Ragnar Relay Del Sol 2011

Well I just got back from another race! This time I went and ran the AZ Ragnar relay. My neighbor had a friend who had two spots open up on her team about a month ago, so we jumped at the chance to run another race. This was the first race I have run without Heber. He’s still not up to par with his knee (ACL surgery last fall).

I only knew 2 people on the team when we left…but it was a blast and everyone was a ton of fun. It was the first relay race for 8 of the 12 people there. So our whole first van had never done one before…we gave them some pointers on the ride down.

Here is a pic of all the girls that ran on our team. Paula on the far right was our team captain…it was her birthday the day of the race and wanted to run a relay for her birthday. So she put this whole thing together.

Camille, my running partner didn’t get to come either…but her sister Leslie was running on another team, so we met up with her to get a picture. She ran the same leg as me.

Here are some of our girls cheering on van 1 with pom poms on the side of the road.

Here I am chilling in the van after my 1st leg of 9.2 miles…Paula got us all flashing light glasses for our night run.

Here I am getting ready to run my third leg of 4.2 miles. Just waiting for my runner to come in.
We had 2 hours of sleep after our first leg and woke up at 11:30 pm so we could get to the next exchange to run our night run at 12:30am. Then we got 2 hours of sleep again at 7am and woke up at 9am to get the final van exchange at 10 am.

Lots of teams dress up in funny outfits and have funny team names…here is the MC Hammer team. There was also a “Victorious Secret” team…can you imagine what they wore? Let’s just say lace and spandex, this included the guys!

Our team name was “Sol Invictus” so we were supposed to dress up as sun goddesses. Here we are with a 76 year old man that ran the race! He was so flattered that we asked to take a pic with him.

Here I am running my final leg of 4.2 miles. I ended up running another 5.2 miles after this because one of our runners had to fly home after our second run because her daughter went into labor. So all in all I ran 22 miles! I was quite proud of myself, I felt good.

Trying to hand off that slap bracelet in the shoot.

They give out fake Ragnar tatoos, which are always a huge hit.

Some previous Biggest Loser contestants were announcing at the start line and finish line…so here we are with Sunshine, Jessica, and Sione. They are all supposed to run on a team for the LA Ragnar in April. Super cool, my kids love watching Biggest Loser every week. So we watched all of their seasons.

Here is most of our team on the side of the road while Scott was running his first leg. The whole race was about 200 miles.

Here I am finishing up my first leg of 9.2 getting ready to hand off the slap bracelet. I got 8 road kills (passed 8 people) on this leg…7 of which were guys (we are now calling that getting “chicked”). I was super proud of my time on this leg…slight uphill grade the whole way and I managed to average 8:55 per mile….I ran hard the whole way. So for all of my three legs I averaged under 9 min. miles! This is the first race I’ve been able to do that. I couldn’t wait to tell Heber.