#ragnar trail

RAGNAR TRAIL RICHMOND 2018!!!

We captured SO  MANY good moments!!!!!! 

QUACK!

The only miles I logged last week were during Ragnar Trail Michigan.

I could’ve been more prepared, but with the hills - the likes of which I’ve got nothing around me - it probably wouldn’t have helped much. As it was, Vanessa’s son had offered to run anyone’s miles for them, so come Friday morning I took him up on the offer so he ran my roughly 3 mile loop.

@coffeeandmuscles​ posted pretty much any of the pictures that I would’ve posted (since the whole team shared) - except for this one - my wife happened to text me during my evening run asking me how it was going (she didn’t know I was running (ok, hiking) at the time):

8/10/2018 “5.96 miles”/9.59 kilometers First Ragnar Trail run, the hard loop! YTD: 875.73 miles 222 days in a row

I was runner 6 for our team (again), which meant I got to tackle the red (”hard”) loop first (again). I felt like when I ran it last year my performance could go for some improvement (which is ALSO why I volunteered to run it a second time this year when we had a teammate drop out at the last minute for Reasons* - you know, work on your weakness, that sort of thing).

So I attacked this loop with a vengeance. 23 kills (the number of people I passed while on the trail) - most of which commented** on my shoes (I had opted to run with some old pairs of Vibrams figuring my feet muscles would get a great workout trying to navigate the trails I knew were pretty technical).

The trail was a little muddy as there had been some recent rains, so there were a few spots where I struggled a bit with traction, but overall I kept running except for the longest/most treacherous of the uphills (I think there were only two spots (as far as I can tell my data supports this assertion) that I decided “Ok, I’m walking the rest of this hill”).

Overall I improved my time by about 12 minutes, which I was totally jazzed about when I finished.

* Family health issue. That teammate totally made the right decision to stay home.

8/11/2017 6.33 tough trail miles

Day one of Ragnar started out with @coffeeandmuscles cooking a MONSTER pile of bacon, and some eggs and potatoes. Lots of coffee, and then I took a turn volunteering at the transition tent, basically acting as a bouncer. “No I’m sorry, you can come in when we call your group.” “Is your team on the board? What loop are you going to run?” “Go ahead, and please enjoy responsibly.”

Then it was time for my run. It was tough. I was trying to communicate to one of my teammates that I was taking longer than expected, but trying to text while running a gnarly trail turned out to be a little tougher than I was expecting.

Sweat on my hands made it hard to type, and sweat in my eyes made it hard to see that I mistyped “3.5 miles after 53 minutes”. I hear they all got a good laugh trying to decipher my garbled message :)

The pictures of the trail aren’t mine - I didn’t stop for photos, but fortunately my teammates shared theirs (also I’m not even sure these are all the first loop, but close enough). Uphills, downhills, rocks, roots, boulders - it was a really technical trail.

8/10/2017 The road trip!

Amanda (pictured in the back seat with me) picked me up in Chicago, and then we picked up @coffeeandmuscles and @elkay723. Then we started driving to West Virginia!

While we were in Ohio we were a hundred yard or so behind a major traffic standstill. Turns out a trailer hauling wooden pallets had overturned and blocked the entire road. Ended up doing some damage to the guardrail too. But then we were on our way!

that’s like forest! in the dark!!!!?

Yes! That’s what a roughly 120 mile trail relay race is all about! Camp out in a central location in the Appalachians, show up at the start/stop area when it’s your turn to go, and GO!

To cover 120 miles of hilly, rocky, rooty, hilly, bouldery, crevassey and otherwise ‘technical’ trails, let’s assume an average pace of a 12 minute mile. That’s 1,440 minutes, or 24 hours. If you go non-stop over 24 hours, pretty much everyone gets a chance to run in the dark.