It was about a 6 hour bus ride from Sunnyside, WA to Tillamook, OR. Hydrangea Ranch is a few miles outside of Tillamook in the rolling green hills of western Oregon. I battled carsickness for most of bus ride (such a curse!) on those curvy country roads, but survived without any serious problems. Jay listened to audiobooks on the iPad while playing games. Rose and Amber watched movies on our old cell phone, in a baggie, taped to the back of the seat in front of them--a trick I developed last year during the inevitably long bus rides of cross country season in the wide wide west. Amber and Rose both get carsick and pukey if they look anywhere but forward during car rides, but somehow they can watch movies as long as the screen has them sit looking forward.
The teenagers draped all over the bus, talking and listening to music peacefully. Partway through the drive, Jeff and I joined a few kids in a game of "Botticelli" which is a fun verbal guessing game. Eventually we trundled through Portland traffic, twisted through the remote western Oregon lanes, and arrived at Hydrangea Ranch. The bus pulled precariously down a gravel road, executed a hairpin turn, bounced along into some grass, and deposited us with our small mountain of STUFF in the middle of the field. Jeff immediately took the team on a shake-out run while I stayed behind to watch our kids and do some setup. I heaped the gear onto a massive tarp and began setting up tents. Jay, Rose, and Amber love tents. We set up two tents long before the team returned from their run. Eventually the high schoolers returned and Jeff and I helped them set up their tents before heading to the pavilion for a spaghetti dinner.
Friday night's activities included dinner, a short keynote speaker, and a showing of the excellent running movie, McFarland USA. Jay, Rose, and Amber opted to hang out in our tent rather than watch the movie, and when we returned to the campsite, they were all asleep. It was almost too good to be true, but they slept all night. Champions! The team fell asleep MUCH faster than I expected the to. We had five girls in one tent, and the 11 boys divided between three tents. Jay, Rose, and Amber slept in another tent, and Jeff and I had a big 6 man tent to ourselves. Space is such a luxury in a tent! The flat freshly-mowed grassy field was the most comfortable piece of ground I have ever slept on, and I slept quite well, with only a handful of brief wake-ups. Jeff's sore ribs and back were aching so he did not get quite the rest that I did, but Saturday dawned nonetheless.
We had everyone up and at 'em by 7am. I ate a quick quality muffin (I made almond-oat-blueberry protein power muffins at home and packed myself several) and got ready for the 3 mile open race. I ran it last year and it was just too much fun to pass up. Rose popped out of her tent declaring that she wanted to run the quarter-mile kids' race so she could have first dibs on the mud pit. The kids' race was first. Rose charged into the mud pit, took a few labored steps, and then got stuck fast up to her thighs, right in the murky muddy middle. She wallowed for a while, sinking further and further, until a nice lady on the sidelines reeeeeached way out, grabbed her hand, and unstuck her, pulling her over to the rope railing on the side. I was watching from the opposite side and laughing my head off. In spite of her difficulties, Rose somehow didn't fall in the mud and hardly even got any on her clothes!
Next it was my turn. The mud pit was at the end of the first mile of the 3-mile course. At the starting line and throughout the first mile, I heard people around me discussing and debating their mud pit strategies. As I approached the pit, I could not decide on a strategy! So I charged in the middle, then angled myself towards the rope handrail on the right side. Good thing I did too, because the center section of the mud was extra thick and I needed that rope to pull myself along. Someone leaped/flopped next to me and my face got splattered in mud--right into my open mouth! I was spluttering, spitting, and laughing while I struggled my way out of the pit. It went better and faster than I expected, and soon I was running off to the first river crossing, my clunky chunky mud-covered shoes weighing ten pounds each. Once I washed the heavy mud from my shoes while crossing the river, I kicked it into gear again and found that I still had plenty of energy left! So I pushed it and passed some people, crossed the river again, and then got passed on the uphill. I managed to pass one lady back on the downhill and then hung on for dear life to the wake of another female coach whose t-shirt said "Give! Give! Give!" on the back. I gave. She out-sprinted me in the final 100 meters, but I was the third female finisher, 25th overall, and I knocked 35 seconds off of last year's time. Success!
Cross country is just so much fun, especially after this past year where I have run the most miles the most consistently since college. I had more to give! That felt good, since it rarely happens in other more taxing parts of life, like motherhood and such. I was not exactly planning on giving such a play-by-play of my race, but when I started typing, out it came! The rest of the day involved plenty more running, and watching races, and running around cheering during races. I re-discovered how difficult it is to take care of myself while acting as both coach and parent at a cross country meet. I did not have time to eat anything after that first muffin until noon! It was also hard to eat because I kept needing to run--run to warm up the team, run to cheer them on, run their cool down with them. It was great fun watching and cheering on our team! The girls took on the mud pit with gusto. The course officials accidentally misdirected them and their race was an entire mile shorter than it was supposed to be. They were disappointed because they didn't realize it was over until it was too late to sprint to the finish. But they recovered their good spirits and we had a fun time jogging our cool down together and stopping in the river to wash off their very muddy everything.
We watched the boys run in two races and cheered, gasped, and laughed right along with the huge crowd around the mud pit. Our number 1 runner got all the style points when he did a memorable swan-dive-belly-flop into the mud and then clawed his way out, completely covered head to toe in mud. I didn't even recognize him when he ran past me towards the finish line, he was so caked in mud. A hilarious trio of our boys did a round of leap frog in the mud pit before miring down and pulling each other out. We were laughing our heads off! Another one of our runners completely lost both of his shoes in the depths of the pit but he was so muddy upon exiting that the race officials didn't know his shoes were gone and he ran the last two miles of the race in muddy socks! (the rule was no racing without shoes)
The whole atmosphere of this meet was FUN. Due to the long deep mud pit and two river crossings, nobody expected to run fast times, and that took the pressure off and allowed the kids to simply tackle the challenge, compete against the guy up ahead, and see what happened. I loved watching our team goof off and be silly together. Teenagers really know how to have fun. Everyone returned to our team tent bursting to tell us all about their experience in the mud and in the river, bright-eyed with excitement. THAT is why we chose to come back to this exhausting overnight meet. We want to kindle that fire of excitement and interest in cross country! It was satisfying to see the kids talk about running their races with as much excitement as we feel about running and coaching them.
Our exit from the meet was a bit of a death march for three reasons: we were all bone weary, hungry, and our bus was far away. None of us had cell phone reception to call our bus driver to ask her to pick us up, so we had to lug all of our heavy camping gear half a mile down the road to the field where the buses were parked. In retrospect, we could have sent one person down to ask her to come get us, but as I said, we were TIRED and a bit frazzled by that point, so we marched.
As we were walking and lugging along, I suddenly realized that I couldn't see Amber anywhere. I called over to Jeff, asking if he had her. He did not. Amber was nowhere to be found. I dropped the heavy plastic bins I was dragging and went back to search the crowded field of team tents. Nada. Amber was not there. Our team was strung out in a long line along the road, and Jeff dashed ahead to the front to see if Amber had followed one of the teenage girls that she practically worships. But he was so far away that I couldn't see him and we still had no cell service so I kept combing the milling teams, over and over, for her bobbing blonde curls. My friend Tara helped me search (her daughter is on our team). We looked and looked and I said countless silent prayers that kept my rising panic at bay until I saw Jeff dashing back down towards us, signaling that he had found Amber up front in the line with her teenage buddy, Marlee. Relief swamped me.
I joined the caboose of the slowly moving team, lugging my heavy plastic bin up the hill and down the road. It felt like forever before we rounded the bend and saw the school bus parking area! Our shoulders and arms were aching from the weight of bulky camping gear after a long day of running and racing. But at last we shoved our STUFF into the belly 'o the bus, clambered aboard, did a quick roll call, and rolled out, bus bouncing through the rolling grassy field.
On the bus ride home, a sing-off started: the girls in the front of the bus sang Taylor Swift and the boys in the back of the bus sang Disney's Let it Go. It was hilarious. We stopped for dinner at Five Guys outside of Portland. Since we brought PBJ supplies for lunch, we had a cushy amount of team food money left (all in five and ten dollar bills--it was a wad). Jeff stood at the cash register in Five Guys and paid for each individual order. He still had some money left so he told anyone who wanted more to come back through. $13 per person went quite far at Five Guys! The school district paid for the runners, and we paid for our own. Jay and Rose devoured bacon cheeseburgers and milkshakes, and Amber ate peanuts. We got her a strawberry shake--her favorite flavor--but all she wanted was the whipped cream off the top and those interesting roasted peanuts. She likes cracking the shells and eating the salty treasure inside.
It was raining when we left Five Guys, and we drove through a very wet thunderstorm with plenty of lightning all through the Columbia River Gorge. I dozed while listening to an excellent full-cast audiobook production of Jane Austen's Emma. Jeff and I talked with the kids sitting closest to us. We talked with each other. We agreed about every half hour of the entire ride home how NICE it was not to be driving (last year we each drove a 15 passenger van and it was exhausting and stressful). Our kids watched movies and listened to audibooks again. Amber was drooping by the time we pulled into the high school at 10pm. I quickly settled my 3 children into our van, where they all fell asleep (except maybe night-owl Jay). Then I waited on the curb with Jeff for that last family to pick up that last runner. We got home at 10:30pm--almost exactly 36 hours after we left.
The Coaches White, wearing Grizzly red and ready to go!
Makeshift/junky phone stand for movies on the move.
Jay gets so bored on the bus, haha--thank goodness he had his audiobooks to listen to!
When we pulled up to Hydrangea Ranch, everyone crowded over to get a first glimpse. The ranch is settled in a small valley down below the high road, so we had a good view of the place from the bus while driving to the entrance. I love it when teenagers show INTEREST and excitement.
Setting up camp, right up against a corn field. Hector found a SNAKE right where we were setting up our tents. He picked it up and carried it about ten feet away and let it go. We were horrified. I wanted him to hammer throw it into the corn. Thankfully we saw no more snakes during our stay, but I did overhear another team talking about a snake they saw.
Amber calls it "tenting"
Dinner was spaghetti with a massive wedge of cheese baked on top. Jay ate his like a sandwich it was so stiff.
Dinner table.
Inside the tent with a nice corny backdrop. They love the tent!
I took a predawn port-a-potty trip and the view was so...creepy.
Jeff, Jay, and Rose carried our small tent a quarter mile to the race start area so people would have a place to change clothes if needed, but it mostly ended up being an amazing corral for kids. The Condie family came to watch their daughter Kaylee run, and our kids play so well with their kids, it was like a party in the tiny tent.
All set up for a day at the races.
Rose's race: she's in pink, right in the middle.
Mud pit exit--as the day progressed, the mud got more and more mixed together and that grass leading out of the pit became caked in mud so it was like an extended mud pit.
Rose in her mud stockings.
My turn! That rope was so helpful.
Aftermath
Selfie with two random hilarious shameless photo-bombers.
One of our runners brought this funny blow-up chair.
The girls after the mud pit
Washing off
Thundering stampede at the boys' start. It was a bit scary to watch that herd of testosterone jockey for position during the first hundred meters.
Mud pit madness. One of those guys is ours.
Some of the boys in varying states of muddiness.
Jay and his buddy Jordy.
Hamburgers are MANNA after a long day at a cross country meet.
These girls fell asleep in about 10 seconds flat when I draped them into our van at 10pm.
It's shocking how MUCH can be crammed into a mere 36 hours.
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