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Willamette Valley Road Runners (WVRR)
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The Road To Hana:

How To Go From Despair To Delight In 6 Hours 6 Minutes and 59 Seconds

First you need a recipe:

Gather together four women from Salem (Debbie Hagen, Sue Schmidt, Debbie McClanahan, Carol Woodward), one woman from Seattle, Washington (Karen Smith), and one woman from Palo Alto, California (Angela Mogielski).

Place the women on a flight to Maui where they will spend 8 days and 7 nights in paradise.

When they arrive in Maui, provide a van and luxurious condo that allows the women to travel and stay together.

Next you need an adventure:

Enter the six women in the Hana Relay that starts at the junction of Keolani and Aalele St. near the Maui airport and travels an incredible fifty-two miles along 617 curves and over 56 bridges through the most breathtaking scenery in all of Maui. Let’s call this team Girls On The Run.

This is how it’s done:

Have the women gather together early on Saturday morning, travel from the luxurious condo to the start line and send off the first runner (Angela) at 6:30 a.m. (Here is a breakdown of the start times and bib colors – this will be important as the story goes on.)

Author James Michener describes Hana as "Further from anywhere than any other place in the world." Michener was right and it takes forever to get there when you are running.

On the surface this relay appears to be similar to our Civil War Relay – 52 miles total, each runner running 2 mile to 3.5 mile legs three times each. We soon learned that the 4 H’s (hills, humidity, heat and head-wind) can make those short legs feel like a marathon. The only similarity to the Civil War Relay is you have to move pretty fast to get to the next exchange on time.

The Hana relay is no picnic, especially if you are from a mild, low humidity climate as most of us were. Angela, coming from warm and balmy Palo Alto faired a little better than the rest of us, plus she’s an incredibly strong runner. Our team captain, Debbie Hagen, assigned Angela the toughest legs – that seemed to even things out a little.

After we had each finished our first leg we were ready to head back to the beach to soak up some rays and sip tropical drinks – this running-in-Maui gig was simply not fun at all. Oh, the despair!

We pressed on however, and began our second legs. Now that we knew what to expect in regard to the 4 H’s we felt a little better. We began to notice that we were receiving a lot of attention. Other teams were cheering for us particularly, asking for pictures and saying things like "you are inspirational."

We thought maybe we were being noticed because we were cute in spite of being sweat-soaked and sunburned. We realized we were getting into more clogged-up exchanges and were seeing a lot of the teams that had started before us, but it wasn’t until somewhere in our third legs that we were told by the police monitoring the course that we were right behind the race leaders. Folks had been cheering for us because they could tell by the color of our number that we were doing something amazing – we were winning the Hana Relay! Oh, the delight!

Suddenly the 4 H’s became less of problem. Now we were determined to hold onto our place and not just survive this race, but conquer it…and we did.

Girls On The Run won the women’s division and finished 11^th overall out of 105 teams. We celebrated at the finish with the Wrinkles On The Run team (Steve & Kathy Sansone, Bill & Phyllis McCall, Ron & Charlotte Hartwig) who placed 2^nd in their division. The "On The Run’ teams made their mark in Hana Relay history and we need to go back to Maui next year to defend our titles – Right?

The rest of our trip was spent in the sun and surf of the Kaanapali beach with short breaks to shop and get tattoos. Our tans have faded and our tattoos have been washed away, but the memories of our times together will never fade.

Thank you, Debbie Hagen, for gathering us together and for arranging things so perfectly. And a very special thanks from me – if not for you I would not have been able to participate in this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Carol (Hussey) Woodward