Wasatch Back 2010

Our team start time for this race was 5am, so in an effort to get some sleep the night before (Thursday night) part of my team and I went up early and spent the night at our captain's aunt's house. Unfortunately for me, I don't sleep well in unfamiliar places, so it felt like I never went to sleep that night. I am pretty sure I was still awake when our alarms went off at 3:15am Friday morning. We had to be up, ready, and to our pre-race safety training at 4am.

My first run happened about 7am Friday morning and was a 5.1 mile leg. Above is a picture of me awaiting my team member (you can see him approaching in the distance).



He is passing the fancy baton (aka slap braclet) and I am off. I let him borrow the GPS pacing watch (that I had borrowed from a friend) and so the watch exchange didn't go quite as smoothly as the slap braclet.

In this picture my teammates are cheering me from the sidelines in an effort to get me to explode off the starting line, but as you can see I was having some trouble multi-tasking. Apparently, I can't run and put a watch on simultaneously.

And then I was off and running (looks like I'm gasping for air in this picture)!!!


Once our first 6 runners ran, we handed off to the second van and our next 6 runners had a turn. In the mean time, our van went to Subway for lunch and just lounged around waiting our turn to start running again.

I don't have a piture of me running my second leg, but I set off at about 5pm and man was it hot!!! This leg was definitely the hardest of my 3 legs...maybe the heat, or maybe fatigue.

We exchanged to van 2 after our second run and headed to dinner and to the Oakley fairgrounds (the race covered the most beautiful 188 miles of Northern Utah). By the time we had dinner and got settled in our sleeping bags it was about 11pm Friday night. We didn't get to sleep long (we woke up about 2:15am Saturday morning to begin our 3rd leg), but it was seriously such a refreshing night of sleep.

I think we all felt refreshed! Here are my van members bright and early Saturday morning loading up the van (we were required to wear reflective vests from dusk til dawn).

Here were my 3 legs.

The finish line was just waiting to be crossed! We just needed our other 6 runners to finish, so that so that we could all run across it together.

These last few pictures are out of order, but here I am posing with my first medal ever!

Team: Roman's Legion (the bald guy in the front is Roman)

Race time: 31 hours and 17 minutes!