The Beginning: Junior High, Beaverton, Oregon

The story of the Dirty Half Dozen does not begin with a race. It begins in the early 1980s, on the cross-country courses and track fields of Beaverton, Oregon, where a group of junior high school runners discovered something that most people spend their whole lives looking for: a group where they actually fit.

Distance running is not a glamorous sport. It does not attract people who need an audience. It attracts a certain kind of person — someone willing to run hills in the rain, comfortable with quiet effort, who finds something in the shared suffering that others cannot see from the outside. When that type of person finds others like them, the bond is different from the beginning.

This is what happened in Beaverton. A small group of runners who were also, more importantly, just good together. They trained together, traveled to meets together, and gradually spent more and more time together outside of running. The sport was the context. The friendship was the point.

“Distance running attracts a certain kind of person. When that type finds each other early, something forms that is hard to explain and harder to recreate.”

By the time they reached Sunset High School, they were already more than teammates. They had inside jokes that went back years. They knew each other’s families. They had already been through enough together — the long runs, the bad races, the good ones — that the friendships had real depth. Real history.

Hood to Coast: A New Branch Grows

The DHD first heard about Hood to Coast the way most Beaverton kids did — through their fathers. Two of the original members had dads who ran the very first Hood to Coast in 1982, when only eight teams existed and the race was barely a concept. Those two guys grew up knowing the race was something real. When it came up as a possibility in 1986, it wasn’t a stretch — it was almost inevitable.

Their coach, Dave Robbins, ran it in 1985 alongside some of the older runners, which only added to the pull. By the time the DHD decided to enter as a group, the race already had a presence in their world. They signed up, loaded into two vans, and drove to the mountain.

They were sixteen years old. Their parents wouldn’t let them drive, so they had to be shuttled from leg exchange to leg exchange. Twelve teenagers, two vans, thirty-six legs across nearly 200 miles of Oregon — from Mount Hood to the beach in Seaside. It was organized chaos, and they loved every minute of it.

They came back the next year. And the year after that. Without anyone formally deciding it, Hood to Coast became the annual gathering point. Not the reason for the friendship — the friendship was already there, forged in junior high and cemented through high school. But the race became the annual proof of concept. The thing that required them to show up, every August, no matter what.

When they graduated, most teams would have dissolved. Everyone heading to different colleges — OSU, UofO, Washington, PLU, Willamette, Gonzaga, St. John’s — and losing touch. But they made it back every year, even at 18 and 19. Some continued to run competitively in college. Others hung up their shoes except for Hood to Coast. It didn’t matter. August meant the race. The race meant everyone showed up.

Then came careers, some local, one as far as Korea, one who joined the Army. Then marriages, kids, the whole arc of adult life. Divorces. Parents passing. The kinds of things that quietly end most traditions. They worked through it all — often in the van, where you spend most of the time you’re not running. Twenty-plus hours together in close quarters has a way of cutting through everything else.

Forty years later, the streak is intact. The DHD is now the longest-running team in Hood to Coast history with the same core group of participants — a record built not on any grand plan, but on the same thing that started it all: showing up for each other.