And then we had our 60th high school reunion, so I went to that and looked horrible,” he added. “So everybody in my high school class is amazed that we’re still standing. I’m amazed that, well, not just standing, but walking another race, doing Bloomsday.”

Jack has recovered significantly since then and put weight back on, though he still struggles to breathe. But as long as he can still walk, he’s not losing his perennial status, for a simple reason:

“He needs a new T-shirt,” Tana said.

“I’m totally out of T-shirts,” Jack laughed.

The race has given Jack a goal, something to force him to go on the roughly 3-mile circuit from home to the nearby park, do a couple laps and return home.

“It’s very easy to plant yourself in a chair, you know, and to just take your medicine,” Tana said. “We all know that everybody needs to keep moving, and he needs to keep moving. So after Bloomsday–”

“We’ll have to rest,” Jack interjected.

“We’ll do some more walking,” Tana finished.

The route has been thoroughly planned out. Jack will have his 5-pound oxygen concentrator on his back, Tana will carry a spare battery or two, and their daughter and her family will catch up with more than enough spares. There will be periodic oxygen level checks, five rest stops going up Doomsday Hill, three stops on the other two big hills, and three or four more sprinkled on the rest of the race.

“But you know, even then, that’s only, what, about 10 or 12 – let’s say 12 for three minutes, that’s 40 minutes knocked off our time, so we should be fine,” Jack said.

Told it’s surprising he’s still concerned about his time, Jack cut in.

“Well you don’t want to be stupid,” he said.

“They close the course!” Tana added.

“I mean, we’ll be back there with the street sweepers,” Jack said. “Yeah, there’ll be a truck making sure there’s no bodies, following along.

No, no, we’ll be faster than that.”

Jack Tenold has participated in every Bloomsday since its inception and intends to walk it for the 49th time in spite of his stage 4 lung cancer.