Las Vegas RAGNAR 2012

This Fall has been a busy one.

Beginning of November I spent a couple of days down in Vegas 

with a handful of people I either didn't know or barely knew at all! 

Could've been a total disaster.

Let me tell you what.... It was one of the best memories of all time! 

We started on our drive to Vegas on Thursday night which took longer than the usual drive to Vegas because we had a few stops to make plus we had to do some carb loading at the good 'ol Pizza Factory down in Happy Valley. Must say, the hot chocolate was more than fabulous. We stopped in St. George as well to pick up a fellow runner and at this point we were all very spunky, being properly fed and not sleep deprived yet, and we had NO IDEA what we had gotten ourselves into!

Van #2 before any of us had run. Look at our smiling faces :)

Chillin' in the van.

The first 3 legs down. Me, Rob and Josh. Josh was runner 8, right in front of me and at our exchange I'm pretty sure I had to book it as fast as my little legs could carry me across a parking lot because he BEAT US to the exchange, ya he was our fastest runner by far. Our minds were all blown!

Left to Right: Josh Sillitoe, Lance Foutz, Shaun Bean, Rob West, Megan Bonham and Alecia Stratton

(hopefully I spelled all those right)

31 hours and some change after our team started, we were all still smiling but very hungry, tired, jelly-legged and ready to hit the sack, in our own beds and homes. Even though I slept on the world's most comfortable king sized bed! Oh it was divine.

I ran a total of 15.8 miles. First leg 2.9, Second leg 3.5, and Third leg was 9.4 (the second longest leg during the whole race). The first day was horrible running weather because Van #1 started at 6am Friday morning and it was snowing and windy! The rest of the day it was windy and wind is the all time worst weather to run in. Give me snow before wind to run in, any day of the week! The wind finally died down and our night runs were mostly amazing, despite one of our teammates almost contracting hypothermia and my dream about having my face chewed up by a coyote didn't help the morale! However we all made it in one piece, ate dinner at 3am and killed our last set of runs on Saturday morning. After my 9.4 mile run, I was so drained having slept a total of 4 hours in the last 24 hours and already run almost 6.5 miles and I had pushed myself so hard that I had the worst asthma attack I'd had in years. I literally had to say a prayer to get myself to calm down, it scared me.  Anyways, great group of people, I had loads of fun and made some new friends! 

Those couple of days went by so fast and the trip home was long due to the storm we had to drive in. Ty said to me, "Well this keeps with the tradition that you are always driving home when it is storming outside and I'm sitting here at home waiting for you!"

It's true, I'm always out during a storm but we made it home safely 

and 

THIS my friends.......

is what Ragnar does to you. It makes you sleep for 12 hours straight, get up at 1 in the afternoon to eat because you haven't eaten in 16 hours and then go back to sleep for another 2 1/2 hours. After waking up you can barely walk or move for that matter.

Crazy, I know. You have to be crazy to enjoy something so totally insane!

Wouldn't take it back for anything though.