Monday, March 1, 2010

Ragnar Relay del Sol

We made it through the weekend!

And let me quote Jimmy, just so you can get a little flavor of the fun we had...
"I feel so good, I think I could do another Ragnar this weekend!"

What?! Did he say that he would do another one?! Well, well, well my friends, it seems this weekend was a success :)

So, let me give you a little bit of a summary. And for those of you who know nothing about it, well I hope this will fill you in a bit.

This past Friday and Saturday, Jimmy and I ran what is called the Ragnar Relay. This one was in Arizona, but actually the first Ragnar was run along the Wasatch front here in Utah. Our friends Davis and Melanie invited us to run, and we accepted. So we trained and trained in hopes of not being the slowest people there.

On Thursday we left to drive down to Arizona to meet up with our group early Friday morning. Our team was made up of 12 people, 2 vans and 200+ to run.

This is how is goes:
Each team has 2 vans with 6 people in each van. The first van starts the relay and each person in van runs and hands off to the next person, until the last person hands off to the first person in the next van. While the other van is running through its people, everyone in the first van gets to rest.

Van 1 started at 7 am, and after running all of its people through their legs, our van, van 2 started around 11 am. This rotation of people and vans is done 3 times, meaning each person runs 3 different legs throughout the race.

And that is precisely what we did. It lasted about 30 hours, which meant we were running through the night, on very limited sleep. In the rotation, Jimmy ran before me. He did a wonderful job!

**Note: Ragnar Lingo- If you pass someone, it is called a "kill"

Jimmy was able to "kill" quite a few people and not many people "killed" him. He did a great job of maintaining our place. He had some pretty hard runs, with some steep hills, but I know that he was proud of finishing and doing his best.


As for me, my first let (the longest one...) was pretty awful. I was extremely tired, and it was a lot hotter than I expected. I did pass a few people and I did it in fairly good time. My second one was at 3 am, and I felt 100 times better. And the 3 leg, I got stuck at 4 traffic lights, but it was only a 3.5 mile leg, so I was pretty happy!
Our team did fairly well in the end. There was an accident that happened behind us, so several teams had to restart the race further up at another exchange. We were one of the only teams that ran the pretty much the entire race. I think everyone was happy and excited to accomplish something so difficult but worthwhile.

And that is the report. We had so much fun we may just do it again. There are even Ragnars on the East Coast. Watch out! We may ask you to be on our team!

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