Wilson Alums Conquer Hood to Coast at age 60
Hall of Fame Members of the Month
By Paul Danzer
Lying on the ground in a Coast Range field in the early-morning hours of Saturday, Aug. 29, Tom McKillop was having trouble sleeping. The ground wasn’t comfortable. The rain didn’t help.
Fast forward some 12 hours and McKillop, a PIL Hall-of-Fame runner, was celebrating completing the 2026 Hood to Coast Relay with his teammates. And he was suggesting they all run it back again in five years.
“It’s such a unique day-and-a-half together,” McKillop said.
That his suggestion didn’t get a rousing response from a group of tired runners who called themselves “Grateful Still Not Dead” was hardly a surprise. These guys are all 60-year-olds, after all. Then again, among the 1,271 teams that participated in the 2026 version of the annual relay, theirs is a unique story.
The connections among team Grateful Still Not Dead were forged long before the 196-mile sojourn from the Cascades to the Oregon Coast. All 12 men who ran graduated from Wilson High (now Ida B. Wells) in 1984, so theirs are bonds of decades, not days.
For the record, Grateful Still Not Dead finished in 32 hours, 9 minutes and 9 seconds. The runners averaged 9 minutes and 50 seconds per mile but would have been slightly faster if not for a delay of about 20 minutes when they had to find runner Ed Sloop at a congested exchange point in the Coast Range. That time earned them first place as the lone team in the Men’s Champion Masters Division, which requires all members to be 60 and over.
“The fact that as 60-year-olds we were able to do it in 32 hours is really satisfying,” McKillop said.
Triple Threats
This is the third time this group teamed up for the relay. Most of the dozen who ran this year also were on the teams that completed the race at ages 50 and 55.
Running is one way the group has stayed connected. Ken Venables reminds Portland-area team members of a standing appointment every Saturday at 8:30 a.m., regardless of weather, to run Terwilliger Boulevard then spend time at a local coffee shop.
“It’s a therapy session for us,” McKillop said.
It was over coffee after one Saturday run that the idea was hatched to run the 2016 Hood to Coast, in part to mark the former Trojans’ 50th birthdays.
That 2016 team went by the name WHS ’84 Grateful Dead. Five years later, the name evolved to Grateful Not Dead. In 2026, they aptly added the word “Still” to that moniker.
The driving force behind the project, according to McKillop and teammate John Whittier, is John Kodachi. The former class president ran the final leg of the relay to the Seaside finish line.
“It’s quite an accomplishment just to finish with all of our ailments,” Kodachi said, noting that injuries are common in aging runners.
The team had plenty of legitimate reasons not to compete this year. Kodachi ran legs 12, 24 and 36 less than a year after non-surgical treatment for a complete rupture of his Achilles tendon.
Another runner, Steve Giansante, had hip-replacement surgery in February. Ed Sloop, Paul Cameron, Tom Diffely and Whittier coped with nagging calf strains from their training. Randy Acker had plantar fasciitis. Steve Shaw overcame a concussion from a bike accident in April.
And McKillop is two years removed from surgery on both of his hamstrings.
Given that history, at least one team member had doubts they could reach the beach unscathed. Whittier said that van mate Sloop predicted the team had a less than 1 percent chance of making it to the finish line with no one suffering an injury.
But finish healthy they all did — and with enough energy to enjoy the post-race party on the beach. That was special, according to Kodachi, because they had finished too late in 2016 for the beach party, and pandemic restrictions meant no party in 2021.
1983 State Champs
Three members of Grateful Still Not Dead — McKillop, Diffely and Rob Gilbert — ran for Wilson at the 1983 cross country state championships, where the Trojans took the team title. Shaw and Acker were on that cross-country team but did not compete at state.
Others competed for Wilson in the PIL, too. Kodachi played basketball and ran track. Whittier played soccer and tennis. Tim Landis and Giansante played football and baseball. Diffely played soccer and basketball in addition to running cross country and track. Cameron played soccer and baseball and Venables played soccer.
The Class of 1984 connection didn’t stop with those who ran. Classmate Ian McLaughlin supplied one of the vans and Ken Shults — a Hacky Sack savant (aka, the Michael Jordan of footbag) and member of the Footbag Hall of Fame — designed the team’s colorful shirts.
In 2016, a classmate came from Ireland to participate. This year, Gilbert traveled the farthest to run, arriving from Wisconsin about 16 hours before Grateful Still Not Dead’s 4:05 a.m. start from Timberline.
Sleep deprivation and the pain of running some 20 miles over the course of the race challenged each team member. But there was plenty of fun, too. With teams from all 50 states and 40 countries participating, interacting with runners from far and wide is part of the Hood-to-Coast draw.
A close-to-home interaction provided one of the fun moments along the route. A team of women saw the Wilson High Class of 1984 sign on “Grateful’s” van and started a conversation. It turned out one of the women on that team was the daughter of one of the ex-Trojans' 1984 classmates.
“I guess that’s a story about how small the Portland and Oregon community is,” Whittier said.
McKillop said he has run in the Hood to Coast at least 15 times, starting in 1985 when he was part of a team of Portland high school runners who entered the fourth edition of the relay.
“There’s always a point during the middle of the night when you wonder ‘Why are we doing this,’” McKillop said. “But it’s always well worth it at the end.”
Whittier said the Hood to Coast team couldn’t happen without Kodachi’s drive and commitment. And it’s critical that those who commit have prepared well enough to complete their three assigned legs.
“There is no contingency plan if someone gets hurt,” Whittier said, noting that an injury would force teammates to take on added mileage. “If you get injured you become the weakest link. The weight of that reality means you need to train properly.”
Kodachi chuckled about the fact that, by winning its division, Grateful Still Not Dead gets a coveted automatic entry into the 2027 relay race. He suspects, however, 2026 will be the last time his classmates run Hood to Coast together.
“It’s a grind on the body,” he said.
With longtime friends together for more than a day, there was plenty of good-natured banter to raise spirits and energy levels as the HTC miles unfolded.
“Lots of old stories. A lot of laughing. A lot of joking. A lot of sarcasm,” McKillop said.
Whittier added that much of the talk was of high school memories. “With high school friends, what you’re really doing is exercising everybody’s memory.”
And making new memories along the way.
