SoCal Ragnar Relay, Leg 3

After Cale handed off the baton the sun was just starting to rise and we were ready for breakfast. We drove into San Diego and checked out the exchange zone near UCSD, then headed to breakfast where I had a $7 waffle. There wasn’t anything special about the waffle, it didn’t come with anything else, didn’t have bananas, whip cream, blueberries, nothing.  Just one waffle on my plate and it was $7. That wasn’t a good choice, but biscuits & gravy would have been a horrible choice as I was supposed to run 10 miles in a couple hours.

When we got back to the exchange point, we all laid down on the grass on the cliff overlooking the ocean and rested for while.  It was starting to get pretty warm, but thankfully before my leg started, the humidity began to drop and the ocean breeze picked up.

When the misfits showed up that meant Euri wasn’t far behind. When he got there I took the slap bracelet baton and headed off. I could tell that my legs were pretty tired as I didn’t have a lot of get-up-and-go when I first started running. I also need to pay more attention to where I was running this leg since it was in an urban setting and had a lot of turns. The teams weren’t all that bunched up anymore. After I passed 10 people in the first few miles of the leg, I didn’t see anyone for quite a while. I did see my team, twice, since they stopped along the route and that was reassuring me that I was running the right way.

Toward the end of my leg the teams started bunching up and I was getting more kills. I was also hitting stop lights which sucked to have to wait at, though getting hit by a 4Runner would have sucked more.  After nearly 10 miles, my leg and Ragnar came to an end when I handed off the slap bracelet to David. Or at least I thought it was over. One of the members of my sub-team had developed an injured foot during her first two legs. So then there was a debate about who would run what legs to make up for it. I was happy to run another leg, honestly. Hell, I was excited to run another leg, so I slotted myself in to the second to last leg, which was just over 5 miles.

I ran this leg really hard. I’m not sure why. I think it’s because I really wanted to close the gap to another team I wanted us to beat. I wasn’t sure how fast their last guy was compared to Cale, but I wanted to catch up to them as much as I could to give him a shot. I ran my skinny ass through parts of San Diego and National City that my upper-middle class, suburban upbringing never brought me to before. I charged down the road as hard as I could to get the baton to Cale and send him on our anchor leg. Now my Ragnar was definitely over.

I jumped in our Tahoe and we headed for the finish line. Getting into the state beach where the finish line and festivities were took some time as there were a lot of people trying to get in there at once. Cale’s girlfriend, Dorene (another runner on our sub-team) was starting to panic that we weren’t going to get to the finish line in time to run in with him. I was thinking that while Cale’s fast, he was having to run seven miles and he’s not that fast where he’d beat us there. Well, he almost did. We found the other half of our team, the misfits, all drunk from spending four hours in the beer garden, and within seconds I saw Cale’s lanky 6’4” body running up the walkway toward us. We all jumped out and ran with him across the finish line.

Team #17, On Your Left, Post Race

We didn’t mean to, but we ended up finishing 18th overall out of the almost 500 teams in the Ragnar and Cale totally wiped the floor with that other team’s anchor leg. It was a pretty fun event for us.

Showing Off Our Kills