5 miles in the morning around the suburbs in Las Vegas. A little windy but a perfectly relaxing shakeout run before the Ragnar festivities began.
3rd year running Las Vegas Ragnar Relay & for the 3rd year in a row I absolutely loved it! New course & new team for me this year but still the same old fun that comes with a Ragnar. I know a lot of people think these ragnar things are stupid and I completely get where you are coming from if you are a serious runner. But until I grow up I will keep running them and keep having fun! We had a really fun team this year including 800 meter superstar Olympian Nick Symmonds who was completely down to earth and incredibly humble. Our team was laid back, not serious at all but yet pretty dang fast at the same time. Perfect combination!
I was runner #9 and admittedly had quite possibly the easiet leg of the relay. Normally I like to take the harder legs and challenge myself but with the injury cycle I've been riding for the past 2 months I thought it would be wise to take the safer route.
Leg #1 - 2.9 miles at 6pm, 6:53 pace. I have to admit I worked pathetically hard for that 6:53 pace. It was ridiculously windy and there was a net elevation gain of about 100 per mile which was just enough to make me have to work really hard and feel completely wiped out after only 19 minutes of running. haha
Leg #2 - 3.5 miles at 2am, 6:26 pace. Net downhill of about 200 feet but a pretty relentless headwind the entire run. Happy to hit my goal 5k pace for the turkey trot. This leg was fun because we were starting to catch teams and I passed like 30 people in the 25 min it took me to run this one. My feet were on fire the last 1.5 miles which was not a good sign considering I had 9.5 more to run the next morning.
Leg #3 - 9.75 miles at 10am, 6:24 pace. Now don't go thinking I'm all super human or anything. There was A LOT of downhill in this leg....like 1200 feet or something. It was a perfect 1-2% downhill gradiant the entire time. Seriously find me a marathon like this somewhere. This was by far my favorite leg of the race and it felt really good to run for more than 20 minutes. My feet were on fire the last mile but other than that a perfect run and I felt great.
Our team ended up finishing in a little over 24 hours. We were projected to finish in 23:47 which would have been way cool but there is always next year to crack the 24 hour mark. I think we took like 7th overall and I can pretty much garauntee you we had a lot more fun than anyone else. I'll get our Nevernudes video posted when our captain Ryan gets it edited. Another awesome Ragnar experience in the books! | 