Ragnarrrrrr

Continuing the trend of firsts this year I tried my first super relay.  The event is called the Ragnar Relay: Great River.  It is 12 runners (or 6 if you are that hard core) doing 194 miles from Winona to Minneapolis through some great Wisconsin bluff country along the way.  I was the 7th runner on the team, the first from the van I was with (2 vans with 6 runners each).  I had great teammates in my van.  Erik is an amazing runner with a shot at making the Olympic trials in the marathon, Gehrig is a great leader, Tony I haven't seen since high school, so it was great to catch up with him a bit, and Rebekah and Libby got along with the rest of us well.  Everyone really tried hard and had some great runs.  I didn't see much of the other van after the start other than nearly being run over by Alicia at the handoffs.  My first leg was 6 miles and featured a 2 mile climb with about 500 feet of vertical climb.  It was good to plug away at it and run the whole hill.  It felt much better than those battle creek hills last weekend.  My next leg was 9.5 miles from River Falls to just south of Hudson, starting at 2:45 am.  The cool air and drizzle actually felt pretty good, and the road was nice and smooth, plenty easy to see with my headlight.  My final leg was 6.5 miles from Lake Elmo into St. Paul.  By this time I was feeling the previous runs and really had to push myself to keep the pace up.  It helped that I was around faster runners and had them to motivate me to push on, including a guy with an amazing beard who I had seen at the Afton trail run who our team nicknamed Ragnar for this race.  I kept my pace under 4:00/km for all 3 legs, so I was pretty happy with that, the legs do have a bit of speed in them still.  I tried running a 400 on Tuesday though, and the best I could manage was a 63.  Had I warmed up and really went at it I maybe could have made it under 60, but that would be the best I could do right now.  Maybe time to bring a bit more speed work back into the routine next year, I've been missing it now that I don't play much Frisbee anymore.  A couple more weeks to the Trail Loppet, then my season is pretty well over at long last.  I'm not sure yet if I'll do Nerstrand, or even Jesse James days yet.  Depends how the Trail Loppet goes I guess.  I could even sign up for Birkie still, but am pretty sure I won't do that.  I think going up to do some mountain biking and cheer for Jallie would be much more fun if she decides to race it, or I could even go on my churches hiking trip again, which I have missed for the last couple years.  Nice to have a few free weekends to contemplate some of these activities.

Too much racing?

A couple more races to put in the books this last weekend.  Saturday was a wet day for the first ever Battle Creek 1/2 marathon.  The field was pretty small, about 30 runners, and the course was 3 laps of the hilly battle creek ski trails.  I started out fast and created an early gap, but at the end of the first 7k lap I was caught by Eric Solberg.  As the rain of the morning went from a light drizzle to a steady rain I was extra glad I had decided to skip the shirt, even though I was a bit chilly at least I wasn't putting on water weight.  I held with Erik for about half of the second lap until he pulled away from me on a steeper downhill.  I kept losing ground on him after that, and my 3rd lap I kind of cashed it in, content to hold on to my second place.  Jeff came in only about a minute or so behind me, closer than I would like, but he has been training far more consistently than I have, so a good result for him.  I hardly felt like I was breathing hard, but my legs were unresponsive, so I think I need to start ramping up the hill work and a few longer runs to beat the legs back into shape before trail loppet in a few weeks, or that could be an ugly race.
After the racing I was a vegetable for the rest of the day.  I wandered around a book store for a while, then watched three movies in a row, making the most of one of my free movie tickets I clipped from some cereal boxes.  I saw the final Harry Potter movie, a romanic comedy called Friends with Benefits or something like that, and Cowboys vs. Aliens.  It was a nice recovery to just sit and stare at a screen for a bit.
Then Sunday I tried my first real triathlon.  Less than 1/4 mile swim, so I figured I could work my way through that and then see what happened after.  The swim was even worse than I anticipated, I need lessons for sure if I am going to get serious about this, since I came out of the water in dead last.  I have my transitions down fairly well by this point though, and the bike and run went well so I ended up winning overall, so not too bad for my first go around.