TrackTown Explained for Confused Californians

Californians: Parasites.  Maybe traditional journalistic code doesn’t allot a free-willing admission of that kind, but saying such of Golden State transplants is an almost unanimously accepted opinion for Texans, Idahoians, Arizonians, Oregonians and any state population that has or is soon to be trained into the sights of the grand Californian migrant Howitzer.  Water is wet, the Pope is Catholic — and nobody is fond of Californians, including Californians.  The best they can do is assimilate and try not to dislodge the longstanding traditions of the cities they enter.

Eugene’s most confusing tradition to the Californian is usually jogging.  They know about Nike, a thing or two about Prefontaine and Bowerman — but can’t seem to rationalize how a town once known as “Skinner’s Mudhole” is somehow conducive for long form outdoor activity.  

It is a simultaneous undershooting of historical context and overshooting of weather severity.  All too possible for someone reasonably new to town and fresh out of 340 days of sun a year.

Note: The author of this piece is a Californian. He quickly revealed he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when speaking on the phone with Eugene legend Tom Heinonen. Heinonen was the head coach of the University of Oregon Women’s Track Team from 1976 to 2003, and the only NCAA women’s coach to win multiple national titles in outdoor track and field and cross-country. Much like your average cat, the author becomes very scared in the rain.  He asked Heinonen how it was possible people enjoyed running in a place as wet as Eugene.

“You have a Southern California perspective, obviously.  I came from Minnesota where there was two feet of snow on the ground most of the time in the winter.  To me, Eugene and the Northwest would be ideal for running because there’s not snow on the ground, and it’s not hot,” said Heinonen.  “There’s lots of good clothing now.  There wasn’t when community running started here.  All there was, was cotton and wool.”

Sheltering from the weather for a moment, while Eugene’s history may not be a front-facing intrigue for many of the trans-state runners in Eugene, it must be admitted as the pretext for the city’s jogging culture. 

Community running was a new concept in the 1960s for people in the U.S..  In 1962, Oregon Track and Field coach Bill Bowerman took a trip to New Zealand, where community jogging was already commonplace, and trained with coach Arthur Lydiard.  Upon his return he began a program of community jogging with University of Oregon runners as guides, Heinonen said.

Back then runners had reasonable cause to assail the Willamette Valley’s unruly precipitation patterns, and the human conflict of willpower versus weather took creative form in the theater of running apparel. 

“Bowerman had the runners wear long johns, like long underwear, under their cotton running t-shirts and shorts, and he dyed it green so that they could go out into the community and look like they weren’t running in their long underwear,” said Heinonen.  “It started with people wearing cotton clothing which is just miserable in rain.  It just gets wet and heavy and doesn’t keep you warm at all.”

Bob Coll, along with his family, own the Eugene Running Company, a storefront in the Oakway Center.  Running focused athletic stores like his aren’t unique to Eugene, but the quality of service, and community involvement show that even the people pushing product in this city have a genuine mission statement towards promoting the sport.

In regards to the development and sale of more modern weather-combatting apparel, Coll did mention the prevalence of fabrics that “wick moisture and repel rain,” but also reaffirmed that Eugene is already a temperate and well suited place for running when contrasted with other regions of the U.S.

“Even in the summer it never gets super hot here.  If you lived in Phoenix, or the Southwest, or even in the Midwest, they have these horrific high humidity hot days.  We don’t really have much of that in Eugene,” Coll said.  “But there are fabrics now that make it easier to be a runner in a variety of weather conditions.”

Leaving Nike out of the discussion of contemporary athletic apparel could be refreshing for the anti-corporate, pro-worker crowd, but it would be ahistorical—like withholding Babe Ruth from a discussion of all-time baseball greats due to off the field controversy and compounded exhaustion from hearing his name for now over a century.

“In 1973, a guy named Jon Anderson, from Eugene, won the Boston Marathon and he was wearing a pair of Nike shoes—becoming the first athlete to win a race wearing Nike shoes,” Coll said.  “When he won the Boston Marathon his dad was mayor of Eugene, and his dad was so excited that his son won the Boston Marathon, he pushed through the initiatives to build the bike paths along the river.”  This trail system is known today as the Ruth Bascom Riverbank Path System, named after Eugene’s first female mayor who served from 1993 until 1996.

Following the death of Steve Prefontaine, Bill Bowerman, who in addition to coaching track and field, was a co-founder of Nike, worked with Lane County to construct Pre’s Trail in Alton Baker Park in 1975.  Pre’s Trail, along with the bike roads, work in tandem to provide asphalt and wood bark paths—the types of surface that, compared to concrete—are soft, and won’t rocket your kneecaps up through your shoulder blades upon impact.

Developments like these, by Nike employees and Nike-adjacent figures, demonstrate that while the company’s presence is overwhelming today, it was butane to the 60s jogging boom that never seems to die out in Eugene.  Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight capitalized on a market that was burgeoning, forming a symbiotic consumer relationship.  As a result, it can be easy to grow bitter with a popular Eugene activity like jogging that is so intertwined with a single company.      

But this popularization is one of Eugene’s most remarkable footnotes.  Think of how normalized jogging has become in the U.S..  When early on a Sunday morning, walking to a cafè to get a cup of coffee—someone narrowly runs past you going nowhere specific and training for nothing in particular—their motives are of no question at all.  Early last century in the U.S., seeing an average person jog for recreation would’ve been like seeing a kid push a metal hoop around with a stick for entertainment today.  Eugene is the polestar for that shift in opinion; the first source of navigation in The States for average-joe jogging.