logan to park city

ragnar: 200 miles of pure running bliss.
12 crazy people
2 vans
and a whole lot of sweating, smelling, cheering, following, baby wipe showers, honey buckets, stopping, going, trying to sleep, failing at sleeping, being super tired, laughing, yelling, decorating the car, keeping track of who you killed, getting sad when you get killed, reading the ragmag, and MUCH MUCH MORE!

i just finished the 2011 wasatch back ragnar. it was definitely very rough but also so so much fun. we ran from the utah state university to a high school in park city. our team was called team ventus. we bought a team from ksl and that was the team name, ragnar would not allow us to change it so we worked with it. we made it into an acronym and this is what we came up with
Very
Excruciating
Nightmare;
To
Us
Sanity
it kinda doesn't make sense but that was the funniest and best i could come up with!
some of the people on our team have a super fast pace, and so we had the latest possible start time. it was not something i was very excited about because it made it seem like we were always in last place. even though we finished it a lot faster then a lot of teams, it felt like we didnt. we started at 2:30 in the afternoon while most teams were starting earlier then 10 in the morning. i kept getting texts from my friends on other teams saying they were done with their certain legs when we hadn't even started running.
but other then that the ragnar was so much fun. we waited and waited for our van 1 to finish their first legs and we were getting anxious and bored. i just wanted to get going! but at about 8 kayla took off running, then passed the baton to me (i ran 3.4 miles my first leg) then i passed the baton to my brother brad. we got through our first legs and stopped at exchange 18 to try and get a little sleep. it was FREEZING and we only had a few hours so it was a little miserable. when we woke up at 4 in the morning we were all a little grumpy i think. kayla took off running once again and i tried to wake myself up while she was on her run. my second leg i ran 7.3 miles. our last runner in our van was really in a lot of pain with his knees, so at the very beginning of his second leg he decided he couldn't run his third leg. so we split up his leg and tried to decide what to do for his third leg. it was 7.2 miles and very hard... our team captain (brian) called his mom who was volunteering and asked her if she could run an easy 4 mile leg for us and she agreed. kayla was supposed to run that one so she said she would run a 7.3 mile run that was pretty much all downhill. and i took the place of the last run. well as soon as kayla started running her knee started acting up, so she had to stop after a mile and a half. brad said he would run the rest but after another mile and a half he was super tired since it was his fourth run. i was very nervous about my 7.2 mile run so brian said he would run that one if i ran the rest of kayla's leg. so i did, it was 4 miles and there was only one large uphill and the rest was down. brian took over the last leg and he did awesome. i cant believe how well he did after running the HARDEST leg of the whole entire ragnar, and then adding a long fourth leg. i was so appreciative of him. after 30 hours team ventus finally crossed the finish line!
it definitely was tough, and i think it helped me push myself harder then i normally would but it was worth it. crossing that finish line with the team just made me feel so accomplished! ragnar is such a hard race and we finished it. i'm so proud of my whole team. i had a blast hanging out with our van all the time and cheering on all the runners. i cant wait for the next ragnar in vegas!