Aarastas and Sarsosari

Here's our 12 man Hood to Coast team.  We were team Mustache.  Each van has 6 runners and we all run 3 legs to cover the 199 miles from Mount Hood to the beach at Seaside.

Here's our Van the morning of HTC.

And again up on the mountain.

And again on the start line...just a few more minutes to go.  Sarah's getting nervous, so are the rest of us.

Sarah's first leg was a Very Hard due to the rapid 2000 foot elevation drop over 5.64 miles.  The scenery is beautify though.  She did great.  The 2nd leg is the worst because you just ran your heart out and then sit in a car and your muscles tighten up.  It's hard enough to walk let alone run your second leg.  Sarah's 2nd leg was through the middle of scary downtown Portland for 7.3 miles at night, she handed off the baton at about 10:00 PM.  I finished my leg that night at 1:30 in the morning.  When we were all done with the 2nd leg we drove to the next exchange point excited to maybe get an hour or two of sleep before we started up again on our 3rd leg.  I was falling asleep at the wheal and turned the driving over to Bethany, we only had a few more minutes to the exchange.  But there was traffic problems and it ended up taking an hour or so.  We spread out a tarp and got in our sleeping bags or just sprawled out in the car for a little sleep.  Somehow the few minutes we got were enough to feel a lot better when Sarah started our 3rd leg off.  The 3rd leg was pretty exciting because when you were done, you were DONE!      

We relaxed on the beach and waiting for the other van to finish their 3rd leg so we could all run over the finish line together.  The weather was perfect.

The whole team at the finish line.  Our total time was 28 hours 56 minuets.  That's an average of an 8:43 min/mile over 199 miles.  Pretty awesome.     

We started talking "next year" on the way home.