Bloomsday Perennial: Jack Tenold, fighting Stage 4 lung cancer, doesn’t think he’ll have the strength for race’s 50th year
Bloomsday Perennial Jack Tenold, who has been fighting Stage 4 lung cancer since 2024, finished his most recent Bloomsday with his family by his side and an oxygen concentrator on his back. He already knows he won’t be able to do the 50th Bloomsday in May.
“I’m not going to do it,” he said. “I can’t walk that far.”
Tenold had been taking chemotherapy pills, but they stopped working. His doctors just recently switched him to a chemotherapy infusion. He struggles to stand and walk and is on oxygen constantly.
Tenold, 79, said he only wants to remain a Bloomsday Perennial – those who have run each year since the annual event started – if he can complete the race under his own leg power.
“I’m not going to take a wheelchair,” he said. “I’m adamant.”
While he’s disappointed not to be able to complete the 50th race, he’s satisfied with how far he’s come.
“Forty-nine is a legitimate milestone,” he said.
Like many Perennials, Tenold wasn’t much of a runner when Bloomsday started. He signed up after seeing the race advertised in the newspaper.
“I wasn’t doing anything else,” he said. “I thought, ‘That will be fun.’ It was.”
He recalls lining up behind the elite women runners with the goal to keep up with them for the first mile, but he never saw them after the start.
“There was no separation in those days,” he said of the starting line. “They were gone like the wind, so fast.”
One year, in the early 1980s, he overslept on race day, waking at 9 a.m.
“I didn’t set my alarm,” he said. “Back then there was only one starting time. I thought to myself, well, I can still make it.”
At the time he lived on the South Hill, and he ran downtown to the starting line.
“There were three or four young ladies running across the starting line,” he said. “As a result, I was in the race. I immediately caught up with the others. I was pretty soon in the horde. I joined right in, joined up, had a decent time.”
Bloomsday became an event around which he and his wife, Tana, planned family trips. He accumulated memories to go along with his collection of finisher T-shirts, including the second Bloomsday when he was joined by his brother, Bob, who has since died.
“We were close,” he said.
Tenold said he appreciates founder Don Kardong starting Bloomsday, which in turn helped inspire other local road races.
“Those races were all born out of Bloomsday,” he said. “He’s done a good job with this whole program.”
Tenold, who has never smoked, was told he had bronchitis in late 2023. It lingered. After he struggled through the 2024 Bloomsday, he called a lung doctor and was told he had to wait until September for an appointment. In August of that year, he couldn’t walk back up the hill to his house after getting the mail. He went to the hospital, where doctors removed 2.5 liters of fluid from his lung.
After his treatment began, he rallied. He kept walking, preparing for the 2025 Bloomsday. He and his family planned the race meticulously, down to the number of rest stops on Doomsday Hill and stops to check his oxygen levels. He was accompanied by his wife, daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter, most of whom carried spare batteries for his oxygen concentrator.
Tenold’s official time for that 49th race was 4 hours, 47 minutes, the last of the perennials to cross the finish line. He was slowed down after his number didn’t scan at the 2-mile mark and he had to turn back half a mile, adding another mile to his race. He finished with the street sweepers, but he finished.
A photo taken after the race shows Tenold smiling, standing next to his family.
“That was lovely,” Tenold said of doing the race with his family. “That was probably my most memorable.”
Though Tenold is a realist about not being able to participate in the 50th Bloomsday, he holds out hope that maybe, just maybe, he’ll be downtown on the first Sunday in May.
“I’ve been down pretty low before, but I came back,” he said.
“Who knows, maybe he’ll rally,” his wife said.