Ragnar 2.0 - In the Books

This year was so incredible, I'm having a crazy hard time recovering from it.

Because it was damn near perfect.

Sure, there were little snafus.  Like when we got to exchange 24 at midnight Friday night in an INCREDIBLY sleep deprived state, expecting a nice major exchange with OH, I dunno, a building.  Or at least a bathroom with running water.  And got a grass field.  An UNMOWED grass field.  With port-o-johns as the ONLY facilities.

But I digress.

This year's Ragnar Keys was AMAZING.  This was our second year doing the event, and our first as team captains.  Technically BRAD was the team captain.  Technically.  We had a great group of really strong runners.  Half of our crew had relay experience.  The weather didn't cooperate with us, but it didn't absolutely flatten us like it did last year--the heat was bad but the night runs, at least, were manageable. 

I can't say enough about how much fun this group of people was to hang out with in between runs.   Left to right, Gigi (Running on Candy), Brad, me, Nick (went to college with Brad), Kristen (friends with Allison), and Rich (Kristen's brother-in-law).

 Rich and his crew of "Tarts and Tartans" were awesome.  Steady and strong for every single leg.  All while wearing kilts.  Back row, left to right:  Allison (we know each other from the gym), Susan (friends with Allison), Dawn, Rich; front, Mike and Melissa.  Dawn, Rich, Mike and Melissa all know each other and had run together previously.   Steady and STRONG, I say!

 

We started at 5:10 am (10 minutes later than we were supposed to) and finished 34 hours later, while the sun was still out, which was a great treat :-)

 

Fantastic experience.  Shower Pill DEFINITELY made things more pleasant for us, keeping the stinkiness to a minimum.  We really appreciated those Shower Pill wipes when we were stuck at the exchange with no running water, let me tell you.

I'll write three separate posts over the next few days highlighting the three legs.  But suffice to say this was an AMAZING experience with a bunch of great people.  I couldn't help but think of our Ragnar team from last year often--another amazing experience with a bunch of strong, resilient runners.  I was glad that we had an injury/incident free year this year!