Ragnar

On Friday and Saturday (the 17th and 18th), Dan and I ran the Ragnar Wasatch Back relay race. Twelve people with two vans take 3 legs each to run a total of about 193 miles from Logan to Park City. It was kind of a big deal so I could go on and on about it, but I will try to be brief.

In short: Dan was awesome. He took the spot with the most miles total (something like 21) and wowed everyone on our team with his ~7 minute pace.

As if that wasn't impressive enough, he then ran part of the Ragnar Hill (3.2 miles on an incline which seemed to call for ropes and carabiners rather than running shoes) when one of our other runners got injured. MVP all the way.

Dan's sister, Heather, also impressed everyone with her speed and endurance. She had an 8.1 mile run up hills that would have made a grown man cry. In fact, there were many grown men there and I'm pretty sure several were crying.

Dan and Heather's van was full of speedy people, so when it came time for them to exchange with us, Heather was the first runner through the exchange. That was very exciting. Our van made short work of that lead, but it was fun while it lasted.

My cousin, Darcy, is the one who put the team together (which turned out to be a lot more work than I would have thought). She's five months pregnant and still completed all of her legs without complaint. I didn't really get a good picture of her husband, Robbie, but one of his legs was the second half of that killer hill that Dan had to do, and as you can see from our finishing pictures, he lived to tell about it.

Not to mention my aunt, Jill, who was practically immobilized by back pain just weeks before the race. Nothing was going to stop her, and nothing did.

My sister, Hannah, took up running even more recently than I did. She did great, even though we both got horrifically sick after our first two legs, thanks to Jill's irresistibly delicious peanut butter protein balls (knowing that oatmeal was a main ingredient should have been sent off some alarm bells in my head, but they were too good). She managed to recover just in time and ran her last 7.3 miler to bring us all through the finish line.

My mom was our personal MVP because she took Anda for two days while we did this ridiculous thing and was there to cheer us on at the end.

We even got to see my sister, Amy, as a volunteer at one of the exchanges.

Also, this guy and Gumby were there. I know the green suit guy ran his leg like that (it was drenched when we saw him halfway through his run), but I really hope Gumby didn't have to.

I didn't really know the other members of our team, but everyone did amazing things and we had a really great (if occasionally horrible) time. We were cursing the race halfway through, but as soon as we all took 14 hour naps, we were already talking about doing it next year.

We'll see.