Oww, my blisters. And my legs. And, weirdly, my shoulders. That’s right. I ran so much that my SHOULDERS hurt. But it was good.

We started out from Joe’s house in San Mateo at about 6am (fortunately, I spent the night there so I could squeeze in a few extra minutes of sleep), then packed our vans and headed out for Calistoga. We arrived in plenty of time to get check in, pick up our event t-shirts, and get ready to race.

Rusty started us out at 9:30 (although we found him a few blocks later walking and carrying the hat, so we took it from him so he wouldn’t be stuck with it for the rest of his leg). Since I was in Van 2 (along with Jen, Ren, Hao, Mayank, and John), we didn’t have to run for a few hours, so we headed off to the first van exchange. We ate some mushy pasta, salad, garlic bread, and cookies, then everyone tried to grab a little rest.

I was looking forward to trying out my new toy, a Garmin Forerunner 301, so when it came time to start my leg, I was ready to go. My leg went well (GPS data), though it had far more hills than I remembered from our recon drive the week before. I noted the first big hill at mile 1, but apparently spent so much time talking about the hill that I didn’t notice as we drove over the miles and miles of smaller rolling hills. I maintained a 8:46/mile moving pace (which doesn’t take into account the time I spent standing at stoplights) over the 6.9 mile leg, which was an improvement over my usual training pace of 9 min/miles over 5.5 miles of relatively flat paths and roads.

After I handed off to Jen, we spent the next few hours supporting our runners by providing water and Gatorade every mile or two, then heading to the exchange to drop off the next runner and pick up the previous. After John finished his leg and Van 1’s runners took over, Van 2 headed into San Francisco in search of some dinner. We ended up at Mel’s Diner, which was decked out in some of the cheesiest Cinco de Mayo decorations known to man (they had pictures of piñatas hanging instead of actual piñatas (not to even get into the topic of discussing what a piñata has to do with Cinco de Mayo)). We stuffed our faces, then headed to Alla’s place to crash for a couple of hours. We hadn’t gotten nearly as much sleep as I hoped when we headed to the Golden Gate Bridge, where I would start Van 2’s second set of legs with a run through the Presidio.

My second leg (GPS data) started just after the bridge at about 2am. It wasn’t as cold as I had expected, so my long pants and long sleeves proved to be a bit excessive and a little warm. It wasn’t my clothes that did me in, though. It was the hills. Climbing 350 feet in about a mile combined with an hour of sleep really took a lot out of me. Fortunately, the last few miles were flat so I made it through with a pace of 9:31/mile. Not my best showing, but this was rated as my hardest leg, so I’m happy with the results.

The rest of our legs quite a bit of delirious chattering, and began our tradition of yelling “less than a mile left!” and “it’s all downhill from here” regardless of the remaining distance and terrain of our runner, as well as offering them our mascot, the petrified bagel. To help you, my dear readers, appreciate why this bagel is so awesome, check out the sound it makes when I knock on it in this video. How could it NOT be our mascot?

To finish our set of legs, John handed off to Rusty near Cañada College, and we immediately hit the cafeteria to get some breakfast. While there, I learned some disturbing information about some of my teammates: some of them don’t know how to properly eat fruit. John cuts oranges into slices, and will sometimes cut a banana in half to eat it instead of peeling from the top. Hao used “the tools that are available”, so since there was a knife, he scored the peel, then carefully removed it (and refused to answer my question of how he’d eat an orange if presented with only a hammer). The worst was Ren, who peels bananas from the bottom. Why? Because he had trouble opening one once and saw a monkey on TV do it that way, so he gave it a shot. Now, as much as I love monkeys, I don’t trust any old monkey to teach me things. I don’t open bananas from the wrong end and I don’t fling poo. After this enlightening meal, we all went to the gym and crashed into the deepest sleep known to man.

Upon waking, we gathered up our stuff and headed out to the last van exchange. I had my easiest leg, which was a run of 6.2 miles down Hwy 9, which dropped about 1200 feet over the leg. I have GPS data for this leg as well, but it’s incomplete. The road was lined with trees, so I had spotty GPS signal. I didn’t actually leave the highway and run offroad randomly like it seems to think. This did lead to a pleasant surprise, as I reached the end of my leg sooner than I expected, so I had a nice kick to finish with. My actual finish time was 6.2 miles in just under 54 minutes, giving me an average of 8:43/mile. This is despite my nasty blisters, which were not at all helped by the constant downhill running. I made my handoff, and spent much of the rest of the race lying down in the back of the van. The exception being during the final leg, where I ran a few blocks down the street to meet him with some water since his leg didn’t allow for van support. Then we headed down to the beach to meet up with Van 1 so we could finish as a team.

After the race, Van 1 headed home, while Van 2 (minus Mayank, plus Andrei) grabbed some dinner (a round of well done cheeseburgers, except a portabella sandwich for me), then headed back to the bay area. Quite a weekend!

The rest of the photos taken by the rest of the team and me are on Flickr.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Personal Musings, Diet/Exercise, Yahoo!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

tagged bananas, calistoga, monkeys, oranges, running, santa cruz, the relay and yahoos your daddy