jog

So I spent the weekend running that relay that I mentioned last post. I left my house Saturday at 7 a.m. and returned 1 p.m. on Sunday. The race was fun but totally exhausting.

(Passed out in a church gymnasium in Napa, sometime on Saturday.)

Our team was one of three sponsored by Google. Google's competitive team won for the fourth year in a row, in a time that was eight hours faster than ours. Ruth, my Google connection, dropped out on Friday because of a sudden chest cold, so our van was me, Olivia, her work buddies Wilbur and Mark (Ruth's replacement), Googler Chris and his girlfriend Connie, and Googler Kirsten driving us along. I didn't know anybody besides Olivia when we started but you spend twenty hours sweating in a van with any six people and you'll get to know them pretty quick. In contrast, I hardly recognized the people in the other van. We alternated running shifts with van 2, so we ran Calistoga to Napa on Saturday morning, Petaluma to San Francisco on Saturday night, and Atherton to Saratoga on Sunday starting at dawn.

Holy frakking shift Northern California is the most beautiful Hobbiton in Middle Earth, especially one magical pre-twilight stretch of Highway Whatitsface between Sonoma and Petaluma, holy SHIT it's shorts-creamingly beautiful, your shorts-cream will in turn cream its shorts, so on, ad infinitum, the way the fake wildgrass covers the fake hills in the golden hour. WOWZA. It is really too bad you can't eat landscapes!! It wasn't all roly poly grapevine piedmont, either, there was genuine deciduous action in Napa and then the lemon and fig trees and ornamental horticulture of the Norcal suburbs and then the nighttime view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the SF skyline and Alcatraz and Angel Island and the mouth of the bay from Sausalito and then at the very end a steep rise past some reservoirs through the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz mountains right down to the same golden hour, except the next day, on the f-bombing Pacific Ocean. WTH!?!??!! Parse error!!!!

(Olivia running past a winery near Yountville.)

Let me tell you about my lovely long legs, all three of them. For different reasons, they were each very difficult. The first was 4.1 miles on relatively flat ground from St. Helena to Rutherford. It was supposed to be my easy leg but it was 80 degrees and mostly unshaded, and I set a pace too fast too early and had to back off of it after I got a nagging side stitch halfway. Some brain damage there from the sun exposure.

(Trying to cool down in the shade with string cheese and stretching, while awaiting Chris.)

(The second van exchange point, a typical Napa Valley winey and cheesey picnic spot kind of in the middle of nowhere. There's so much more sky you can't see.)

Leg 2 was 6.5 miles from San Anselmo to Corte Madera with a two-mile climb followed by a long descent, and I started it five minutes after throwing up on the grass at the relay point with a splitting headache that miraculously evaporated once I started running. I think it was caffeine withdrawal, because I downed an espresso right before running and that seemed to heal me. I ran this leg around 10:30 p.m. on a lonely country road through foothills, and after the initial clump of runners split up, it was just me, my headlamp, the fog, and occasional relay vans on the road.

The first runner I passed said, "Hope we don't get eaten by mountain lions!" hee hee hee hee as she pushed her headphones back into her ear for more Dance Hits U.S.A. 2. Turns out cars were more likely to attack us - a relay runner was struck by a car a few miles down the road, but we didn't hear anything about it until Monday. (She's okay, it was not life-threatening, but still...eesh.)

(Mark running in the very very dark.)

Our last runner crossed the Golden Gate Bridge at 2 a.m., and we drove down the Peninsula for three hours of rest. The rest of the van opted to pile up in Chris's living room for naps, but since I was so close to home, I just slept in my own bed. In three hours I was back on the side of the road, cradling a cappucino, waiting for Connie to appear. My third leg was 5.6 mostly flat miles straight down Foothill Expressway. It was 8 a.m., but it was already hot, and I was just plain exhausted, so this leg might have been the hardest.

(My helpful water volunteer giving me an unwanted shower.)

All told, I ran 16.2 miles in 2:10.21 for an average of 8:03 minutes per mile. It is two days later and I am still sore as balls, dehydrated, and sleepy, but I would definitely do this again.

(Chris in Saratoga on mile 3 of a 5-mile uphill, with Connie watching.)