Ragnar Los Coyotes: Let's Get it Started!

When last I blogged, Chris and I as well as our other Breaking Rag teammates (along with Bryan's parents Joe and Janie) arrived at the Los Coyotes Indian Reservation safe and sound, set up our campsite, and turned in for the night.

Probably due to my lack of sleep on Wednesday night, even though we were camping in a tent, I slept well on Thursday, waking up around 5:30 on Friday morning and convincing my bladder to let me stay in my warm sleeping bag for a little bit longer.  Eventually,  however, the needs of nature won out, and I emerged into the slumbering campground.  A few folks were starting to stir, but things were still quiet overall.

The moon sinking behind the mountains,

as the sun starts to light our side of the world.

I'm always prepared to be the first person awake, so after visiting the port o loo (sidebar time - in our Ragnar talk the week before the event, one person was really interested in who was handling the port o loo's.  For the record, it was a company called Andy Gump, and they were really fantastic.  I guess that random dude was right to ensure they were involved.  Sidebar over), I hopped into my camp chair outside the tent with my headlamp and a copy of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, ready to handle some reading.  Soon, however, Chris started to stir, and we got busy firing up our camp stove to heat water for coffee and tea for the crew.  Before too long, a stirring in Jen's camp chair revealed Matt, who apparently slept outside all night (me, to Chris: "you let him sleep out here all night!?!  He could have frozen to death!  I'm not running his legs!"); Jake also emerged from the tent before too long.

How many engineers does it take to put together a flashlight?

As we heated our water and the gentlemen pondered the different instant coffee options we'd brought, our camping neighbors asked if they could borrow our hot water kettle when we were done; when we replied that of course they could, they did us a solid by sharing their freshly brewed Pete's Coffee, made in a French press brought from home.  Chris was particularly pleased with the caffeine upgrade.

Not our neighbors, but a few other team campsites.

Photos courtesy of Kelly.

As the morning moved along, Jen, Bryan, and Kelly came to visit and to offer us a hot breakfast at the RV.  I was Runner 1, up first right at 9:15, so while I declined a heavier breakfast than just the bagel I'd brought with me, I was happy to accompany everyone to the RV to visit before the event started.

A few shots of the Ragnar trailer and surrounding village.

That's the mess hall tent in the background.

Photos courtesy of Kelly.

After watching the rest of our group break their fast on bacon and eggs, a few of us headed back to the transition tent for the opening ceremonies.  The national anthem was played, and just before the first teams set off at 8:30am, a special blessing was given by members of the Los Coyotes tribe.

Not the best photograph,

but it was still really neat.

You're gonna have to trust me on this.

I headed back to our campsite to grab some last minute gear and met our entire team for our first group photo of the event:

From left: Jake, Matt, Chris, me, Kelly, Bryan, and Jen,

ready to Break Rag!

Photo courtesy of Jen.

Just after the 9am folks took off, I headed into the transition tent to start our team off on its merry way.  We had our name announced, I posed for pictures for the rest of the team, located just beyond the starting line, and then it was time to go!

Waving like a weirdo.

Check out that lady's abs in front of me.

Damn, Gina.

Photo courtesy of Kelly.

So apparently I get a double chin when I run.

That's awesome.

I like to think my PT folks would be happy
about my appropriately neutral neck alignment.

Photo courtesy of Kelly.

Kelly also grabbed a video of the start, which is pretty fun.  Hopefully, this link will work.  If it doesn't, just imagine the pictures above coming to life, Harry Potter-style, and you'll be good.

The standard order for loops at a Ragnar trail event starts with Runner 1 doing the green loop, Runner 2 doing yellow, Runner 3 doing red, Runner 4 starting the sequence over at green, and so on, until every runner has done each loop.  Green is normally considered the easiest loop, even though the distance may be longer than yellow, as yellow tends to be more technical in nature (at least, from what our team has seen at McDowell and now at Los Coyotes).  Red is generally the longest loop, often doubling the distance of the shorter ones.  While a normal Ragnar trail team has 8 members, our team only came up with 7, so we needed to somehow cover the three legs that would be handled by the vacant slot in our lineup, Runner 3 (we designated this).  I volunteered to handle an extra red loop, Chris did the extra yellow, and Jen did an extra green.  

While Runner 3 being the vacant slot meant that Chris (Runner 2) and Jen (Runner 4) could do their extended legs back to back, as Runner 1, I did green first, then waited for Chris to run yellow, then hopped back into rotation for my first spin around red.  I think this worked out pretty well, given that at the time, the day was sunny and warm-ish.  I really didn't want anyone to have to wait around in the cold, shivering in wet clothes while waiting for a teammate to finish a leg in the dark.  That would be lame.

Anywhoo, my trip around green went well.  None of us were as fast as we anticipated, mainly because the terrain on all three legs was tough.  In addition, the village itself was at 4500 feet, so every now and then, you'd feel the effects of running at elevation kick in, which is always a fun thing to experience ("everything is really...swimmy...").  

My Suunto data on green.

Click to make it bigger.

The chart above graphs my average pace (the faster I ran, the higher near the top of the chart) along with the elevation changes over the course.  As you can see, while green started out decently flat, and I was moving along, around mile 1, we hiked a full mile straight up into the sky.  This section was done on a fire road, and everyone was just trucking along, waiting to get back to more interesting trails.  Hiking on fire roads would be a major theme of this race, as every loop held at least one mile of this straight up business.  It really killed everyone's paces, as the slope made it truly un-runnable, for the most part.

Eventually, the fire road turned back into trail, and I had fun screaming down the descents on the course.  Of the three loops, this was my favorite, but given the lack of affection I felt for the others, that's not really saying much.  Coming back into camp, I was captured by the race photog:

Always smiling!

While I was out doing this, the rest of the team headed back to the campsite to help Chris get ready for his spin around yellow.

Bryan says all is well!

Photo courtesy of Kelly.

Back to camp it is!

Photo courtesy of Jen.

Some relaxing was done as well:

Team Breaking Rag!

Photo courtesy of Kelly.

Hammock selfie!

Photo courtesy of Kelly.

Spencer family shot!

Photo courtesy of Kelly.

I ended up finishing my green loop in 42 minutes, which wasn't too far over my expected time.  Chris headed out for his yellow loop and since he spent a good mile of it hiking straight up into the clouds, he grabbed some shots along the way:

I mean, the scenery was stunning, no doubt.

That was for sure.

Chris did well on the yellow loop, despite it being really technical and steep in places.  He told me to watch out for my head on the descending switchbacks, as there were several trees that attacked him.  When I ran the yellow loop (my last, around 5am on Saturday morning), I realized that the trees poking him in the eyes were a good foot over my head.  Hooray for being a short person!

While he was out running, Matt and Jake were kind enough to wait with me at the transition tent, so I had someone to talk to while killing time for my first spin around red.  Since my hike up green convinced me that I could indeed take my phone to snap photos, I tried out shooting them through a plastic bag (since my phone was right next to my water bottles, I didn't want it to short out or get wet or whatever).  Obviously, the results were less than stellar:

Although, in fairness, there are Instagram filters

that do exactly this.

Eventually, we saw Chris rounding the curve, so I bid adieu to the gentlemen and started up the red loop. Remember how in Thursday's post, I mentioned our campsite was right on the running path?

"Hi guys!"

"Okay, bye guys!"

Photo courtesy of Jen.

Red shared the first 1.15 miles with yellow, and while yellow then branched off onto actual trail, red kept climbing, until almost the 2 mile mark.  Hence, plenty of time to shoot the scenery:

I mean, right?

So pretty.

More stupid f*cking fire road.

And even more.

This is near the end, I think.

My Suunto chart from the red loop:

Does this look like fun?

It was not.

After the 2 miles of uphill, the red loop turned into actual single-track and wound along through the forest for another mile and a half.  While it was pretty, the descents were really steep, and the dirt was super loose.  This was my least favorite part of the entire set of loops, as I almost ate it down the hill quite a few times, and there were stories of some folks who really did.  After mile 3.5, it was onto fire road once again, thankfully downhill this time, for about 2 miles.  On my first spin around red, I was running next to a lady about my age and we started chatting.  When I asked her where she was from, she responded, "Long Beach!" so I took this opportunity to pick my new buddy Ellen's brain about good places to eat and run and things to do in the area.  Before she ditched me around mile 6, she gave me some great ideas.

As we got to mile 6 and off the downhill fire road, I looked at the elevation on my watch and realized we were at 4100 feet, about 300-400 feet lower than the village itself.  That meant that over the course of the final 2 miles, we were going to have to climb up this distance again.  While this wasn't too steep over the given mileage, by this time, my legs were toast - quads and calves were destroyed from the constant up's and down's - and even my hamstrings felt far tighter than normal.  Eventually, I saw camp in the distance (heard it before I saw it, actually) and was able to move a bit faster, knowing that I would soon hand the race bib off to Jen.

From the race photogs.

"Just keep swimming..."

For her part, Jen was ready to go at the transition tent!

"Where is Amy?"

Photo courtesy of Kelly.

Eventually, I made it to the tent, clocking in around 1:56 for the loop, falling far short of my expected time of about 30 minutes faster.  If I figured out this linking videos thing, you can see the video of my hand off to Jen here.  Notice the volunteer who has to take the red loop bracelet off of me; after that run, I had no idea where I was or what was going on.  The volunteers really are awesome at these things.

But back to Jen!  Here she goes, for her first spin around green:

Heading out of the transition tent.

Photo courtesy of Kelly.

Official race photos.

This lady does not mess around!

After doing the 3.9 miles of green and the 7.9 miles of red, it was back to camp for me, to chill out for a bit and recover.  In the Ragnar talk mentioned above, one of the things they covered was that the trail would be dusty, and they weren't joking.  Check out this loveliness:

Can you tell where trail shoes

give your feet extra ventilation?

Yummy!

After getting cleaned up, a few of us headed to the RV, as Joe and Janie were making burgers on their grill.  Hot, fresh food sounded just this side of the best thing ever at this point, and we were so thankful for their willingness to come camp in this dustbowl and serve as our short-order cooks.  Seriously, they are amazing.

Jen's green loop went great, and then it was time for her to hand the baton to Jake, so he could start his spin around yellow.  Things went well for him, too, including being captured by official race folks (well, his picture anyway.  As far as I know, they didn't physically capture him. I feel we would have heard of that):

Now that is a Ragnar beard.

Our buddy Scott has some serious competition in Jake.

After Jake came in, Matt headed out on his first leg, around red.  I have to admit to feeling kind of a sick thrill waiting for Matt to come back; the red loop almost murdered me, and I knew Matt would have some unkind things to say about it as well.  Thankfully (?) for me, I wasn't disappointed.

Heading out with high expectations

Don't let that smile fool you - 

he's crying inside.

Keeping our sign on most of the night before resulted in one LED strip burning out, but we were prepared, so while we waited for Matt to do red, we made some quick repairs and were ready to go again:

The engineer, engineering

The engineer, standing

None of us really know what's going on here.

When it was time for Matt to be heading back, we all went out to support him on his final stretch of red, which also allowed us to see some of the finest scenery in camp:

There's Matt!

And the line of Andy Gump's!

Matt handed off to Bryan in the tent, and he started out on the green loop, bringing another rotation around for our team.  As you can see, the sun was starting to set here, and we were quickly about to enter Ragnar After Dark time.

Testing out the Buff

Ready to go!

Photos courtesy of Kelly.

We waited for Matt to emerge from the transition tent, noting that this was taking a bit longer than normal.  However, once he did, the issue became clear.

Matt, observant fellow that he is, noticed the Lagunitas beer guy was starting to set up his stand, and Matt kindly offered to "test out the lines" for him.  The Lagunitas guy was all for it, so although half of the cup was foam, the other half was a free beer!  Not bad!

Coming up in future blogs, our team finishes its first set of 8 legs and I run again, making a new best running friend.  Also, Ragnar After Dark!

Later!

Amy