Wasatch Back, Baby!

I've always thought that runners are totally crazy, and this past weekend just proved my point. Rob and I ran in the Wasatch Back, which is a 188 mile relay through the back roads of the Wasatch mountains. It was CRAZY! Insane. So much fun (in retrospect, of course).

There were 650 teams with 12 runners on each team. We started at 8 am on Friday morning and finished around 3 the following afternoon. It may have been sooner, but I'm not sure. Each runner had 3 legs to run. I ran a total of 16.5 miles and Rob ran a total of 20 - 21 miles. Our team wasn't the most competetive, but we came in 10th for our division and crossed the finish line 146th out of 650. Respectable.

Waiting at the park for the last runner of the first car to come in, so our car could go.

Here I am after my first leg. It was only about 80 degrees, but it felt really hot while we were running.

This was our car. Each team had two cars (we were in car 2). Every team had to come up with a name for their team and then decorate their cars. Our team name was named "Our dad can run faster than your dad", hence the ties for decoration. Four of the runners on our team are siblings, and their dad (age 64) actually ran on our team. That's the dad standing behind the car. He did really well and actually ran really fast. We were aptly named.

There were a lot of really nutso names and people went all-out on their decorations. People even wore costumes. I haven't seen that much bathroom humor in a long time. Anyway, one team was called Zena princess warrior. They wore zena costumes to run in. Pretty funny. My personal favorite was the Never Nudes. On their car it said "there are dozens of us". Some of them actually ran in really short, skin tight Daisy Dukes. I'm laughing just thinking about it.

Here's Rob during his first run. He had a really steep uphill for his whole run. Rob had been really sick for a few weeks prior to this, but you'd never know. He chugged up the hill like a champ.

At the top after Rob's first leg. So beautiful!

After everyone in our car took a turn running, it was the other car's turn to run. We got a break for about 4 hours. We hung out at Morgan high school, ate a really disgusting spaghetti dinner (I didn' t know Spaghetti could be so bad!) and tried to take a nap on the grass. We slept for about 1/2 hour and then it was time to start running again at 11:30.

It's now about 12:30 am and I'm getting ready for my longest run. It was freezing cold, until you started running. Every night runner had to wear a reflective vest, headlamp (or flashlight, which I later switched to), and a flashing back light. We also wore glow bracelets so our car could pick us out of the crowd.

All of our longest runs were during the night. We ran from 11:30 and finally got done at 6:00. I didn't get any pictures of Rob running, because I fell asleep in the back of the car for a little bit.

We rolled into Heber City park at 6:30 am and crashed on the grass for about an hour. After we'd had a little bit of food, we were surprisingly refreshed and ready for round three.

Waiting at the exchange.

One mile to go.

The route went through Heber and Midway, up Guardsman's Pass and into Park City. Rob ran 2.5 miles to the top of Guardsman's Pass and then all the way down to the parking lot of Deer Valley Ski resort. It was a really, really tough run. It's hard to tell how steep it is from a picture. It was also really cold and rainy. He actually wasn't supposed to start running until closer to the top, but our other runner needed some company so Rob finished his run with him.

I was trying to get a picture of Rob approaching the sign that said "one mile to go", but I was too slow and so he's in front of it. This was the point where the people in our car noticed that Rob's calf muscles were staying permanently flexed. We felt bad for him.

Here we are at the end - waiting for the last runner to come in so we could cross the finish line.

The whole team.