RRR 2011

Since I'm sitting in the family condo in SLC with really nothing to do except for reading blogs, I decided I would make a bloggin contribution of my own to fill up my time.  This could very well be a rambling post, so beware.

Now just to spite my past practice of saying that I'm going to do things, then not doing them, I'm going to actually do something I said I'll do, which is write a blog post about the Red Rock Relay, the race I participated in last September in southern Utah.  Just to throw out a few specs, the race was approximately 187 miles, completed by teams of 12 runners split into two groups which then alternated running six legs at a time. (I hope that explanation is comprehensible.)  To bring back a previous blog practice of mine, I'm actually going to put some sort of picture or graphic to complement my verbal explanation.

I actually ran the Red Rock in 2010 too, but I don't really want to go into detail about that experience.  Sure it was awesome, but I didn't really train for it that much, and also I managed to get sick with some sort of flu, cold, sore throat, overall-awful disease a couple days before it started.  So I was just not feeling 100% during that race.  I was closer to 50%, and if you've ever been at 50%, it's not so much fun.  Anyway, this year was a lot better because I had been training for it all summer in Cambridge, where I actually able to manage a degree of consistency with my running.  I hiked Timp the weekend before the Red Rock Relay, which completed my training by helping me acclimate to Utah's higher altitudes, and I was basically good to go.

In a 12-person team, the Red Rock has each runner do three legs of whatever length your team leader chooses.  My first leg was 2.9 miles at about 10,000 feet, which was a fun little jog but had my lungs on fire by the end of it-- the air is just a lot thinner up there.  I ran it some time in the afternoon, but I had to wait until midnight to get started on my second leg, after our team had run another 48 miles.  This second run is basically the whole reason I even wanted to write this blog post.  Sometimes we get lucky enough to have certain experiences that you feel like you'll never forget, where you experience something in every epistemological way-- physically, mentally and emotionally.  This run was one of those experiences.  It was 8.4 miles across the desert at midnight, with just a headlamp to see where I was going.  The temperature was perfect, and I picked some great music to listen to. One of Jon Smith's Song(s) of the Week started me out slow and steady, Loscil's "Shallow Water Dropout."  Then I moved straight into Sufjan's Age of Adz, and he literally took me the rest of the way.  I got passed by some sort of monster running like 15 miles an hour near the beginning, who we later found out was one of the guys on the team that got in first.  They leave last so as not to arrive hours and hours ahead of everybody... anyway, I then got passed by some girl who was a little more ambitious than able, I think.  After passing me, I dogged her steps for maybe a mile or two before sprinting past her.  She deserves more credit than I'm giving her, though, because she definitely helped me pace myself for awhile.  But after that I went the rest of the way without a hitch, passing three peeps, until I got kinda close to a couple of dudes in front of me.  I thought I had enough juice to possibly kill them as well (a "kill" is the RRR terminology for when pass someone), but something weird happened to my calf when I had about a half mile left in the leg.  It just decided that it didn't like working so hard any more.  So I just limped along till the end of the run.  All the same, I ran the 8.4 in something like 75 minutes, which for me is really good.  I was only JV in high school track, to give you an idea of my non-elite running status.  But I was happy with it, and the run just felt really, really good.

Later on that night I slept about 2 hours on a gym floor.

Then we got up and I eventually did my last run, which was something like 6.4 miles.  It was actually really tough.  Besides the fact that it was in the 90's, the first two miles of the run was a pretty steep uphill climb.  Regardless of that, I did okay, and sailed along for the next two miles after that as well.  But then I hit a wall.  Yep, that wall that runners talk about.  Except mostly it's marathoners who talk about it.  My only possible excuse is that I was dehydrated and hadn't slept very much the night before.  At one point in the last 2.4 miles I actually had to stop and walk up one demoralizing hill... but only after I saw that there was no one behind me in sight, and that the people in front of me had stopped to walk as well.  Then when I got to the end of the hill, I started running again and passed them.  And finally staggered across my finish line, handing the baton for the last time.

All in all, it was 17.7 miles over about 24 hours.  For crazy runner types, that's nothing.  For me, it was a good achievement, and not necessarily because I actually finished, but because I finished well.  It felt good, and I felt like I ran my runs well, and in shape and ready enough for it.

One more thing.  Most of the Red Rock isn't actually you running, it's you cheering on your teammates.  We had a great team this year.  We also had a great "Sun Van", the half of our team doing our sets of legs.  It helped that there were seven of us in a 15 passenger van, which made for REALLY comfortable rests in between runs.  But the camaraderie of Team Tortoise, our awesome Red Rock team, was another reason why running the Red Rock was pure awesomeness.  It was fun having my friend from the Cambridge study abroad Brett, my sister Emily, my brother Jeff as our driver all on my team-- not to mention bumping into Emily Dekam from my summer adventures, as well, who was on another team that kicked Team Tortoise's butt.

This post is forever long already, so I will just stop now and reward any of you who actually have read the whole thing with the following awesome picture:

At the finish line!