This past weekend I ran in the Southern California Ragnar Relay. It is a 203.5 mile 12-man relay race from Huntington Beach to Coronado Island. I was on a team made up mostly of fellow R&D folks from TaylorMade along with a few others. Each team uses two vans to help with the transportation. I was in van two along with Matt Johnson, Jessica Fortin, Michelle Penney, Jessica Torpey and Olivia Stewart. The other van started first, at 8:15 am in Huntington Beach. Each of their six runners ran their first leg and we met them in East Anaheim at around noon for the exchange. By then it was starting to get pretty hot. I was the last runner in van 2 so I watched as everyone else pounded the pavement through temperatures that peaked at 105 degrees (according to the suburban thermometer, 98 degrees according to weather.com). Our team was amazing in enduring through the heat. It was slightly cooler when I ran at about 5 pm, but still hotter than anything I’ve ever run in before. The heat just sapped our strength. My leg was only about 4.6 miles, but I had to walk several times. I finally finished and handed off to Joe Hoffman, the first runner in van 1 for his second leg at about 6:20 pm. It was pretty brutal.
While van 1 was running their second legs, our van hit up In N Out in Temecula for some burgers. Other than when we were asleep, it was the quietest our group was during the whole race. We had all not eaten much all day, so caloric intake was the highest priority. We then drove to Lawrence Welk Resort just North of Escondido on I-15. That is where we would meet the runners from van one and start our second legs. The girls slept in the van while Matt Johnson and I tried in vain to sleep on a putting green adjacent to the parking lot. After a little over an hour of trying, we gave up and went over to the exchange area where they had hot chocolate, some music and some fire pits. We chatted with some other teams and waited for updates from van 1.
Eventually their last runner was on the course so we started getting ready. Sometime at about 1:00 am, the exchange was made and we were on the course again. Running at night was a cool experience. There were almost 600 teams, so you were never too far from other runners. Each runner wears a reflective vest, a headlight and a tail light. It looks pretty cool as you look up the road and see all these runners.
As before, I was the last runner in our van and I ran 4.7 milesfrom Rancho Carillo Elementary school in Carlsbad to TaylorMade-adidas golf, my workplace! I ran from about 4:00 am to 4:45 and there handed off to Joe Hoffman again for his third and final leg. At TaylorMade, we had the advantage to actually shower and sleep indoors. I slept in my office and got a good, solid 3 hours.
When I woke on Saturday morning, my body was not happy with me. It was as if it was saying, “Wait a minute, I thought we were friends!” My head hurt. My stomach was unhappy and I was just tired. I didn’t eat very well or very regularly on Friday and I had run almost ten miles in addition to not getting adequate sleep. I didn’t feel like eating much, but I knew I needed to eat something because I still had over 6 miles to run later that day.
Eventually, I started feeling better. Better enough to get some snacks and to drink some fluids. We met van 1 at about 9:30 am at the Torrey Pines Glider Port where they finished their last run. They could now go and relax until the very finish, but our van’s team still had 43 miles to cover before we were done. Luckily, the weather was perfect. Slightly overcast and cool, it made it much nicer to run than the previous day.
Michelle Penney had a real trial with her last leg. She had some shin splint problems that were lingering from several weeks before the Ragnar and while she had struggled through them in her first two legs, they really hurt her on her third leg. We even contemplated letting her switch with another runner to finish. But Michelle didn’t want to stop and so she endured. We were all proud of her when she finished and had overcome such difficulties.
Eventually it was my turn again. I started way down in Chula Vista and was to be our last runner. I felt better by the time I started, but it still took me a couple of miles to get into a good groove. At just over the half-way point, my family rode by in a shuttle toward the finish line and cheered me on. That gave me a tremendous boost. The last two miles felt good and I even tracked down and passed a girl who had passed me a couple miles into the leg. I was really pushing it at the finish. I turned a corner and looked through a tunnel toward the finish and heard my team cheering for me. That made me go even faster! I gave high-fives and moved quickly past our team toward the finish line when I heard them yelling, “Wait. Wait for us!”. I was so focused on finishing that I didn’t realize that we were supposed to all finish as a team together. I was under the impression that I would finish for our time and then that we would all gather and cross again for the photo op. It was really hard for me to slow down, as you can see in the video below. Michelle was the camera operator.
In the end, it was a lot of fun. I’m glad I did it. As for next year, I’m still mostly on the fence.
A couple of other things have happened in the family recently. Emma did get braces! She’s pseudo-excited about them, meaning that she’s sort of excited about the notoriety that she gets due to being one of the first kids in her class to have them, but she can’t really act excited about it, so she has to play it cool.
Until next time…
