Aarastas and Sarsosari

Hood To Coast 2010

I just finished the worlds largest (not longest) relay.  Some 12,000 people ran the relay.  Hood to Coast is a 197 mile relay from The top of Mount Hood to the ocean at Seaside.  We had a 12 man team and each ran 3 legs.

See how good I am at pretending I'm not terribly tired and sore?

Team "We Eat Dust"

There was another team we followed for a while in the van named "Eat Our Dust".  I thought that was pretty funny.

 I told Arwen I'll probably never run this race again until she talks me into it.  So she strapped on my bib number and started training.  Registration for next years run starts in 3 weeks.  I guess that's time enough to forget the pain.  I hope so.

 I had 3 shirts I ran in on each leg...one from Intel, they payed for my run and gave me a nice dry fit shirt to do a littl advertising, one they gave me at HTC, and my real one "TEAM SARAH"  Who was my real supporter for this event.

We had 31 hours to do the run to qualify, we came in at just shy of 30.  The top team came in around 17 hours.  The record is 15:44:55 hours (that's a crazy 5.19 min/mile).  We had a few guys on the team get lost (other van)  and after my last leg I came into the finish line and the other van was not there.  It felt like I was waiting for ever but the whole thing only cost us 6 min. I guess.  All in all the race went smooth and most of us met or exceeded our goals.  Though I think I did have a goal of a little sleep that I wasn't able to meet.  I was up a lot of the night before we left for the mountain at 4:00 AM, then over the next 30 hours I got about 2 hours of sleep out in some field.  No sleep added a lot to the difficulty of the relay.

We also took Road Kill stats in our vans.  A Road Kill is anyone you pass on your leg.  It got me running faster than I probably would have, especially on my first run.  I got 9 kills in the first 4 miles then chased some guy for the next 3.4 miles before passing him just before the finish line.  He heard me coming (I had an annoying rock stuck in the tread of one of my shoes) and kept looking over his shoulder and speeding up.  I just had to out run him in the end.  I was a tick mark on two of the vans out there.  The first guy that passed me was on my night run.  The cars driving by would cast my shadow on the road in front of me and then all of a sudden there was two shadows.  I tried my best to keep in front of him but with each car his shadow got taller, then I could hear him and he made a break for it.  I tailed him for a while but he was just too fast for me.

My Road Kill stats:

Leg1 Kills 10

Leg2 Kills 4  Killed 1

Leg3 Kills 6  Killed 1