Back on the Bluffs: Fort Casey Running Camp Revives a Legacy Built by Doris Brown Heritage
Doris Heritage coached 20 All-Americans in 39 years at Seattle Pacific University |Photo courtesy of Doris Heritage
The newest chapter of the longest-running story in American running camps.
There’s a new camp on Whidbey Island this year on last week of July. It’s the Fort Casey Running Camp. For decades however, this ground belonged to Doris Brown Heritage and the Falcon XC Camp.
Doris Heritage was 5th in the 1968 Olympic Games | Photo Courtesy Doris Heritage
Doris grew up in Gig Harbor, Washington, running on the beach near her family’s home simply because she loved it — this at a time when girls weren’t supposed to run distance at all. She was barred from her own high school track. So she found a club team, and by the mid-1960s she wasn’t just competing, she was rewriting what people believed was possible for women in the sport. In 1966, she became the first woman to run a sub-five-minute mile indoors. She went on to win the International Cross Country Championships five years in a row, from 1967 to 1971 — a run of dominance nobody has matched since. She set world records in the 3,000 meters and two miles, competed at the 1968 and 1972 Olympics, and at one point held every U.S. women’s national record from 440 yards through the mile.
Then she did something arguably even more lasting: she stayed, and she coached. For four decades at Seattle Pacific University, Doris built a distance program that produced national champions and All-Americans, served as an assistant coach for the U.S. women’s team at the 1984 Olympics and the 1987 World Championships, and became just the second woman inducted into the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Hall of Fame. She’s also enshrined in the National Track and Field Hall of Fame and the National Distance Running Hall of Fame. Her story is now the subject of Last Lap, a 2024 documentary that won Best Washington-Made Film at the Gig Harbor Film Festival and the Audience Choice award for Best Documentary Feature at the Seattle Film Festival.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, Doris helped start a running camp on the same stretch of bluffs, beach, and forest trails at Fort Casey where campers will train this summer. For decades, it ran under her camp’s name, making this patch of Whidbey Island arguably the longest-running running camp location in the country. When the property changed hands in 2024, the camp went quiet. Last year, Youth Runner reserved the site and began fresh, bringing back some of the same coaches such as Pat Tyson and Eric Hruschka, who led the Falcon XC Camp. This July marks the very first Fort Casey Running Camp under its new name. The name is new. The ground, the trails, and a lot of the coaching wisdom are not.
That legacy is stitched into camp itself. Every year, campers close out the week with the Doris Heritage Camp Classic, a race named in her honor on the same trails she helped make into a training ground. Runners here aren’t just building fitness for the fall season — they’re training where a five-time world champion once did, on the ground she helped turn into hallowed running territory.
Fort Casey Running Camp runs July 27–31, 2026 — its inaugural year — and it is close to full. This is the last stretch to register before the available spots are gone. If your athlete wants a week of expert coaching, ocean-bluff trail runs, a trip to Port Townsend, and a start line named after one of the greatest distance runners America has ever produced, now is the time to be part of year one.
Register here: youthrunnercamp.com/fort-casey-running-camp