‘The city is so welcoming’: The tales of Bloomsday 2025 in Spokane

It was the perfect spring morning for a run as people lined up by the thousands for the 49th annual Lilac Bloomsday Run. Beautiful blue skies, not too cold to wait for the starting gun, but crisp enough to keep someone from overheating on the seventh mile.

Tension built up, group by group, as the announcer counted down. For some, this was the culmination of months of hard work and preparation, and they were laser-focused on beating their personal records. For others who may have forgotten about Bloomsday until it was already May, this is at the very least the reason they and their family didn’t sleep in on a Sunday.

The pros were quiet and eyes forward when the starting gun went off, but the later groups shrieked and cheered when it was their turn to bolt from the starting line.

Nearly 33,000 racers crowded Riverside Avenue Sunday, with another 2,200 joining virtually, according to Bethany Lueck, communications coordinator for the Lilac Bloomsday Association.

Denise Attwood jogged in place to warm up before her group was given the go-ahead. She was in the orange group but held back to run with her extended family in the lavender section, running as part of a fundraiser for the Conscious Connections Foundation, which funds girls education and rural healthcare in Nepal.

“It is a big group, and we do Bloomsday every year,” Attwood said. “We were just talking about how we have all of these retrospective pictures now, of us and the kids when they were really small, going all the way up. It’s a family event for us.”

Some of the younger street trees quickly became laden with the dozens of sweatshirts thrown into their branches, where they are later picked up to be donated. A homeless man in a tattered top tried to cut out the middleman and pick through the selection, before someone accused him of theft and a police officer yelled at him to leave.

Family and friends clustered together, some dressed up in tie dye or as Minions and chickens, as yellow bananas and pink T. rexes, in a purple bodysuit, or as Grogu or Darth Vader in celebration of May the Fourth.

This is the second year Staci Heidenson and Rachel McMackin dressed up for Bloomsday. Last year, they dressed up as a banana and a beer, throwing together whatever costumes they had in their closets. They decided to coordinate this year as Minions from the “Despicable Me” franchise, capped with yellow beanies and goggles.

Bloomsday is about “the community and just getting together with some friends and getting outside, and with the spring, everybody’s been stuck inside for so long,” Heidenson said.

Jeb Foster and a gaggle of his nieces, nephews and their friends wore handmade tie dye T-shirts, hoping to stand out and make it easy for the kids, running with a buddy system, to keep track of each other.

“We were supposed to have words on the backs of our shirts, but the vinyl didn’t work,” Foster said. “It was supposed to say, ‘May the Fourth be with you on Doomsday Hill.’ ”

He wasn’t the only one with that idea. Friends Karlos Stewart and Shaymus McInelly, both 17, wore matching Darth Vader T-shirts that said, “Star Wars Day: May the 4th be with you.”

“It’s tiring, man,” Stewart said, catching his breath near the top of Doomsday Hill. “Our legs hurt. And our livers.”

In observation of Monday’s Cinco de Mayo holiday, duo Francie Tupper and Payten Somes handmade colorful felt piñata costumes for Tupper’s first Bloomsday, Somes with a few under her belt.

The two stretched and took in the crowd as they waited in the blue section for their turn to approach the start. As Tupper took in the mass of bodies ready to race, she noted there were more entrants in the race than people in her hometown in Montana.

“It is so cool that you can have so many people from different walks of life, from all over the country, coming here to just run a race, but it’s such a staple in the Spokane community, it’s just so cool to me,” said Tupper, 25.

The two became friends while in college in Montana and were reunited when Tupper moved to Spokane. Somes, 24, grew up in Spokane and began running Bloomsday as a teenager, roping in Tupper this year with the allure of handmade costumes and glitter smeared across their faces.

“We love to dress up for fun,” Tupper said.

“So it’s a double-whammy,” they said in unison, grinning at each other.

They’d practiced running the course before the race, but before the pair took off Sunday, Somes took a moment to share some wisdom with the new Bloomie.

“We’re definitely walking up Doomsday,” Somes said, referring to the long, steep grade up Pettet Drive just before the fifth mile. “I just hate it.”

Of the smattering of bands set up along the course to re-energize racers, their first serenade was from Crimson Creek. Ranging in age from 11 to 16, the five-person band specializes in “post-metalcore” sound, evident by guitar shreds of Sorin Botezatu and Ember Velazquez, Rowan Aikman on bass and screaming vocals of Elias Pyritz and Atticus Burgett, the former also plays drums.

As they scream-sang at passing runners, many threw up “rock-on” hand signs or screamed back, whooping and laughing with the band. They met through the organization of Sean Burgett, director of music lesson service Rock Club, who facilitates several local young bands.

Though exhausted and hands cramping by the end of their set, having replayed their set list three times over, they appreciated the massive audience of over 30,000.

“It’s a privilege,” said 14-year-old Ember. “Most people can’t do this stuff, so we’re lucky, even though it hurts.”

Asked if they’d ever consider taking on the course in a different way, by running it, each of the five emphatically shook their heads and twisted their eyebrows.

“I’m slow,” 11-year-old Elias put it simply.

While Bloomsday itself isn’t political, it’s common to see people figuratively running for office literally running the route, and politics still abound on one of the few days a year that tens of thousands are on Spokane’s streets. Spokane City Council candidate Kate Telis waited near the starting line alongside Carmela Conroy, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress last year and has signaled she will run again in 2026.

Several signs along the route said, “You run better than the government.”

On the side of Broadway Avenue, Carlolyn Scott held a dummy with a Donald Trump mask from a pole with a cardboard sign attached that said, “Punch Trump,” encouraging runners to smack the commander in chief as they passed.

A couple hours into the race, the presidential dummy was visibly crumpled, and piles of stuffing blanketed the sidewalk as Bloomies had their way with the puppet.

At a pro-Palestine, anti-Trump rally past the top of Doomsday Hill organized by the Party for Socialism and Liberation in Spokane, protesters called for the release of Martin Diaz, a Spokane man who was brought to America as toddler. He was detained last week by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and faces possible deportation to Mexico.

At the top of Doomsday, the iconic 7-foot vulture loomed ominously as usual, greeting worn-out Bloomies to the hardest part of the course.

But there’s someone new under the feathers. The costume’s creator, Bill Robinson, who has worn the suit most years since 1987, has passed the duty to his son, Tom Becker.

“My knees are giving me trouble,” said Robinson, 72, who has recovered from heart problems in recent years. He said he’s feeling better but worries about the strain from the weight of the costume.

“I just don’t dare; my knees would buckle from doing this. I’d go down and crash. I need to stay off,” Robinson said. “I feel good, though.”

The community event includes people of all ages and abilities.

Bill Voiland, 77, pushed his four-wheel walker steadily up the hill.

“This is third time I’ve done it with my wheelchair,” Voiland said. “I used to run it all the time, but then I had a stroke.”

Voiland started early, at 7 a.m., and said it usually takes him about five and a half hours. His sister, Eileen Voiland, joined him.

“I agreed to come along,” she said. “I have to irritate him, then go a little ahead and let him catch up. That’s my job.”

The race is a family tradition for many.

Carl Hanson, 69, stretched his quads next to the 5-mile marker at the top.

“I feel great other than a tight leg,” Hanson said.

“He didn’t know if he could do it, but I said we could just walk it,” said his son Jonathan Hanson, 36.

Carl Hanson has been a frequent participant over the years and remembers pushing Jonathan up the hill in a stroller when he was a baby.

“He had a little baseball cap and sunglasses and drool,” Carl Hanson recalled.

For others, Bloomsday was a training opportunity for a bigger challenge.

Scout Anika Friendshuh, 13, of Troop 203, carried a hiking backpack, preparing for a 50-mile hike later this summer in the Sawtooth Mountains.

“I’m a little tired, but I’m doing all right,” Friendshuh said.

Situated on the intersection of Lindeke and Broadway, where racers turn and wince through the last mile-and-a-half, sat a group of friends with a long tradition on Bloomsday of abstaining from the exertion.

“For every Bloomsday, you need runners and you need cheerleaders,” explained 76-year-old Gloria O’Connell from her friend Sue Thompson’s front yard, her voice raspy from cheering so much. “And I’m a cheerleader.”

Friends from across Washington convened at Thompson’s corner residence, where she’d used the prime real estate to show off her Bloomsday finishers shirt collection, dozens hung on her chain link fence amassed through opportune thrift finds, friends who’ve competed, and a few she earned herself.

Racers stopped to ogle the museum, kids pointing out their favorites and many complimenting Thompson, 75, on her display. Some stopped to say they’d bring her an addition.

While retirees filled her front yard in lawn chairs, Thompson and O’Connell reminisced on Bloomsdays past when visitors would fill Thompson’s house with air beds, an “air bed hotel,” Thompson laughed, more in RVs and tents in her yard.

“It’s just a reason to have a picnic, a party, to have friends and family over,” Thompson said. It’s the only time she sees some of the visitors each year.

O’Connell recalls passing out chicken drumsticks to racers on one Bloomsday after cooking too many for their gathering and watching runners drool over their food as they passed.

She thought of the chicken she’s cooking this year, needing to go in and check on it but fearing once she did she’d miss her sister, a 91-year-old with a freshly replaced knee who ran this year.

“It just makes me cry; it’s so awesome to see all these people in love with what they do,” O’Connell said. “Well, maybe not by the end of it.”

The Rainwater family took an entrepreneurial approach to the race, alliterative siblings Annalise, Alice, Angus and Atlas Rainwater selling cups of lemonade and Otter Pops to Bloomies. Within the last mile of the race, they tempted wincing racers with the cold treats.

It’s the first year the kids have watched Bloomsday.

“It’s a fun way to introduce it to them,” said Miranda Rainwater, their mom. She hasn’t run Bloomsday for a while, last competing in a princess dress before she had kids.

While business-minded Angus, 8, favored passing out cups of lemonade, his 11-year-old sister Annalise likes “watching them run,” she said, extending her hand to high-five as many passing Bloomies as possible.

Under the mild sun, 7-year-old Alice loved “that it’s summer,” she said with a twirl.

“It’s spring,” corrected Annalise.

Often, Bloomsday is a generational affair. That was certainly the case for the Kalu family, mom and dad Anna and Mandela speed walking with their four kids and Mandela’s father a bit behind them. Their three kids who ran, Esia, Ava and Nakiah, sprinted ahead a few yards before returning to their parents, only to turn and run a short distance again through a hose someone had set up to spray Bloomies.

“Through half of it, my heels were sore,” said 10-year-old Ava, though she’d recovered when asked in the final mile.

Sibling Temina was having perhaps the easiest among them: the 10-month-old strapped happily to her father’s chest as a slight breeze tousled her dark curls. Though Mandela carried her across the finish line, her mom took the extra weight the first half of the race.

Anna’s first Bloomsday was last year, walking while pregnant with Temina. The couple have set up their daughter to be a perennial since before she was born.

“That’s the hope,” Mandela said. “To pick the tradition back up.”

He started Bloomsday at the same age, in utero, only missing a handful of Bloomsdays throughout his life.

As thousands crossed the finish line in front of city hall, some were glistening, resplendent, evidently in the best shape of their lives. Others hobbled along, weak-kneed and stiff-hipped. In the end, whether they jogged another 100 meters to O’Doherty’s for a victory pint or limped to their cars for a dearly needed nap, they could proudly say they completed the 12-kilometer course and attended one of Spokane’s most important gatherings.

Hannah Ge and Nora Lonam accomplished their goal for the year of breaking the one-hour, 12-minute mark. With a lot of training this year, the gradual but punishing hills on the route that had vexed them when they first ran Bloomsday were a breeze this year.

“It’s fun supporting the city, and the vibes are great running with other people,” Ge said. “It’s definitely more fun than running alone on a country road.”

Clayton Early traveled to Spokane from Seattle for his fourth Bloomsday and crossed the finish line after about an hour, 15 minutes. His wife and 15-month old son were waiting for him.

His goal this year was just to finish and enjoy the run, he said.

“He’s about 15 months,” Early said, motioning to his child. “So it’s harder to get time to run that it used be. I love running, but also this race has all different abilities, and it’s just – the city is so welcoming.”

This year is the 30th Bloomsday for Geoff Pinnock, former design director for The Spokesman-Review.

“I had to finish number 30,” Pinnock said. “It’s kind of ingrained. I run with my friends three times a week, year round, so this is always one of our primary focus events. I just feel like I have to do it every year.”

Seemingly everyone who could stuff themselves into the crowded restaurant went to O’Doherty’s Irish Grille after finishing the race, the traditional spot to sit, celebrate and meet up with the friends and family that straggled.

“We’ve been coming (to O’Doherty’s) for a long time,” said Kevin Boerker, who just finished his seventh Bloomsday.

“This dates back to the Flying Irish (running club), that’s kind of where this all started, and we’ve just been hanging out here since then,” added Matthew Kee, who’s on his 22nd.

“It’s Bloomsday, you’ve got to go to the Irish pub,” Boerker said.

Billy Morse, who just finished his 34th Bloomsday, joked he only comes to Bloomsday to beat Boerker.

“Last year I beat him by one second,” Morse smiled. “This year I beat him by seven.”

More seriously, Morse noted he lost a friend who died just days before the 2024 Bloomsday race, and he now runs with his friend’s name written on his shoe.

“And I’m kinda doing the race for him now,” he said.

Morse isn’t the only one with a companion to best year after year. Tom Treloar said he and his son, eighth-grader Charlie Treloar, came to Bloomsday this year determined to finish under an hour. Charlie had an added goal.

“To beat him,” he said, grinning at his dad.

And he won $10 bucks doing it, Tom chuckled.