I'm going to repost my account of the Hood to Coast relay here, just for fun:

So at last, two weeks after the fact, here I am blogging about the amazing Hood to Coast relay race that I did at the end of August. It was a blast. This race was in Oregon - starting from Mt. Hood, down the mountain and along the Columbia river to Portland, and then along the Willamette river to the town of Seaside, right outside of Astoria. 196 miles total, divided between a team of 12 people. I ended up running just over 17 miles in three different legs.

In a word, it was ORANGE.


These are all the people I was in the car with. The team of 12 is divided into two cars, which take the relay in 6-leg shifts, so that you can get a 4-5 hour break, get something to eat, get some sleep, hang out, etc, while the other car is running.

My friend Ryan (in the wig) invited me to be on his regular relay team, the "Cho Mamas." If you haven't guessed, our team color was orange. What about the name Cho Mama suggests the exaggerated use of orange, you may ask? Well, here's the scoop, and I apologize if I wasn't supposed to divulge any of these Cho secrets. I hope I'm not disbarred or anything. It all goes back to high school: the original Cho Mamas were members of the SLC Murray High School cross country running team - whose school colors were blue and white. Just kidding. They were orange. The name comes from a word that their coach used to use, apparently a Native American word for "faster." Or maybe it was just "go." Anyway, it became their team mantra back then (Cho!), and the rest, as they say, is history.

This is the sweet shirt I bought second-hand as part of the team uniform. If you read closely, you can see that it says Abu Dhabi. How that shirt got all the way to lil' old Utah, I have no idea, but everyone that I saw on the course would call out, "yeah, Abu Dhabi!" Did they really think I was from the United Arab Emirates? I don't know. But it was a lot of fun making them wonder.

I was third in line, which meant out of a total of 36 legs, I ran legs 3, 15, and 27. For anyone interested, here are my splits:

Leg 3: almost 4 miles, 800-ft elevation loss. Ran at about 3 in the afternoon. I clocked just over 7 minute miles.

Leg 15: 7.25 miles, no real net elevation gain or loss, but full of rolling hills. Ran at about 2:30 in the morning. I slowed up to about 8:20/mile, but finished in an hour, which was my goal.

Leg 27: 5.8 miles, more hills, but no real net gain or loss. Did this one at about 11:00 the next morning. I was tired, but I was so ready to get it over with, I did 8:10/mile.

Our team average was I think just over 8 min/mile, so I feel pretty good about my times.

Besides all that, though, it was quite the experience. It's such a larger crowd than at a normal half marathon or 10K, but everyone seems to pull together more, just to finish the darn thing. People that would leave me in the dust would holler as they past, "hey, good work!" and "keep it up!" and stuff, and I could only oblige and do the same for anyone that I passed. Except for on the last leg, where I was so winded I couldn't really bring myself to say anything to anybody.

Here are some memorable experiences:

1) Listening to a Spencer W. Kimball book on tape on the drive up and most of the drive down. Boy, that guy sure gets you in the mood to run.

2) Here's a sweet pic of me burning up the road on my first leg:

I don't think I really run like that. More like this:

3) Running in the middle of the night, in the middle of a huge, unfamiliar forest, along a nearly deserted road, following a string of bouncing red LED lights that we all had to wear on our backs. It's amazing how motivating those lights can be. All I wanted to do was catch up to them all as fast as I could. Wish I had a pic for that one, actually.

4) Lots of cool team names and themes. To anyone thinking about putting together a relay team: first of all, get into it. The more into it you are, the cooler you look. Second, try not to have your team name be mysteriously (or obviously) anatomical or suggestive. If you do, you're probably not original. It's been done, ok?

We made friends with the "Mr. T" car on the second day, that had wired some speakers in the front of their car and could spout Mr. T quotes at anyone they wanted throughout the race. There were the "Banana Striders," whose name I can't decide if it's dirty or not, but they gave us a bunch of free bananas before my third leg, with the message, "The Banana Striders love you!" There was the Muscle Milk sponsored car, the Wheaties team who were too fast to talk to, and the ubiquitous "Wall of Sound" team, that had strapped about a dozen loudspeakers to their car and drove the whole course blasting heavy metal all the way through. Can't imagine what it must have been like driving with them at night.

5) Good fish and chips in Astoria after the running was done, and good times on the beach afterward, including a cool "Chariots of Fire" moment, which you can see here, if you care to:

Will I do it next year? Probably not. But there are plenty of local relays around here, so maybe I'll don the Orange again and become a Cho Mama in 2011.

This is a funny time to start out a blog such as this, since I've just sworn off running for the remainder of the year. I ran a few races at the beginning of the year, then did a lot of training for a bike touring trip, then ended up sitting on my duff for about three weeks. After not consistently running for nearly 4 months, I made the mistake of packing in 6 weeks of hard training for the Hood to Coast relay (17 miles). Shin splints ensued. And now, although there are several more races in the year that I'd like to do, I'm at the point where I am downing ibuprofen and naproxen before every training session, which is not the kind of guy I want to be. So I'm taking some time off my feet, putting in some miles on my bike, in hopes that I can start again fresh in December to start training for next year.

In order to keep myself motivated, I've made a list of races that I'm interested in doing:

Jan. 22: St George Painters Half Marathon

Feb. ??: Tuacahn Duathlon

Mar. 06: Lake to Lake Team Relay

Mar. 19: St George Spectrum 10K

Apr. 23: Hurricane Half Marathon

May ??: St George Triathlon (Olympic Distance)

Jun. 17: Ragnar Wasatch Back

Jul. ??: Bryce Canyon Half Marathon

Jul. 29: Saints to Sinners Cycling Relay

Sep. ??: Redrock Relay

Oct. 2: St George Marathon

Nov. ??: Snow Canyon Half Marathon

That's about 144 miles of running, and who knows how many miles on a bike. Sounds like kind of an exciting year, eh? Hopefully I can put together the training and the funds and the work schedule so I can pull it all off.

So after many, many months of thought and reflection, I decided to do something different and with a slightly more specific focus with the blog.

This has been many months in the making, and I've considered various different things I could write about, according to my various passions and hobbies, including:

1) Music. I am a cellist, part time, but since I don't often get a chance to play and I haven't set up a studio to teach in yet, this would be sparse at best.

2) Translation. Well, this isn't the most exciting thing to blog about, and it would be nice if I could write about something that I don't already spend most of the day doing, just to get away from it, you know?

3) Creative writing. I enjoy writing, and I thought this blog would be a good place to deposit some of my scribblings, but frankly, I'm just not quite brave enough yet to put rough drafts out into the public forum. Maybe that will be a different blog.

So I've found that running and endurance sports have become a new passion of mine. Given my body type and general life-long habits, this has been a big surprise for me, but over the past year and a half, I've come to not only really enjoy it, but I think I've become kind of good at running.

I've also discovered recently that I need a kind of pressure valve, as well. I've been bursting to talk my wife's ear off about my races, my experiences, my training, my research and reading, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum. And while I'm grateful that she'll listen, I don't want to wear her out. So get ready, any readers that may be out there - I'm going to talk a lot about running here, and maybe about a couple other things, too.