The Lilac Bloomsday Run, also known as Bloomsday, is an annual timed road race in Spokane, Washington, held on the first Sunday of every May since 1977. The course is 12 km (7.46 mi) long. The course starts in Downtown Spokane and heads northwest along the far west end of town, passes by Mukogowa Ft. Wright Institute and Spokane Falls Community College before heading up "Doomsday Hill" and back downtown to the Spokane County Courthouse. Every finisher of the race receives a Bloomsday t-shirt.
The Lilac Bloomsday Run has had over 40,000 participants every year since 1986. Race participation peaked in 1996 with 61,298 registered participants. The number of registrants in 2008 was 47,528. Lineth Chepkurui set an unofficial 12 km world record in the 2010 women's race.
Don Kardong, who founded the Bloomsday race, cites James Joyce's Ulysses as the inspiration for the name Bloomsday.
Read more about Lilac Bloomsday Run: Results
Famous quotes containing the words lilac and/or run:
“Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children’s hands, in front-yard plots,—now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests;Mthe last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries, because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own, because they pass for nothing in the new places.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)