Ragnar Las Vegas

In early November, Parker and I were able to participate in another Ragnar race, this time in Sin City (a.k.a. Las Vegas).  In fact, by competing in this race, we earned a special medal, called Saints & Sinners to signify completion of the Wasatch Back Ragnar and the Vegas Ragnar (Saints in Utah, Sinners in Vegas).

Much of the team from Wasatch Back joined us, though we had a few changes, partly due to an injury incurred by Azure while running a marathon in San Francisco.  Our van ended up being myself, Parker, brother-in-law Rob, Tyler Rossi, Teri Rossi, and Ronnie Trost.  So, it was the same van as Napa Ragnar from a year ago except swapping Azure for Teri.

We drove from California to Las Vegas on Thursday.  The ride was mostly uneventful but long.  We enjoyed some Dairy Queen for dinner and met a guy who did a relay race from the East Coast to the West Coast over 3 months!  Made our Ragnar seem much easier...

We stayed at the Excalibur hotel in Vegas -- it was pretty awesome, looks like a castle.  There were a few times when Teri and I had to cover the boys' eyes while heading through the casino to our rooms.  There's a reason it's called Sin City...

We took a walk down the strip in the morning.  Our hotel was across the street from the "Statue of Liberty" -- by the New York New York hotel that has a roller coaster you can go on for $15 per ride.  We passed.

We had a nice big breakfast at Denny's before heading to the grocery store for snacks and drinks and then heading to exchange 6 (where our van would begin)

 Below are Tyler and Ronnie at exchange 6.  They aren't looking all that excited, are they?

We don't have much in the way of pictures during the race (we were focused) though we have quite a few at the finish line.  A memorable aspect of the race was Tyler getting lost in the middle of the night.  He was runner #12 so we were at the exchange point with the other van and after a while we realized there was no way he should still be out on the course.  We tried calling him and texting him but weren't getting an answer.  Finally, his mom (Teri) and I got in the van and started tracing backwards looking for him.  Eventually, he called us and tried his best to describe his location.  Of course, never really having spent time in Vegas, it took a while to figure out where he was.  Eventually, we found out he had turned and followed some runners on the next leg which is why it had taken so long.  We picked him up, got him back on the course, and then went back to our hotel for a couple hours of sleep.

The weather was actually quite nice for the race -- a little cold at night, which was great for the runners, and warm but not too hot during the day.  Parker and I were happy with our times -- my last leg had a fair amount of downhill but after already having gone nearly 11 miles during the first two legs, I was definitely out of steam when I finished the last leg of 6.7 miles -- I was so grateful to be finished.

Parker passed a ton of people and a bunch of them were just shaking their heads at him when they finished.  One guy even told him to go eat some burgers and milkshakes and SLOW DOWN!  His running watch shown above says at one point, he was running a 3:44 pace.  I'm guessing that was downhill but he's pretty fast!  The team as a whole did a great job and we ended up finishing in 25 hours, 36 minutes -- good enough for 6th place in the Men's Open Division and 24th place overall (out of about 500 teams!)

Here we are at the finish line with our medals.

Do I look tired?  I am!

Here are some pictures of our van with all our kills marked along with a few hashtags we came up with along the way.

Amazingly, we ended up with 274 kills for our van alone!  As you can see, we passed a ton of people along the way.  Our team name was "The Clickers" and we held clickers as we ran to help us count our kills.  That's a lot of clicks!

We drove back to California the next day and could barely move as we stopped to get food along the way.  We were so sore!  But all in all, another great Ragnar.