SoCal Ragnar Relay, Leg 1

I’ve never done a relay race before, but couldn’t imagine how this wouldn’t be fun – except for the not showering part. 

The Ragnar Relay was originally run in Utah and created by a guy who wanted to mimic the Hood to Coast Relay in Oregon. For the most part it’s made up of 12 person teams, split into two sub-teams. One sub-team will run a series of legs of the course with their six runners and eventually meet up with the other sub-team and they’ll run the next six legs of the course. The teams do this over the 200 mile long course, each runner running 3 times. 

Of the 12 people on the team, I knew, or at least knew who, five of the other people were. We did have a team dinner the weekend before the race so everyone could meet, but ironically, the two sub-teams kind of stayed sub-divided during the dinner and didn’t really interact much. My sub-team – van 2, was the “older crowd.” Van 1 was the misfits – mostly UCI grad students. Adults, but still college kids in a sense. The main thing I wanted to get out of this dinner was to meet the guy in van 1, Euri, who was going to be handing off the “baton” to me so we’d recognize each other at the exchange point. Well I did meet him, but when it came time for the first exchange, our original meeting was all for naught. 

Waiting for Euri at the park

Apparently Euri is a professional drinker and was rather bombed at dinner, so as he came running down the slope into the exchange point he didn’t understand who he was going to be handing the baton off to. As I stood there in the middle of the trail – the only person standing on the trail, I wondered why does this guy look confused? He had a look on his face that read “who do I give this to?” To me it seemed pretty obvious who he needed to hand the baton off to – the only guy standing in the middle of the trail waiving his arm at him! 

Once I got the slap bracelet baton I took off down the trail. We’ve had a cool spring here in SoCal, except for this day. It was about 91 or 92 degrees out and I was running on a paved black top trail in exposed sun, so I was rather warm. Thankfully I was only going to be running seven miles and it was all flat. I wanted to record as many “kills” as I could (passing other runners) and got a little excited at the start of my run as the next runner was in site. I looked down at my watch as I went through the first mile and saw I’d run it in 5:56. Oops. Too fast. I throttled back to a 6:30 pace for the remainder. 

My team found a spot during my run where they could stop and cheer me on. That gave me a bit of a pick-me-up, but it turned out that stopping for me like that might not have been the best idea. The van rout that paralleled my run took them onto the east bound 91 freeway. On Friday afternoon, this freeway is a parking lot. When I came blazing into the exchange zone, happy with my six kills, I looked around and saw no one from my team! Unlike Euri, I knew the person who I would hand the baton off to and could tell Dave wasn’t there. Thankfully only a few seconds passed before Dave came running up and I gave him the slap bracelet. 

I was a sweaty mess, but with no place to take a shower, I grabbed a Gatorade out of the cooler and climbed into the back seat of our team Tahoe and began wiping myself down with baby wipes.  I tried stretching some and began eating because I had essentially 10 hours to kill before I ran again. That makes it sound like the Ragnar is really boring, but I never was. While your van is running there’s a lot of action going on as you leapfrog your runner and navigate to different exchange points. The down time while the other van is running flies by as you try to sleep or eat a real meal and get to the next major exchange point. 

The rest of the team ran well through the heat, but thankfully we got some relief when the sun set. Cale ran strong through the dark and didn’t get hit by any cars on the narrow country road he had to run down. He had nine kills on his leg, meaning two things: 1) Cale was running pretty fast and 2) we were starting to catch up to the meat of the field (we were one of the later teams to start due to our team’s average pace). At the next major exchange point in Lake Elsinore, we met up with the team in van 1 – the misfits. We didn’t see them at the previous major exchange because the traffic was too heavy to allow them to drive there faster than Euri could run (that’s LA traffic for you). The misfits were in good spirits and ready to start their night leg.