Ragnar del Sol

I am nearly recovered from a bad bout of bronchitis and am hoping to have full lung capacity back in the next few days.  I got sick last week after our fun family President's Day campout to Bulldog Canyon and by Thursday night, I was feeling pretty crappy.  I even gave in and started on some meds since all the natural remedies I was trying weren't touching it.  Everyone knows that feeling sub-par is never fun, but I am quite certain I made it much worse by being a part of the Ragnar insanity.  You know that part where the doc says, "Rest, rest, rest."  Oh ya, I missed that part :)  I must have heard, "Run, run, run."

Last weekend was Ragnar del Sol weekend, and I was part of an amazing 12-person team who, while still claiming to be perfectly sane, voluntarily paid to run 200.5 miles nonstop over two days in a relay style race (3 legs each) while shuttling between the 36 exchange points in two vans, all throughout much of Arizona.  What an experience.  Really, an incredibly cool experience and something I will never forget.  The van was so trashed with all our gear and crap everywhere after just a few hours.  In and out.  In and out.  I wonder how many times we got in and out of that dang van?  Lots of time spent leapfrogging our runners every mile or two along the Arizona highways, giving support, delivering much needed water, yelling encourgagement over the megaphone, laughing at the insanity, frequenting more porta-potties than any human should ever frequent in one weekend.  My bronchitis/maybe pneumonia lungs burned with a fire I haven't felt in years and my body was so dang tired.  I think I might have slept a grand total of two hours over a two-day stretch, and that was curled up in a van on the benchseat I was sharing with my rad hard core cousin, Jodi.  She rocked the insanity with me, and so did my cousins, Jimmy & Tamara, along with a couple of their cousins on the Van Epps side of the family plus 6 other random friends.  Oh, and I might have caught about 20 minutes of shuteye sleeping on the ground in the cold, bermuda grass football field of some high school after showering in their locker room Friday night (exchange 12).  That was not the most pleasant part of the trip.  Jodi and I were laughing so hard at the insanity at that point.  Still, even sick, it was really so much fun.  And yes, I know that sounds a little deranged.  Actually, a lot deranged as I write this.  But yes, it was actually fun.  And I am pretty sure I will do it again with 2 vans full of my best friends and family.  Maybe we'll get a killer team of crazies together for next year's hoopla.

I posted all my pics on Facebook already as did many of the other peeps on our team, but I am hoping to put them up here too in case I ever turn this blog into a book.  I was runner 5 of 12, one of the two token females in Van 1 and four in our total team.   I followed Jodi (she was runner #4) so I got to get the baton slap bracelet handoff from her each time.  Sweet.  We collectively decided (in our humble Van 1) that we rocked extra hard since Van 1 ran so much more than Van 2.  We logged 111 miles to their 88 as most all of our legs were longer.  Not sure why the Ragnar Gods designed the course like that with so much disparity, but so be it.  Actually, that only adds up to 199 miles, so somewhere along the course there was another 1.5.  They must have rounded down in the Rag Mag that published all the leg distances. 

My legs were 6.8 miles (run along Wickenburg Rd toward Phoenix at 3:15pm on Friday - super toasty but a nice flat and gradual downhill run), then 6.7 miles (run along New River Road, mostly uphill, on the way to New River in the middle of the boondocks at 2:30am Saturday morning - cold, dark, a little creepy, going on 22 hours with no sleep with lungs fire-filled), then finally 4.8 miles (run over super hilly road coming into McDowell Mountain Park in Fountain Hills at noon on Saturday - so hot and lungs now bursting into flames).  Can I just say how happy I was when I finished leg 3?  Soooo happy.  But I was even more happy when I finally laid my head on my pillow on Saturday night at 7:30 pm (after being awake for 48 of the preceding 50 hours) and crashed like nobody's business.  I don't think I moved for 11 hours. 

The hardware from the race is the coolest in my collection.  Our team's race shirts are rad (our team was Rock the Ragnar).  The pictures make me laugh and smile and remember what it feels like to push. 

Good times, good times. 

For our record books:

We finished in 31 hours, 3 minutes, 37 seconds, and best I can tell from the results sheets, we finished 176 of 377 finishing teams (excluding the ultra teams that were running with 6 people only).  Our team's average pace for the whole event was 9:17/mile.  Not bad, not bad for a random bunch of banshees. We'll take it.