Ragnar Trail Relay Appalachians WV

 So about 6 months ago we signed up for this crazy thing called a Ragnar Trail Relay. I had wanted to do a spring/early summer race, and this worked out timing wise- I thought- it's six months away, I can get totally ready by then. Who cares that I have not run on a trail since I was in high school, I can get in plenty of practice by then! I'll totally be ready to run the 15 miles in 2 days!
So yeah, any guesses how my training went? :) I did run a lot. I got in a 7 mile run as my longest, I even did a few two-a-days. But no trail runs. I though that I'd just have to wing it when I got there. If we did not have soccer taking over our lives in the spring I would have been able to do trail runs.
So, a Ragnar Trail run is a team of 8 people who each run 3 times over the course of 2 days. There are 3 different trails- the Green loop, which was 3.5 miles, the yellow loop which was 4.6 miles and the red loop was 6.7 miles. It was a total of  14.8 miles. One runner is out at a time, and it is like any relay run, where one runner gets back and the next runner heads out. We started at 10:30 Friday morning, and ran through the night to end on Saturday afternoon. While we were not running we had tents that were are base camp.

When we first thought of doing this, we thought it would be great to put together 2 teams, and then everyone could have a running buddy. We had so much interest, we thought we could easily fill up 2 teams. Jump forward to the start of June- we will still 2 people short of filling 1 team! I was so insanely stressed about that situation. I was the team captain and a majority of the details fell on me. Aside from being short $220 if we didn't fill those two slots, we would each have to run 4 times instead of 3.
After a lot of prayers, a lot of fishing on social media, and more "maybes" turned "nos" than I can count, I finally had a nice lady named Lynda message me on facebook asking if I was still looking for 2 team members. I snatched she and her husband up so fast it left both of us spinning. All of the sudden I could stop stressing about that. As soon as I stopped stressing about that, Colleen, my friend who was also running, said that she had not been training and she wanted out. I told her she had to find her own replacement, but she wasn't able to, so she ended up having to come and run.
We had to really think carefully about how to deal with Colleen not being ready to run. We finally decided to have her run the hardest loop first, after which one of two things would happen- either she would think, oh, I can do red, that means I can totally do the yellow and green. OR-- she would at least have her hardest leg out of the way and no one would have to run the red leg twice. So we moved runners around quite a bit in the days leading up to the race, and finally the night before we had our order.

In the midst of this, i had all of the business of the end of school. Field days, field trips, end of the year celebrations, soccer practices, tournaments, and parties. Plus, at one point I thought that it would be a good idea to have Nate's birthday party the night before we went to the run. So yeah, it was kind of a crazy 2 weeks. But Finally Friday morning came, and after the alarm went off at 3am, Jesse and I got up and met Cindy and Colleen and were off to West Virginia.  

We made good time getting there, I got us all checked in, and we met the answer to my prayers- Keith and Lynda. We really lucked out in having such great people to share our team with. It would not have been as fun if we had to share our campsite with unpleasant people. 

We brought our huge tent, and then just shared with several people. It turned out to be a good thing to have!

 Friday started out chilly and fog covered. We got to the race site at about 8:15am, and started getting things set up and ready. By the time our leg started at 10:30 it was warming up a bit and turning into a great day. Colleen and I sat around and goofed off while waiting for our turn. We had the 4 people who had spent the night the night before be the first 4 runners. Lynda, Keith, Kate (a former co-worker of Jesse's) and Kendal, (another friend of mine and Colleen's) Next came Cindy, and then Colleen, and then Jesse and then me last in the lineup. So it was getting hot, and we were thinking that it was going to be too hot in the tent to sleep, so I decided to go down to the car and get the fan that had been left there. The shuttles stopped running at 4pm, and it was now or never. So I sent Colleen off, and grabbed a shuttle the 2 miles down the road to Cindy's car. I worked this all out by the skin of my teeth, and thanks to a very nice driver, he took me right to Cindy's car, and I was able to grab the fan and make it back on the last van back to camp. While we were going back the downpour started.
At the start of the race we had a safety briefing, and one of the questions was what happens if there is lightning. The answer was that the race would close for an hour, and the next runner would get skipped. There continued to be ominous clouds throughout the day, and Colleen really really REALLY  wanted the lightning to come during Cindy's run. She was about 20 min off. So Colleen was just minutes into running the longest, toughest leg of the race when a storm of biblical proportions showed up. Tents were flying all over the campground, so many teams had canopies and such that were thrown around like little toys. The rest of us brought the chairs into our tent and hung out. We thought that surely this would be a half an hour summer storm. 2 hours later it was still pouring. We had a great bonding experience sitting in the tent, and there was great joviality, and levity. We spent quite a bit of time wondering what Colleen would say when she got back. Wondering at what point she was going to just sit down and give up. About every 10 minutes we would start laughing thinking of the irony of it all. We finally thought that we'd go back down to the village and wait for her down there. As we were packing up and getting ready, she showed up at our tent, soaked to the bone, but smiling. She figured that since the course had actually been closed for 2 hours and we skipped the next two runners, that 2 people could fill in for her next two legs. So Jesse and I didn't have to run our first legs.

At 7:30 Lynda went back out for her second run, and the rest of us started to think about getting some sleep before our night runs. At one point Lynda had mentioned that she had trained for night runs, and did not mind them at all. So, I was signed up to do Colleen's middle of the night yellow loop, and I thought I'd see if Lynda wanted to do it, and I would take her yellow loop early in the morning. She decided to do that. Then, on top of that Kate had to leave early, so I told her that she could run my green loop, and I would run hers. It would get her out a few hours earlier than otherwise. So what it came down to, was we had been doing this race for almost 21 hours and I had not even run once. I was starting to wish that everything could have just gone as planned, but then again, I was pretty scared to run during the night. There was deep fog and the head lamps did nothing for the fog. Plus- bears. So it was the situation that I was in, and I needed to make the most of it.
I started out running the yellow loop, and that was not too bad except for the mud, and well, it was through the woods, which my leg muscles were not used to. But I came to find that I really do not mind trail running. We did so much of it in my high school cross country days, and that kind of came back to me. I ran that in pretty much what I expected based on everyone else's times.
Then Keith went out for the red loop and I was hoping he would take his time because I was up right after him to do the green loop. It was while he was out that our next predicament came about. The last runner out was 4pm, and we knew that it's likely we could get me out by then, but not guaranteed. It was right about then, that due to the mud, most teams were taking much longer to run, and they decided to do something so that the teams could finish. They started calling teams back to double up their last 6 runners. So the two runners to run the green loop would run together, and the 2 for the yellow look and red loop. The other option was that I would be sent out to run the last red loop at 4:00. That would mean that we would not leave camp until 7pm, and get home by 10pm, and we still had kids that we needed to get home, and church the next morning, where I was leading the music in sacrament meeting, so I had to be on time. So my options were either be there super late, or I could run 3 legs within 6 times. Neither option looked good, but I finished my marathon by sheer determination, so I thought that I would give the doubling up option a try. So about an hour and a half after I finished my yellow loop I set out with Colleen to run the green loop. We started out pretty well, but after about the first mile I started to feel the fatigue. It was not pretty. There was a lot of walking. It did not help that most of the trail had mud so thick that you risked both losing a shoe and twisting and ankle all at the same time. It was during the second half of that loop that I realized that the transition tent is a busy confusing place, and that no one would really notice if I did not show up to run the red loop with Cindy. I wanted to run it, but I knew that I couldn't do anything other than walk the whole time. So we sent Cindy out on her own, and we started to get things ready to go. When it was time for her to be done, we went down to the finishing area to join her for the run over the bridge.
All three of the loops finished at the same spot with you running up and over a bridge and down to the transition tent. It was the final insult to the race. When your team mate finished the last leg, you could join them and finish all together. By the time Cindy finished, it was just Cindy, Colleen, Jesse and I there, but we joined her and finished together. After which we went and got our "medals" which had no metal in them at all. They were stamped leather on a wooden plaque.

 So I didn't quite finish all of the legs, but then again, if we had all run where we were supposed to, I would not have run all of my legs anyway, due to the rain out.
So the verdict--- it was a good time. I really did enjoy myself. I would totally do it again minus the mud, porta-potties, running and camping! But I'm glad that we did it. I wish that it would have worked out differently and I could have run all 3 loops, really so that I could see what the red was like. Maybe I'll try to make it out there when we're up at Deep Creek and see if I can find the trail. So there you have it, the super long drawn out story of my Ragnar experience.