The rear window of the van carried a stark warning: surrounding a skull and crossbones, the words “Kills” and “Killed” were smudged in ripply white window paint.
The parking lot at Copper Mountain Resort was filled with large vehicles of every description: Suburban/Denalis, lumbering white 15 passenger jobs, and some Grand Caravan mini-vans, dwarfed by the brawny pride of people carriers. All of them bedecked with team logos, inspirational slogans and ironic puns.
“Lady Divas from Denver”, “Slow Children at Play” (without a comma), “Fukawi”, “Pickled Prostates”. We’d had quite enough simply to gather our crew of six, much less come up with a team ethos; our windows were bare. But the innards were filled with sleeping bags, backpacks holding multiple pairs of running shoes, shorts, fleece tops, and sundry nutritional supplements.
Luckily, while waiting for our alter egos – Van #1 – to finish the first 40 mile segment of the relay, 5 of the 6 in that vehicle pulled up. First order of business: Scott decorated the windows with a few simple stars and our team name, so we wouldn’t look too out of place. We loaded up a carton of more food, 48 blue topped water bottles, and three T-shirts apiece, two each with the Endurance Nation team logo, just below the words, “Ragnar Relay COLORADO September 7-8th 2012”
Those two dates really says it all. This thing goes non-stop for about 30 hours from Breckenridge to Snowmass at elevations from 9000′, up to 10,400, back down to 5700′, and up again to 9,000′, finishing @ 8200 feet at the base of Fanny Hill. The race, for us, started at 9:30 on Friday morning. With Jan riding herd, the Van 1 crew meandered along the roads and bike trails of Summit County: over to Keystone, around the lake, down to Frisco, then up Officer’s Gulch (in the rain) to Copper. While waiting for Aaron to finish that 7 mile segment, the van #2 crew started to jell and feel the excitement.
It may have been the sweet potato fires and chicken tortilla soup, but we were all warmed up and raring to go, even though only one of us would get to actually run out of Copper. At 3:57 PM, Aaron rolled into view, slapped the orange bracelet across Steph’s wrist, and up she went, 4 and a half miles to the top of Vail Pass.
It seemed kind of anticlimatic. Van 1 took off, presumably for some down time – showers and maybe a nap at Steph’s condo in Vail – we were left again without much of a clue as to what to do. So we just started to make it up, and discovered the rhythm which would haunt us for the next 24 hours.
Drive a few miles to the next exchange point. Hang out there. Make sure the next runner was ready to go; have the runner following him/her start to prep; check out the facilities; and gawk at the antics of the other, more together teams who would shadow us for the rest of the race.
Like the “Slow Children at Play” We never really found out the origin of the name. But as we’re waiting for Steph to make it up the hill, here comes the SCAP runner, carrying one of those two foot high neon yellow green icons of a child, meant to be set on the side of a street, warning drivers to be careful. Did he actually carry the thing all the way up? He handed it off to their next runner, who disdainfully cast it aside within the first 10 steps, muttering, “He’s crazy, I’m not gonna carry that thing.”
Steph, who’d just finished Ironman Canada a few weeks ago and is nursing a painful left knee after a cortisone shot there several months ago, handed off to Josh (the only non-ENer in our van, but we didn’t hold that against him), who used running to get himself off the couch, lose a lot of weight, and help control his diabetes. He had one of the tougher legs, downhill on Vail pass for 9 miles. Tough on the thighs.
So our pattern emerged . Runner finishes, with urgings to “keep walking”, while the rest of us are really anxious to get to the next spot, where, of course, we will once again have nothing to do for quite some time. The sun, still warm, is falling, and Kurt may see the last of it on his leg, another 6 miles downhill from the end of Big Horn Rd into Vail proper. He walked up the hill in the chill, wearing his fleece top, which he intended to hand off to the incoming runner. No communication there, so we neglected to pick it up – while driving past Kurt on the Frontage Rd, we asked, “Where’s your vest?”.
He left it up the hill, so back we go, collect it, and zoom back down. Somewhere in there, we make a pit stop at Steph’s condo, meet and greet part of the Van 2 team there (I finally get to say hi to Aaron, whom I’ve chatted with via email for the past two years), and zip to G. Ford park, where Carrie gets a rapid send-off into the sunset – literally.
But not before she tries to race into the sanican – not realising there’s a line of 15 people waiting. Oh well, it’s only 9 miles until the next opportunity. Let’s see, @ 9 min/mile, that is … uh-oh!
It’s starting to get fun now, trying to drive up to our runners, holler and pound the side of the van, stop to hand off water, and provide encouragement. What’s most amazing to me at this point, though, is that everyone is treating this as a RACE. In other words, they look tired, sweaty, spent at the end of their leg. I’m worried, as I’m the fastest runner on this team, so I don’t think I’m going to get away with dogging it, and just treating this as another training day. I’m going to have to actually WORK.
Carrie finishes up at Minturn, handing off to Scott, and it’s my turn to start to get anxious and prepped up. Carries has crushed her segment. We started out in Copper 23 minutes behind our projected best time, and she’s lowered that to 18 minutes. And now it’s dark.
So out come the headlamps, red tail lights, reflective vests, and warmer clothes. Scott, next up, has been warned not to work too hard, and he’s currently in the middle of a rather scary cardiac diagnostic process. But he seems quite cavalier about it, trusting the opinion from one MD, who tells him it’s probably NOT hypertrophic cardiac myopathy, and so he does his 3.6 miles in 31 minutes. Pretty quick for a cardiac cripple.
I take off from Beaver Creek @ 8:45 PM, and immediately have to wait for a light to cross the highway. Then it’s off to the races – 2.9 miles, at a 7:20 min/mile pace, in the pitch black Colorado night along a wooded bike trail. All I can really see is a cone of white light in front of me, and have to kind of guess when the route goes up down, or around. At about 1.5 miles in, a guy one third my age goes by, maybe going 6:45/mile. No way I can stay with him, so I just keep going, and hope there’s some light to show me the way when I get to the exchange point. (That would be the only runner to nail me the entire relay). I make up for it with a “kill” of my own in the final quarter mile – a stout young lady who is really motoring, and makes me work when I try to pass her.
Once again, we meet up fleetingly with Van 1. And I learn what everyone else has discovered – at the finish, it’s really kind of tough to be prepared for the handoff, worse in my case because I don’t have a chance to talk about it in advance, as Summer from the first crew is our next runner, and I really don’t have that good of a mental picture of her. There are usually about 20-25 runners waiting for their own handoff, and they are all wearing reflective vests and headlamps at this point, so picking anyone out of the crowd is hopeless. I just holler out our team number and her name, hold up the bracelet, and hope that whoever took it actually WAS Summer.
Van 2 is all smiles and proud of ourselves, getting the time down from 23 minutes off to 15. It’s now 9 PM. The bad news? We have to start running again sometime between 1:35 and 2 AM. The good news – the next exchange is in Gypsum, and Carrie lives about a mile from that spot. So we hightail it to her house, where we hope to get some rest.
(To be continued)