Ragnar Colorado

Sometimes your friends get you to do dumb things without even trying. Like run a Ragnar when you haven't been training and have been struggling to run 3 miles on 8 hours of sleep, but that's exactly what Brenda got me to do. Run Ragnar with absolutely no training.
She had been on the Ragnar team for a couple of months. She ran it last year and was happy to do it again this year even though she didn't have much time to train with all of her school stuff. Friday the first she messaged me and asked if I wanted to do it too, since the other team was still short runners. I've wanted to try a regular road Ragnar since I did trail last year and this seemed like a good opportunity. It was a sponsored team so all I had to pay for was food and gas and Brenda said it was a beautiful run. I thought about it over the weekend, recruited my friend Spencer to come too and we committed to the team on Monday.
Thursday morning we had two people drop out and we still weren't sure on the vehicle situation. It was really starting to give me anxiety. We finally got the runner situation figured out, van 1 would just take our leg 7 and we would just do a 5 man team in van 2. Since we were only going to have 5 runners, our team captain decided we would just take her car to save on gas.
Thursday night we left Provo at about 7 and headed for Colorado. It was a long drive, but we made pretty good time and crashed as soon as we got to the hotel. We only got about 4.5 hours of sleep (if we were lucky) and then the other team's van 1 was up and getting ready to leave. Brenda, Spencer and I had nothing to do about 6 hours waiting for van 1 to get to the exchange and for our other two teammates to get there. We sat around at the "lake" at the resort for a while and tried to not be too bored, but I think we were all glad to get things started.
 Brenda was our first runner. It was pretty warm and she had a long run. She ended up running even longer, because it was a moving exchange and we were pretty far down. I was the next runner and I was afraid between the heat and the altitude I was going to die, but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. It was beautiful and I just might be in love with Colorado.

3 runners later and we were at a rec center sleeping on the gym floor.

It wasn't the best sleep I've ever had and it was only about two hours before we were packing our stuff back to the car and driving to the next exchange. Some vans really get into the whole thing and decorate their vans and it is awesome. This was one of my favorites.

It was about 2 in the morning at this point and we were running through Glenwood canyon. I was sad we were running it at night because it looked like it would be a beautiful canyon, but it was a great night run and we had an awesome moon!

 Luckily after this run we got to stay in a hotel. I slept much better there for about 3 hours and then we were dragging our sorry selves back out to the car for our last round of running. I was pretty gross and super tired by this time. My last run was really hot and even though it was only 3.3 miles it was slower than I've run in a LONG time, which is saying something since I've been so slow the last 3 months.
I was so glad when I was finished. The last three runners did great and we actually made pretty good time. We had a while to wait for our last runner. We got cleaned up a bit and Brenda caught a few zzzz's

and then we were off to wait for Spencer at the finish line. I was SOOO glad to be done and then we just had to wait around for everyone to be ready to drive us back to our car at the starting line.

Sadly it was a two hour drive to the car and then the six hour drive to get home. We left the finish line at about 6 and left for home and about 8:45. We stopped for pizza because we were starving and wanted some "real" food and then we just pushed it through the night. It was nice having 3 people in the car so two could keep each other awake and the third could sleep. We pulled into Provo at about 3:30 a.m. 8:30 church was definitely NOT going to happen so Brenda and I dragged ourselves out of our house for an 11:30 ward. We barely made it through sacrament meeting and then came home and crashed.
It was a fun weekend, but I don't know if I'm really cut out for road Ragnar. I think I'll stick to trail.