200 miles to feel like a kid again.

Ragnar has been on my bucket list for a a while now.  With all the changes in my life this year, I decided it was a perfect time to try something new and outside my comfort zone.  When I put out the call to the universe that I wanted to run Ragnar, it was answered almost immediately by Lars, Endurance Junkie Extraordinaire, who hooked me up with the best team I could have asked for.  I learned a lot racing for 28 crazy hours in a van with 5 strangers, not the least of which is that you can still feel and act like a kid at the ripe old age of 41.

This post is nearly impossible to write, because Ragnar defies description.  If it's true that pictures are worth 1000 words, they will still only give you a tiny bit of the flavor of what it's really like.  But I can tell you that distance runners are all pretty awesome people, and when they get together and have a party, they do it up right.  Even if the rest of you think we're nuts.

Washington's installment of Ragnar is a 200-mile relay race, from Blaine on the Canadian border to Langley on Whidbey Island.  Once your team starts, it runs constantly, all day and night, until each of 36 legs are done.  Regular teams consist of 12 runners in 2 vans, each running 3 legs.  (Ultra teams do the same thing, but with half as many runners.  Lars, mentioned above, was on an ultra team.  Talk about crazy distance running!)  Our team, Misters, Sisters, and Blisters, started at 9:15 Friday morning.  Van 1 ran 6 legs, one runner at a time, until Exchange 6, where our van, Van 2, took over for 6 legs.  Repeat that twice more, though all kinds of weather and at any hour of the day, and you have completed a Ragnar.  I was Runner 9 with 15.5 miles:  6 "Moderate" miles, 2.7 "Easy" miles (starting at 1:49 a.m.), and 6.8 "Very Hard" miles.  Those are Ragnar's descriptions, and they were fairly accurate.  Others had much more hellacious mileage, with massive distance and hills in each leg.  I can't quite wrap my head around those, but I think I could tackle a longer, harder set next year if asked.

At Ragnar, team names are important, irreverent, and hilarious.  Costumes are optional, creative, amazing, and based on the way some of the costumed runners were walking, they can also chafe pretty bad.  But because there are prizes, chafing costumes are apparently to be endured for the duration, judging by the Green Costumed Chafing Guy I saw several times walking with a decided hitch in his stride.  There was a team of fictional villains, a team of space-related characters, a team of men in dirty underwear, and so many more that I can't recall because my brain was on overload.  Vans are decked out in varying degrees of awesomeness, and with 388 teams, there are well over 700 of them on the roads.  As I drove home from the race, I found myself scanning the road for Ragnar vans.  Sadly, I didn't see any.

Spending 28 hours (more than that if you count travel time to and from the race) in a van with 5 people I barely knew was going to be a stretch for me because I have always felt awkward and shy around people I don't know well.  But I've been working hard to let go of my mostly imagined limitations and trying to judge myself less for just being me, so I tried not to give it a second thought.  It was the right thing to do, because I had an absolute blast.

My Van 2 teammates are amazing people!  Strong, tough, entertaining and spirited, every step, every mile with them was an adventure.  I swear I had a smile on my face the entire time (except maybe when I was running that last leg), and I don't recall laughing that hard in what seems like forever.  I learned a lot listening to them, and hanging out with them gave me a lot to think about and frankly, to aspire to.  Starting out, nobody on my team knew about my divorce.  Everyone in my van was married (two to each other), and so I felt a bit of an outsider from the get-go, especially because they knew each other to varying degrees before the race.   Being myself around new folks doesn't come easy for me (so much easier to be a clown!), and it's especially difficult now, because this divorce seems to loom so large, at times it seems that's all that there is to my life.  But at Exchange 12 when our first legs were finished, I was walking back from the locker room with my teammate Wendy, and rather than hold back, I let her know what was going on.  (Mostly I did this because she said "that guy is checking you out" and I was all "really?  yay!")  At dinner, when she and I were talking about it, I told everyone else.  I didn't feel judged and it wasn't as hard to share as I thought it would be.   Over and over I've found that there is support out there, you just have to open up and be ready for it.  In addition to this, I learned some Ragnar-specific lessons:

My body can do amazing things and take me to amazing places when I ask it to.  I've never been a night owl, I'm usually asleep by 10, and during Ragnar I was able to run crazy fast (for me, anyway) in the middle of the night with no thought in my mind other than getting to the exchange as fast as I could to hand off the slap bracelet to my teammate Shawna.  (I ran that leg, in the middle of freaking night, at 7:55 pace.  Granted it wasn't even 3 miles, but it was 2 in the morning!!)  And though I felt pretty crummy during my final leg, I toughed it up and down the hills as fast as I could because I didn't want to let down the team.

I can sleep anywhere:  in a tiny way-back seat of a Suburban packed full of stuff, and also on a yoga mat on a crowded gym floor surrounded by other teams'  racers snoring in my ear.   Perhaps the most important lesson:  If you sleep during Ragnar, you should be prepared to have very unflattering pictures taken of you and posted on Facebook.

You can never use the porta potty too many times.  Even the yummiest Lara Bar tastes like crap after eating energy bars nonstop.  Jelly Bellies are the bomb, as is chocolate milk.  Coffee is a necessity, as are baby wipes.  Bathroom humor is pretty darn funny on no sleep (seriously, our team name turned into Misters and Sisters on Shitters after a particularly rough morning).  28 hours go by so quickly and are so crazy intense that it was already hard remember things the very next day.  Running 3 legs in 28 hours is hard, but not as hard as a marathon.  It's also way more fun than a marathon.  I always, always go out too fast at a race, even a race with three legs.  At 2 am, the misty air in Anacortes smells heavenly.  It's easy to forget to hydrate when you're having fun.  I am really competitive.  Whidbey Island is beautiful.  There really is such a thing as the post-Ragnar blues.  Hanging out with a bunch of people who were strangers no more is good for the soul.

And finally, distance runners are really cool people.  As I surveyed the post-race gathering, watching the ongoing antics of the teams and the happy exhaustion on all the runners' faces, I realized that running is truly important to me.  And because some things are that much better shared, it just might be a prerequisite that my next serious relationship is with a fellow runner.

Because runners are that cool.

Note:  Most of this post was written the day after Ragnar.  It's so rewarding to look back on what I wrote a month ago and see how my feelings about The Sideways ruling my life have changed.  Back then, it still loomed so, so large.  Now, not so much!  Life, she is getting better all the time.