Back to Utah.

"If you could move all of your friends to Utah, it would be such an awesome place to live!" -JWB


5.7.2012 - 5.13.2012

Other than the race on Saturday, just one run this week. 4 miles, Andesite, slowly. Also a quick little hike in Arches NP, where I saw, among other awesome things, the Landscape Arch:

And climbed rocks to get some views of the La Sal Mountains behind sandstone structures and whatnot:

Right, so I ran legs 2 and 8 of the Red Rock Relay (Moab) on Saturday with Girls Heart Rockets. This relay is shorter than the other long distance relays I've run. It's only 12 legs covering 70 miles, so each runner on a 6-person team only runs 2 legs totaling 11 or so miles. GHR fielded 2 teams for this race, Team Discovery and Team Endeavour. I was fortunate enough to be the slow poke among the speed demons of Team Discovery. Despite a couple mishaps (showing up several minutes late for the first exchange because we drove the van off the road and got stuck / had to enlist nearby construction workers to help us get it out; showing up a couple minutes late to the 6th exchange because we weren't really keeping track of how close it was when we were giving Janelle some water), we still managed to average sub-8:00 miles for a mountainy, high altitude course, finishing 1st among all female teams, and beating ALL of the mixed gender teams and ALL BUT ONE of the all male teams. How awesome is that? Plus, we were treated with the presence of two huskies at the finish:

A few words on my legs:

Leg 2: 7.4 miles at 4000', mostly flat with some rollers. The stress of showing up several (3-5?) minutes late for this exchange, combined with my usual habit of going out too fast led to a marked petering out as the run progressed (mile paces: 6:47, 7:24, 7:52, 8:17, 8:42, 8:48, 8:26, 7:25). I passed Lucia from Team Endeavour somewhere around a mile in, then with about a mile left I saw that she was catching up, which motivated me to work a little harder. I was pretty content with my performance on this leg, given my fitness level and minimal training (especially in medium-length tempo-like runs). Being able to run/walk 31 miles does not mean I can run 7 miles speedily.

Leg 8: 3.2 miles, steady climbing 740' (up to 8340'). Slow on this one, 10:15/mile pace, but I ran the whole thing, unlike the handful of people that I passed. I quite enjoy climbing, and I think even my speedy teammates would have run this leg at a somewhat similar pace.

Sum: 14ish miles run.