We recently ran in the Wasatch Back Ragnar relay race. The race runs from Logan to Park City, Utah covering a grueling 188 miles. Now, we didn't have to run the full 188 miles all alone. Each runner is part of a team of 6 or 12 people. We of course were on a 12 man/woman team. Combined together with the two of us, we ran a total of 31 miles within 24 hours. We started the race at 7:30 am on June 19. After finishing our first legs in Liberty, we went on to Powder Mountain ski resort to relax and get ready for our second legs. Little did we realize, running the second time would be the hardest thing ever! We ended up running late in the afternoon when the day was hottest. This absolutely drained both of us. We were running, out of breath and fighting off dry heaves. Not fun. While running, we couldn't help but think, "Why did we sign up for this? We will never be doing this again!" It is miserable while running, but the sense of accomplishment afterwards is a reward well worth the pain.
After our second legs, we drove to North Sevier High School where we slept on wrestling mats for about 3 hours. Well, we layed on them for 3 hours or so at least. We really slept half that time at the most. We got a text message from one of our teammates in the second van at about 2:45 am saying that they were only about 6 miles away from being done. We were still a good 45 minutes away from the checkpoint and they would be done before we could get there. We ended up getting stuck behind all sorts of slow cars (supporting their teams) and showed up at the checkpoint 15 minutes late. It was really frustrating. We got off on our last legs on a bad note and were determined to make that time up again. Most of our van had really easy 3rd legs. The exception was Chris.
Chris had a very difficult run uphill for 7.8 miles. The leg ran from the east side of Jordanelle Reservior to the scenic overlook at the top of the hill on the south side of the reservior. At least he was running at 5:30 in the morning when it wasn't hot.