A Relaxing Weekend Running the Ragnar Relay

Good Morning, and I’m sorry – I’ve gotten way behind on a bajillion things, and haven’t had time to write a good post for you, so you get the rushed story of my amazing weekend. However, other than today, this week should be a really good one for posts. I’ll probably have a reblog for you from Ligonier Ministries (I haven’t decided if that’s the one I’m really going to use) and a guest-post from Friend Jordan. I might also review Voyage of the Dawn Treader and there are several other things I’d like to write about… just haven’t had the time.

So for those of you who don’t know, I ran a super relay race this weekend called the Ragnar. It’s covers 200 miles and lasts about 36 hours or so. I only ran 11 of those 200 miles, while my teammates ran way more than that, so it made for a really fun weekend for me. Oddly enough – the most relaxing weekend I’ve had in a long time.

The Ragnar Relay took me back to the days of my youth for a bit. It was a lot like a softball tournament in that there were teams and comraderie, competition and goofy down-time. Because I only ran 11 (well, just over 11) miles, I was able to run all of my legs of the race pretty well. I averaged exactly 10-minute miles which was my goal, and I’m pleased that I met it because two of my legs had relatively big hills that were tough to conquer. I also ended up running at about 1:30 in the a.m., which was pretty exhasting, but way too much fun.

I’ve been asked a few times what my favorite part of the weekend was, and I change my answer every time. My current favorite is when Joseph and I were in neighboring porta-johns and he was loudly singing at the top of his lungs for all to hear (I think he was singing Poker Face). It was probably about 3:30 in the morning, and all of us were getting more than a little insane with sleep deprivation and single-mindedness on finishing the race. right after that, when we were walking back to our van, Joseph and I decided to jump over a low wall, which he did pretty suave-like, and I failed at… but I didn’t fall down so it’s okay. A few of our teammates were freaking out a little because they thought I might fall on my face and not be able to run my final leg. At that point, I reminded them that my final leg was 3.5 miles of completely downhill running, so they decided to quit worrying since it wouldn’t be a difficult leg for someone else to run.

And that was my weekend.

I get formally observed and evaluated at work today, and I need to catch up on a lot of critique partner reading, revising my own manuscript, and a bunch of other things.

I hope all of you had wonderfully relaxing weekends even if you didn’t get to run an awesome 200 mile race!