The Ragnar Relay

First entry. This is a bit back dated, but as I recalled the events of last weekend to Leah, between laughs she made the comment "you really should blog about this." So, here I am... Work plus the Army 10 miler yesterday has delayed my initial post, but hopefully I'll be able to keep up in the future. I actually logged into blogspot this morning to see if the leahandeugene domain was available. Well, it was taken, but it turned out only because I had taken it over a year ago!

So what better way to kick off this blog then to recount the story of how I spent last weekend. Somehow I was convinced in early summer to join a 6 man team in running the Washington, DC Ragnar Relay. A little bit about the race itself. The Ragnar Relay is a long distance, round the clock endurance relay that takes place around the country throughout the year. It originated in Utah 4 years ago, and has steadily expanded outward since then. In this case, it mainly followed the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Trail from Cumberland, MD to Washington, DC. 183 miles from start to finish. It was broken up into 36 legs (about 4-8 miles each) and most teams (the sane ones, if you call running 15 miles over 24 hours sane) had 12 people running 3 legs each.

But wait... I said 6 man team. Well, for the slightly more adventurous (aka insane) - there were the ultra teams. Ultras had 6 people running 6 legs each (2 back to back), approximately 30 miles per runner... So, on Friday morning I piled into a mini-van with my teammates Greg (our intrepid captain), Tony, Darin, Kevin, and Tom and we drove off to Cumberland, MD.

Now, I've run 5 marathons and many, many shorter distance races. Without a doubt, this was the hardest race I have ever done. I've also heard now from a few folks who've run a full Ironman Triathalon and they seemed to agree - this was tougher. For me, the difficult part wasn't necessarily the distance. Somehow I drew the 6 legs that had the most elevation (if you go to the website, check out legs 7, 8, 19, 20, 31, and 32). I think my total gross elevation climb was around 3500 ft - over 1/2 mile uphill. You know how you'll be driving some days and you'll come across a big hill? I'm talking about the hill you think in the back of your mind that it's the kind of hill you would never want to run up. Yeah, it was that hill in the beginning of leg 19. To make matters worse, this was the weekend that surprise Nor'easter came through the area. So, in addition to running approximately 30 miles with little to no sleep in a 24 hour period, with lots of elevation in between - we had to do it while battling high winds and rain. Of course, the precipitation was sporadic over the 2 days, but as my luck would have it always managed to downpour when I was out of the van.

I've gone running at night before, but usually only with a reflective belt or vest. Running with a headlamp, flashlight, vest, and blinking LED lights was new experience. Since we were going uphill, and it was at night, the dropping temperatures combined with high humidity and dew point (as any good SWO can tell you) led to most of my first leg being run in a fairly dense fog. Our mini-van, surprisingly enough, did not get too... funky (imagine 6 sweaty guys locked up in a van for 24 hours). Baby wipes are every long distance runner's best friend in situations like these. After each leg we'd also change out of our dirty clothes and packing them away in zip-loc bags...

Of course, the most interesting part of the evening, at least for me, had absolutely nothing to do with running. Throughout the race we would drive ahead in the van from checkpoint to checkpoint, making sure that our runner had everything he needed, getting the next runner prepped... So, we're in a park in western rural Maryland, standing at the exchange between legs 4 and 5 - Darin is waiting to take the next leg from Tony. The trail runs underneath a small bridge. Well, as we're waiting for the exchange, we hear this loud screech, and as we look up to the road - we see this car swerve by, slam into the guard rail on the bridge, and crash to a stop out of sight. Kevin and I ran up the hill and to the car, where the driver had already managed to get himself out and was stumbling around on the road. He didn't have any visible injuries, but it was clear he was pretty shaken (and it was clear he was something else, too... more later). Turned out that being in the middle of nowhere, we had no cell phone signal - so a driver who stopped turned around and headed back into town to call the police. A bunch of drivers started stopping and as so often the case in small towns, everyone knew the guy and was asking if he was ok (who I call "Charlie"). An ambulance and fire truck showed up in relatively short order - but the part that threw Kevin and me for a loop was when the fire chief started yelling at Charlie, asking how much he had to drink, etc. Found out later that the fire chief was in fact, Charlie's son. So anyway, Kevin and I stick around to make a statement to the police, since we were the only ones who apparently had actually seen the accident. We then learn (all kinds of things I didn't know about Maryland) that if you are in a car accident in Maryland, the State Police will send you to the nearest Maryland Hospital. The thing is, we were on the West Virginia border, and the nearest hospital in West Virginia happened to be much closer. So of course the fire chief got into a pretty big argument with the State Police about how he wants Charlie to go to the closer hospital (and we still didn't know he's his son). In the end, Charlie got into an ambulance and was taken to the WV hospital, where I can only hope that he was ok. Although, I hope he won't be driving anytime soon. I think the most fortunate thing is that he didn't hit another car on the bridge - that could have gotten very ugly.

So, that is my story of the Ragnar Relay. In the end, it was long, painful, and tiring, but I had a great time and made some great new friends. If I didn't mention it, the first time I had met Tony, Tom, and Darin was when we were packing the mini-van up. I should mention that in the last week, Greg has found yet another insane, crazy long distance relay in April, and he has gotten most of the team to agree to join up yet again (still working on one). I'll let you know how that one goes.