Run. Drive. Sleep (?). Repeat. That's the slogan of the Ragnar Relays, and how true it is! This last week, Ryan and I ran 171 miles in a group of 12 people. We all ran 3 different legs of the race, each varying in length and difficulty. It took our team 26 hours, 50 minutes to complete (which was 3 hours and 10 minutes faster than our expected time!). We weren't really trying to compete, we just wanted to have fun and say we ran a Ragnar. We ended up taking 88th place out of 200 teams, and 4th place in our category... not too shabby if you ask us! We started the run through the red rocks in the Valley of Fire, then ran around Lake Mead, and ended up at the Red Rock Hotel and Spa in Las Vegas. We'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story:
Our team name was "12 Hot Runners" and we were each a different "hot"... Icy Hot, Smoking Hot, Drop it like it's Hot, Pretty Hot, Red Hot, Oven Hot (for the girl that was 4 mo. preg), etc. etc.
Here's the whole team with the Ragnar Van and our metals.
There are van decorating prizes and let me tell ya... some people went all out: Christmas lights, dirty underwear all over the van, a wheelchair on top, a halo on top, a devil tail off the back and horns on the front.... seeing the vans was half the fun!
There were all sorts of crazy people in costumes... we saw Elvis, girls all running in tu-tu's, angels, devils, guys who only ran in speedos, a team of mullets...
Ryan still fresh during his first run. Okay, he was fresh the whole time... he rocked all of his runs and everyone was jealous of his long stride! (And no, I am not having my own little dance party on the side of the road- I was giving him water at the half-way point.)
Here I am still fresh on my first run. Unlike Ryan, however, my time gradually went a little downhill with each run. And no one was jealous of my stride (or my t-rex looking arm... I hope I didn't always run like that! ha!) :)
Here's the beautiful park where we first crashed with hundreds of other people. We woke up and left to meet our other van at the next exchange at about 9 pm and we got to run until 12:30 or 1 am. It was awesome running in the middle of the mountains by yourself on a clear night with no lights (I actually thought I would be scared, but I wasn't).
This was our second crashing place where we snoozed for a few more hours until our last run started at 4:30 am. As you can see, this was not as luxurious as our previous one. We were with hundreds of other vans at a school parking lot and the grass had all just been watered so there was no where to lay out our sleeping bags. I'm sure some other vans were mad when we took up a whole parking spot to sleep in. But ya gotta do whatcha gotta do. We put our cooler with our flashing caution lights at the end of the spot so no cars would miss us and run us over.
Yay! We did it! Here we are at the Red Rock hotel where we ended! While we had a ton of fun, we swore we weren't going to ever do one again. (No sleep, no meals, and tons of running can really get to you!). But a few nights later we found ourselves looking up all of the other Ragnar Relays and going through the other maps to figure out which ones we would want to do (there's one in Washington state that looks awesome...to all my Washington friends out there, any takers? I'm serious. Go look it up)!
The End.
