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| My Van 2 teammates |
We were driving to the hotel at Gold's beach to check in. A few hours prior we had crossed the finish line of the Wild Rogue Relay in Brookings Oregon, reunited with the other half of our team and the significant others that had flown in to join us, drank a few beers, ate some pizza, and shared stories of our 33 hour odyssey we had just experienced.
When I say "we" I am talking about "Van 2". We were an entity, Van 2, for we had been together for the entire 33 hours. Sure we saw our teammates (van 1) at the van exchanges when we handed off to each other to run, but for the most part it was just the 6 of us. It dawned on us that this drive to the hotel would be our last, for once we got there we would all go our separate ways with our significant others or other teammates and "van 2" would cease to exist, and to be honest it made us a bit sad. Laura, ever being the psychologist, asked us two questions; first, what was your favorite run and why (we each had ran 3 times for those that don't know how these things go), and second, what was your favorite van experience and why.
Choosing my favorite run would have seemed easy, since clearly my last run along the beach was nothing short of spectacular, especially since Laura chose to run it with me, but choosing this run over the other two runs as my favorite would totally overshadow the fact that I had broken my foot just 9 weeks prior and was lucky to be running at all! Prior to the relay I had put on a pretty good game face about the status of my foot, but the truth is I was quite nervous about being able to run all 3 of my legs. Up until the week before the relay I was pretty sure I'd have to have someone run my 2nd leg and I'd somehow hobble through the last one, but then the pain level dropped off significantly and I was miraculously able to run all of my legs with very little to no pain! I can't tell you how grateful I felt to run each one of those legs, even the creepy dark one!
What's funny is we all chose the same favorite van experience. We all decided our favorite moment was when we got kicked out of the campground. In our defense the relay handbook pointed out all the campgrounds that were along the relay route as we were making our way to the next van exchange to look for a place to crash. We had been running from about midnight until 6:00 am or so, so we pulled into one of the campground areas, drug out our sleeping bags, set our alarms for 10:00 AM and fell fast asleep. I had ear plugs in and an eye mask on because the sun was already well into the sky by then. About 2 hours into this dead-person sleep I hear this man roaring out to us from above, telling us that this was a public day camp facility for day use only and we were to pack up our stuff and leave immediately. I pulled up my eye mask, completely dazed, and said, "isn't this day time?" While he's still barking at us George realizes what's going on and quickly deescalates the situation. It's only then that I look around and realize there's a family camping about 200 yards away and we have pretty much invaded their picnic table area. So as we gathered up our stuff we started laughing at what I said, and then started saying things like "hey it's day and we used". "I don't understand the problem sir, it's daytime", laughs laughs and more laughs, as we decided to drive down the road, pull over and get organized. We pulled into a scenic spot near a river, packed up our stuff, dumped the water out of the cooler, gathered up all the trash out of our van, brushed our teeth, washed our faces, and talked about going and getting coffee, ice, and water somewhere down the road. At one point Doug said, "Hey I feel pretty good", and we all agreed. And this was after 2 hours of sleep! It's hard to explain how or why we were all like that, but that's how it went. We got our coffee and headed to the van exchange to meet up with the team and eventually run our last set of legs. Team energy is a very real thing!
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| Still funny |
