Ragnar Wasatch Back

My sister Azure and her husband (who have run with us in other Ragnars) asked us if we'd be interested in running the Wasatch Back Ragnar this year.  Wasatch Back is the original Ragnar and this was the 10-year anniversary of that race.  We found out later that there were only a few teams in that original race and my how it has grown!  This year there were over 1,000 teams participating!

Since Parker was in Tahoe with his friend Trever the week before Ragnar, Ryan Sheehy and I drove to Tahoe and picked him up and then headed off to Utah.  We went the back way over Tahoe and as we were coming to a stop sign, we heard a loud dragging noise.  I thought it was the diesel behind us but realized we had a flat tire!  We pulled over into a parking lot to check it out and the tire was shredded.  Ryan and I were able to get the spare tire on and then we had to drive about 30 minutes to the next town (Fernley, Nevada).  We were looking for a Walmart but as we pulled into Fernley, right in front of us was a used tire store.  We pulled in and asked them what they had that would fit our van.  They went to the back and then came out with the right sized tire with lots of tread, so I asked "how much?"  He said $40.  I said, $40 installed?  He said yes so I said you have a deal.  They changed the tire and we were once again on our way.  Ultimately, we ended up getting the tire replaced by Big-O with the same tires as our other three (and they paid us back for the $40 used tire as well).  We were grateful we were safe and it didn't take too much time out of our trip.  Here is the casino where we changed the tire (had to walk through the casino to wash our hands afterwards).

Parker and I stayed at my parents' house in Utah that night and since our van didn't need to be at the start line until about 3:00, we were able to sleep in and have a nice breakfast.  The weather was great and the scenery was breathtaking.  Tina's brother Mike kept talking about how he wants to move to Utah to retire since it's so pretty and the people were so nice.  The volunteers were super cheerful and even the policeman that were working were amazingly friendly.  At one point, we went down a road that was supposed to be closed; rather than chew us out, the policeman just asked us to go slowly so we wouldn't have to turn around and backtrack.  Below are a number of pictures Parker took along the course.

 We were team 890 (Killing in the Name -- Rob chose our team name, don't ask.

Looks like our Ragnar sign below is bleeding blue.

A small part of Ragnar hill.

There were so many vans at the major exchanges!  It took us 45 minutes just to pull into one of the exchanges and it got pretty cold that night.  I ended up getting about 15 minutes of sleep but Ragnars aren't about sleeping anyway.

My last leg was Ragnar hill.  Andrew had the first part of the hill and then I had the rest of it.  It was about 4 miles but had an elevation gain of 1,700 feet!  It was impossible to run it the whole time so I would run as far as I could, then walk fast while I got my breath and start running again.  I can't believe I made it to the top -- even was about a minute per mile faster than I had expected.

Parker was super fast as always and passed tons of runners.  Below are two pictures below of our van after we made it home.  As you can see, we had tons of kills.  We ended up 15th in our division and 46th overall!  We felt pretty good about that since there were more than 1,000 teams competing.

Not sure if we will ever do this one again but it was nice to say we completed the Wasatch Back Ragnar.

We celebrated by going to Kobe Saturday night and then headed off back to California in the morning to get ready for our High Adventure trip on Monday.  Good times.