Bloomsday Perennial: Doug Clark put the ‘Finish’ in Bloomsday

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.

The two reunited on a nearby road. “Of all the things she brought with her, she packed all my Bloomsday shirts,” he said.

His wife of 40 years, who died last year, had participated in many Bloomsdays herself, but Clark said she made sure to grab his collection, not hers. The fire came within a couple hundred feet of their home, but it was unscathed.

Clark, who grew up in Pullman, had moved to Spokane before the inaugural Bloomsday in 1977.

“I don’t take any credit for signing up for Bloomsday,” he said. “It was my brother’s idea. We were running a little bit. I don’t think I’d run over three miles.”

The two started the race together, but Clark soon fell behind. “My brother is much faster than I am,” he said.

Clark struggled with the heat that first year. “I thought it was way too long and way too hot,” he said. “In those days, you went down Doomsday Hill. Boy, going up Meenach was a killer. It was really brutal.”

But still, something was sparked in Clark. He joined a YMCA running clinic that would eventually morph into the Spokane Roadrunners Club.

“Running was the thing to do in those days,” he said. “I found a pretty good support crew.”

Clark managed to finish the race in just over 44 minutes one year.

“That was when I was young,” he said. “That might have been 1984. I was pretty competitive. I tried to run pretty fast.”

Clark, no relation to a former Spokesman-Review columnist with the same name, said he also started to volunteer with Bloomsday around 1980 when he was asked to make some signs. He made the section signs for each starting group, plus the age group signs in the packet pickup area.

“I did them all by hand,” he said. “Starting in January, I would start getting requests for signs.”

A couple years after that, Clark was recruited to paint the finish line the day before race day, but he could not find the proper paint in time.

“I spent all Saturday afternoon running around trying to find paint,” he said.

The next year, he procured enough purple paint that would wash off in the rain and painted the finish line, assisted by his wife and volunteers who kept racers from walking in the fresh paint. Clark said he would do an outline in chalk, then fill it in. He always arrived around 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. on race day to get it done.

“I would paint a line about a foot wide and above that paint ‘Finish’ in large letters,” he said. “I didn’t have time to do anything fancy. The trick was to get it done so it could dry before the race.”

Clark continued the annual task until he hung up his paint brush in 2006. “It was kind of fun, actually,” he said.

Along the way Clark participated in several marathons, including the Coeur d’Alene Marathon. For 11 years, he also competed in the Le Grizz 50-mile ultramarathon in Montana. Bloomsday became such an easy race for him that he would often do it twice on race day, either by finishing and then looping around to the start line to do it again or reversing course at the finish line to run it backwards.

But those days are behind Clark, who will turn 78 in March. “Now I’m just pretty much strictly a walker,” he said. “I never knew what the back of the pack was like for the longest time. It’s totally different.”

In 2025, Clark finished the race in two hours and 22 minutes and he is fine with that.

“I just like the crowds, seeing all the people,” he said. “It’s just a wonderful event.”

Clark still walks three days a week to keep in shape and also swims. “I have to,” he said. “I can’t do it cold turkey. The only time I did that was the first year and boy did I regret that.”

He plans to be in downtown Spokane on the first Sunday in May for the 50th race and to hopefully keep going for many years after that.

“I’ve thought about that,” he said. “I think I’ll keep going until I can’t go any further.”