Friday Morning: I woke up at about 5:15 to Dex, my cat, purring loudly in my ear and crawling around near the pillows. Maybe because it was race day, but I was up for good at that point. Once I cleared my head of the cobwebs, I remembered that it was an epic tour stage in the Alps so I turned the TV on to watch Andy, Frank, Tommy V., Cadel, Sammy Sanchez, Contador, and the surprise winner, Pierre Rolland battle up the slopes of some French mountain I don't remember the name of. It was a great stage that saw Contador attack early and often to try to rescue the tour and salvage a spot on the podium. Unfortunately for him, or fortunately for his detractors (myself) he wasn't able to do so as Cadel and the Schlecks were able to limit their losses. Rolland used Sanchez to bridge the gap to Contador and then took off for the only win by a Frenchman in this years tour. Quite the stage indeed.
During the tour, I packed my gear and shaved my legs. Yes, I shaved my legs. There is something about that action that says, "I'm ready to go fast." Yeah, I know, many of you don't have any desire to ever shave your body hair. I could do without body hair for the most part, and the shaving ritual is part of the whole process in getting ready for a big race. Since I haven't really raced (except for the Honeywagon) since Seattle 2009, this qualified as a big race.
10:00am: Work starts at ten and I was hoping to be productive but the store was busy with the additional visitors that Ragnar Relay brings in. Lots of new people checking out the store and picking up some last minute supplies. We did good business on reflective vests, blinking lights, and nutrition. It was fun watching the early teams go by the store, with decorated vans, costumes, and signs. That is one of the reason I love the relay. Its all about enjoying running for its own sake. 12 (or 6 or 3) people running three times, through the middle of the night, just because its cool. Its an adventure. Its fun. You get to be goofy and act like a kid. PR's aren't really important. Most people are running new legs, odd distances, or the course has changed.
2:30-4:20pm: We got to the start, which was mostly empty. There were only two other team with our start time. The Trout Slayers and Team WTF (Witness the Fitness, a high school group from Utah). We received our safety briefing and we only harassed the poor girl a little bit. The best part was Sam's blatant fart, which was ignored by the woman giving us the safety briefing. Almost immediately after, Sam decided he was going to run over to Canada, ie, the other side of the park. I think his quick sprint towards the border caught the attention of the border patrol officer. A quick honk of his horn and let us know that we shouldn't really mess around anymore.
4:20pm: The three teams left Peace Arch Park with much fanfare. As much as the 30 people who were still there could muster. Collin got smoked on the first leg, incurring our first and only passing penalty. The rules were agreed upon, that if any team member got passed, which includes losing the first leg, that they would have to take a penalty shot out of the rum baton. We picked up Gulley during the first leg and RB met us at the start of his first run, leg 3. Things on the first several legs were relatively boring. After we gapped the other teams in legs 1-3, (RB smoked a female runner on the Trout Slayers. You should have heard his drunken explanation, or exclamation to that poor girl at the post race party) things got really slow. Despite it being somewhat boring early, the legs went by quick. Before I knew it we were just north of Bellingham and ConnorWhan (even his dad calls him by both names as if it were one) was warming up.
8:00pm: Our van hustled into Bellingham to the high school for the exchange point for my first leg. I left my watch at the store so I had to borrow one. I kept the warm-up to a minimum with about a mile of jogging and some half hearted drills. Lance Romo rolled by on his bike and Holly showed up to wish me good luck and bring me real food for the evening. Hooray for Holly! If I learned one thing in the previous two versions, its that REAL FOOD is a must. You can only eat so many fake food energy products. My meals of choice included two cold pasta salads, chocolate milk, fruit, almond butter and jalapeno strawberry jelly sandwiches, and then all the requisite nutritional add on's. GU, Hammer, Nuun, and so much more. ConnorWhan somehow managed to get lost coming into Bellingham costing us about 10 minutes and then it was my turn.
8:15ish PM: I'm off and I'm flying up State Street heading south towards Fairhaven. Traffic is minimal and Jim is out in front of the store and grabbed a sweet picture as I sped by.
After that things start to blend together and get a little hazy. Night was settling in and reflective equipment came out. Trey blazed a mostly downhill leg. John Collins ripped past Lake Samish. I'm not even sure who ran next. We met the legendary Keefer Whan, ConnorWhan's dad in Edison. That was a real treat. He, of course, got everybody riled up especially RB. If you ever get to see (or meet) RB, ask him why they call it Black Friday.
10:00pm-ish: Our final two legs of the first cycle were Wes and Sam. Wes got a little confused and frustrated when he got lost and turned off the straight road and headed toward the casino. Gambling probably would have been more relaxing, but much less fun. I know I should have blogged using my super smart phone that eats batteries, because I know I would forget some of the funny stuff, but I'm not that big of a nerd yet so I opted to rely on my memory, which was a mistake, as this part of the blog is probably pretty boring. Heck, all my blogs might be boring. Maybe when I'm running million mile weeks you might be impressed or I might accidentally type something funny. But until then......
12:00-1:00am-ish: We still weren't catching very many teams. Just a few stragglers here and there. We did have one incident with a racer that wasn't so pleased at our behavior. Apparently we were too loud for her tastes. I agree, we were probably too loud. But her message delivery was poor, and in turn, the reaction from the team was even poorer. Lets say, we didn't exactly quiet down. Luckily, we passed up her team so fast that there were no further incidents.
2:30ish am: Surprisingly, my turn to run came up quick. As we approached LaConnor, I got my gear back on. It was getting pretty cool, in the low 50's and clear. The stars were actually mostly visible and beautiful. Half tights and a short sleeve for this leg. The exchange wasn't at the high school like it had been in the past. Instead we parked in this little lot and I had to walk/jog up a hill to get to the exchange point. There was a sleeping area on this exchange, and also a refueling station that had granola, yogurt raisins, and something else. I always run from the exchanges with the free food. Luckily, I had Wes grab me a bag full of the yogurt raisins which I later added to my trail mix. Wes trekked up the hill with me but then went down to see where the rest of the team was. In the mean time, ConnnorWhan comes screaming in off the road ready for the handoff. I departed on my second run, 7.2 rolling miles, to no fanfare. Not a single teammate besides ConnorWhan was there. Lame. I headed out of LaConnor and onto Reservation Road through the Swoniomish Res. Its one of the darker, more isolated segments of road in the race. There were so few vans around. And it gets really weird. You go from an uphill grade to a downhill grade without really realizing it. There are no visual clues. All of a sudden you are either slowing down or speeding up naturally. And it just gets darker and darker it seems like as the trees get closer to the edge of the road and block out what little light is coming from the sliver of a moon (I don't even know what kind of moon it was). Eventually I popped out of the trees and I knew I was close to the end. The "1 mile to go sign" hadn't been stolen (cough cough) and I tried to bring it home strong, which roughly meant a 5:20 mile. And that is when disaster would strike.......
3:30ish am: Trey took the handoff and it was terrible. This is a 1:53 half miler and you'd think he had never run a 4x800 relay with a similar handoff. The only good thing is that we didn't drop the bracelet/baton. (For those of you who remember snap bracelets at the height of their popularity, that is what we use. A reflective logoed orange Ragnar snap bracelet). Trey takes off at a gallop and that is the last we saw of him for over an hour. When both vans drove the course without seeing him, we knew he was lost. That set off a series of frantic phone calls and a lot of back tracking in the vans. Both vans drove the course a couple times. Eventually we both went to the exchange point to get our next two runners ready and one van waited it out while one van continued searching. Eventually, Trey shows up at the exchange point just when we were trying to figure out what to do next. I was still in the search van and I got a call from Gulley saying they found him. I took the opertunity to catch some z's in the Gramma Van.
4:30ish am: Sam is running. We're at the Deception Pass park entrance. Dawn is just creeping in and I busted out my camp stove to make some instant coffee (Starbucks Via, hate Starbucks, love Via). I've got a white gas fire going, and I hear two random shouts: "G-SPOT KILLAZ" Sam Alexander is on his way to the exchange, and announcing it to the world. Nice. And that's how we concluded the second cycle.
5:00ish am: Buckley is the first to run his final leg and the sunrise views form certain parts of Whidbey are unparalleled. Simply amazing. I kick myself for not taking pictures. I kick others for not taking pictures. But since we aren't a bunch of women, we don't take thousands of pictures. I'm lucky we have any.
We're flying through legs and everybody is happy to be done, except for those that still have to run. I have my longest leg left still. 7.8 miles out of Coupville. Dreading it. By this point, I'm working off of 30 minutes of sleep. My hammies and calves are thrashed. I'm wondering if it isn't time to just jog it in, since our nearest competitors are well over an hour behind despite us handing them 45 free minutes. Fortunately, the coffee started a storm brewing in my gut, and I no longer had to worry whether or not I would have a successful bathroom trip before my final leg. Caffeine took care of that. We did catch the G-Spot van's (G-Spots had the lovely wives of two of our team members as well as 10 other awesome women from Bellingham. Our whole goal was to catch them. Bonus points were to be awarded to the actual G-Spot Killer, the one who passed their runner on the road.
7:00is am: Soon enough, ConnorWhan was running again and I was getting ready at Coupville school. I'm just throwing it out there..... people were taking much more time in the bathroom this time around that they normally would. I'm talking, minutes on average. Enough to make me nervous that I'd be late to the exchange despite the line of only 4-5 runners ahead of me. My fears were unfounded. As the sun came up, a thick fog rolled in on us. Reflective vests and flashers were again required although it was no longer night time. Bummer. I hate the reflective vest. My Amphipod suspenders never made it back in the van after my second leg. Damnit! I'll have to buy another. Each successive leg meant less and less warmup. I jogged from the toilet to the exchange, shook my legs out, and waited. ConnorWhan again finished fast and passed off the bracelet flawlessly. No time wasted there. Somebody ought to let us help the US men's 4x100 national team. I took off and one of the first vans to pass me on the road was the G-Spot van. Would I be the one to catch them?? Unfortunately, the fog ruined the epic views on my leg as you approach the water. All you could see was the gray. I tried to tell our van (van 1, Gramma Van) that I felt like Atreyu in the Never Ending Story heading towards the nothing instead of away from it. They didn't know what the hell I was talking about. It was great. I got the hilly portion done and out of the way early and then it was mostly flat or downhill for the final 4.5 miles to the finish. I was finally passing people. I kept having the same vans go by me including a maroon Caravan that kept calling me "fast guy".
I was actually feeling good and I was ripping it. I was going off memory from the previous year and waiting for the ferry terminal because the exchange was just beyond, only they changed it this year. I still had two miles to go past the ferry. Luckily it was a flat approach. I was booking it towards the finish and in the last quarter mile, I had two runners ahead of me. A man and a woman. I went into my best Quentin Cassidy finish kick and reeled in the guy, and missed the girl by about 10 seconds. Turns out, she was the G-Spot runner. Trey was the G-Spot killer. But everybody knows I did all the work. Ha ha. Final splits would be my fastest average of the three, for the longest leg. 5:29's per mile. Not bad.
I finally had a perfect handoff with Trey. Picture perfect. Best handoff of the night. The fog was burning off. It was slowly getting warmer, an improvement from my leg where I could see my breath and I was steaming. Things went smoothly over the last handful of legs. By 10 am it was sunny an in the low 60's which was enough for Wes to exclaim, "Man its f*#%ing hot out." Can you tell we've had a cool summer? 63 degrees with sun feels hot as most of us were shirtless.
10:15ish am: Sam finished up hard and when we all ran in together, he sprinted home torching the rest of the team members to the line. I hobbled in behind with bloody heels and sandals. Blister city.
And here are the race splits from Peter:
Round 1
Colin 0:37:11 6.3 05:54
Peter 0:38:49 6.4 06:04
RB 0:52:03 8.5 06:07
Jason 0:30:15 5.4 05:36
Jay 0:35:34 5.8 06:08
Connor 0:40:29 6.5 06:14
Charlie 0:37:53 6.5 05:50
Trey 0:15:08 2.8 05:24
Collins 0:35:05 6.0 05:51
Mark 0:18:44 3.1 06:03
Wes 0:42:49 6.8 06:18
Sam 0:39:10 7.0 05:36
Round 2
Colin 0:26:54 4.4 0:06:07
Peter 0:20:02 3.5 0:05:43
RB 0:19:12 3.5 0:05:29
Jason 0:23:06 4.1 0:05:38
Jay 0:20:10 3.4 0:05:56
Connor 0:38:06 6.6 0:05:46
Charlie 0:41:13 7.2 0:05:43
Trey 0:59:03 7.7 0:07:40
Collins 0:15:00 2.7 0:05:33
Mark 0:25:00 4.2 0:05:57
Wes 0:30:00 4.7 0:06:23
Sam 0:30:43 5.4 0:05:41
Round 3
Colin 50:00 7.8 0:06:25
Peter 17:03 3.1 0:05:30
RB 16:11 2.9 0:05:35
Jason 17:22 2.9 0:05:59
Jay 40:29 6.5 0:06:14
Connor 32:26 5.5 0:05:54
Charlie 42:46 7.8 0:05:29
Trey 26:45 4.8 0:05:34
Collins 43:42 6.8 0:06:26
Mark 26:26 4.2 0:06:18
Wes 22:59 3.8 0:06:03
Sam 27:34 4.7 0:05:52
After Trey's 10+ leg improvised leg on round 2, since we were off searching for him and not at the next two exchanges, I had to estimate times. Feel free to post corrections. Also, Sam's 2 and Colin's 3 legs are combined and done from memory. For some reason my watch didn't split when I thought it did.
Summary
Colin 18.5 1:54:05 0:06:10
Peter 13.0 1:15:54 0:05:50
RB 14.9 1:27:26 0:05:52
Jason 12.4 1:10:43 0:05:42
Jay 15.7 1:36:13 0:06:08
Connor 18.6 1:51:01 0:05:58
Charlie 21.5 2:01:52 0:05:40
Tre 15.3 1:40:56 0:06:36
Collins 15.5 1:33:47 0:06:03
Mark 11.5 1:10:10 0:06:06
Wes 15.3 1:35:48 0:06:16
Sam 17.1 1:37:27 0:05:42
Klicks Team 189.3 18:55:22 0:06:00
Discrepency between above team time and official time lies in the lack of tenths being included in my splits. Obviously Trey and Connor ran faster per mile actually covered but this only gives them credit for the course measurement, not their detours.
