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.