2011 Cascade Lakes Relay, Chapter 6: Sleep

Van 1 was done with our second round of relay legs, one more round and one more leg for me.  We drove to La Pine High School to get some rest, maybe even a little sleep, which is what I got.  I had to shower before trying to sleep.  I know I have to feel like my pores are clean if there’s any chance of my sleeping.  After my shower, I didn’t know where any of my teammates had ended up.  I knew they were somewhere sleeping or trying to sleep. I donated five dollars for a cot to sleep on in the gym.    I set up my cot alongside a hundred other cots with people I didn’t know and noticed anytime someone moved on one of these things, it made some huge scraping, popping sound that reverberated all over the gym.  I tried to lie down on mine without making noise.  I wasn’t perfect, but I kept it pretty quiet.  It was still dark outside, but morning was coming.  I had maybe somewhere between an hour or two hours to rest.  I looked at my watch, and surprised myself by falling asleep to the echoing hum of the gym’s air conditioning.  I actually fell asleep.

Suddenly I awoke with a start.  What time is it?  The sun was out and bright.  I could see it through the door.  I imagined the birds were singing or were already done with that.  How long had I slept, and why am I still here?  Why didn’t my teammates wake me up?  They must have left without me. This was no dream this time.  This was real.  I looked at my watch, and my fear gave way to disgust and amusement.  I had slept for less than fifteen minutes.  But I was awake now.  My panic had taken care of totally waking me up. 

So I got up and bought breakfast from some little girl, maybe eight years old, who was really overly-enthusiastic about her role as a waitress.  She was like, “Well good morning, sir, and what can I get for you this morning?”  I looked at the posted menu again.  There was really only one thing on the menu. 

“I guess I’ll have the five dollar breakfast.”

I expected her to tell me, “That one’s been real popular this morning.”  But she asked me, “Do you want orange juice?  It comes with it.”

Well, I was sort of hoping I got everything that came with it if that’s what I’m paying five dollars for, so I said, “Yes.  Thank you.”  And besides, asking me if I want orange juice in the morning is like asking me if I would run from a badger if it bared its gleaming teeth and chased me in the middle of the night.  Anybody who knows me well knows I drink orange juice every morning, and I have for as long as I can remember, so nearly sixty years, if not sixty.  On the rare occasions that I don’t get orange juice in the morning, I am condemned to think about it for the rest of the day like an obsession.  The first thing I will then do when I can is go buy orange juice, and I sigh and close my eyes contentedly when I take my first swallow.  Sometimes I’ll even say, almost to myself, slowly, “Hah . . . cha, cha, cha.”  And take another swig.

After locating my teammates, kind of one by one, we loaded up and departed.  This was going to be the hard one, but then we’d be done, and there was some pleasure in knowing when we were done, Van 2 would just be starting their last legs.  And we’d be done, finished, completed.  We’d be somewhere celebrating with a beer, maybe a wedge of lime, and probably under a palm tree—paradise.  And I took pleasure in that thought.  You have to understand, there had been some discussion, maybe you’d call it bitching, about how we always got the worst times to run compared to Van 2, and our legs were hotter or darker or more remote, ours were like more dirty and made of gravel, and we had worse hills, and our rest breaks were shorter, and somebody had done some math and figured out that each of us ran an average of four miles more than the average of the runners in Van 2, saying which means each of us will be running for almost an hour more than them, even though all of us run faster than 15 minute miles.  Rounding in math can be a wonderful thing. And I thought, “Yeah, and in the other van, Jesse has all the girls to himself, and I have to share my girls with Connor. . . .  Well, at least Jesse’s girlfriend is in our van, and I’m sitting right next to her.  Ha!”  In other words, I was really getting into this complaining.  And don’t forget, we were the ones who survived a plague of locusts, even though it was really only Shelley.

Now I will tell you.  It was pretty hard to be mad at all of Van 2 for the punishment being inflicted on us.  Jesse had a “Very Hard” leg coming up.  He might even need rock climbing gear; he would have such a climb.  Because of this, I even called him, “an honorary member of Van 1.”  So he’s OK.  And who could be mad at Jean, or Tiffany, or Danuta?  Who could even be mad at Caitlin, even though she is Kirsten’s daughter?  They’re all so nice.  But Kirsten Bartlett!  That’s a whole other matter!  We were all innocent newbies to this relay.  We didn’t know.  But Kirsten Bartlett, our team leader, had run in this thing the year before.  She knew.  And isn’t it interesting to note that last year she ran in Van 1?  Now look at what van she assigned herself to this year: Van 2.  Because she knew.  She knew and she did this to us.  She did this thing to us.  Later she would claim she wanted to do Van 2 so she could experience the whole course.  She had done Van 1 last year, and so now she’s covered the whole course.  I just smiled when she said that.  It sounds true, but I’m still going to have to think about this for a while.

In the midst of all this complaining, I was feeling sorry for myself.  My bruised chest was hurting.  My legs were really tired and nowhere near recovery.  And my sleep-deprived body was shot.  I looked at the map.  My last one, Leg 27, was on pavement, which would be better traction, but it was going to be hot and uphill.  There was nothing steep on my leg, it was gradual, but uphill all the way, which I knew would grind me down at this point.  Leg 27 was going to be my longest leg at 7.5 miles, and it is classified “Hard.”  Some legs are classified as “Very Hard.”  But I knew by the way I felt that I was going to have to classify this leg for me with a whole new name: “Extremely Hard—should not be attempted without seeing a doctor first and then second a psychiatrist.” 

Before my leg, I’d sit in the van and watch Connor run his “Easy” 6.0 mile leg, as if any six mile at this point could be easy.  And in fact it made him bleed.  The heat, the sweating, the mileage, and the rubbing of his shirt had added up.  Kristi got back in the van after rendering her support to him with water and maybe GU or something and announced, “His nipples are bleeding.”  I suggested that I could give him some Nip Guards, which I had some in my running grab bag, if he wouldn’t be too embarrassed to wear them.  I mean I don’t know, do some guys think of them as some abbreviated form of a bra?  I guess I do.  But I knew they would help right away.  No more pain.  No one in the van had ever heard of Nip Guards, and Kristi was pretty sure Connor didn’t know about them either.  So I described them as decently as I could as a sort of round, raised band aid.  Then I added that he might like them better if we attached little tassels to them.  This got a round of laughter, and then all the women started talking about how they were going to start a fashionable line of these things in different colors and different designs, and even novelty versions.  And I thought with some discomfort, now I know what girls feel like sometimes.  For God’s sake, I feel like they’re talking about guys’ nipples, my nipples.  Connor refused the Nip Guards.  I'm guessing he looked at them and thought I'm not wearing those girlie things; I'd rather bleed to death from my nipples.

And before my run I knew I’d be feeling really sorry and kind of worried about Shelley because her run of 7.2 miles was classified as “Hard,” with four miles having no van support, and the map showed that ominous picture about an inch in height of a mosquito, which some of the legs show on the map as a warning; in this case, because she’d be running alongside the waters of Crane Prairie Reservoir.  Poor girl!  If she’s not fighting off locusts, she’s a target for mosquito swarms.  I don’t know how Shelley feels about bugs, but her experiences with them are accumulating.

After we met up with Shelley again, my leg was only a mile ahead.  We gave her water, and she looked so red, so hot in complexion.  I thought how red I was going to look.  It seemed like we were now driving uphill, approaching some mountain.  I thought it might be Bachelor.  It occurred to me—is that mountain my leg?  But I relaxed, knowing it was too far ahead to be mine.  That must be Jesse’s—Jesse, earning his honorary membership through the hardship of running a very Van-1-type leg, somewhere up a mountain slope.

(To be continued.)

2011 Cascade Lakes Relay, Chapter 5: My Second Leg

And so we piled into the van again for that long ride into the darkness.  We were supposed to start at 8:43 p.m. after the sun had gone down, but the team was falling behind our predicted time, so we’d be starting closer to 10 p.m.  We would all have to don our reflective vests, and I was kind of excited about getting to wear my new headlamp.  I’m going to take care of this one.  The last one I had, I kept forgetting I’d put it on over my hat, so when I finished my run, I’d automatically take my hat off to feel the coolness hit my forehead.  The headlamp would go flying off my head, like a flying Garmin, and it would hit the hard tile floor hard.  The first two times it hit, I just lost some of the light settings.  The first time I lost the flashing light setting—which who cares?—then I lost the brightest setting, not so good.  I was down to a basic headlamp, either on or off.  The third time it hit, all light was gone for good.  Man. Can’t I learn from my mistakes?  I probably wore that thing less than ten times before I wrecked it for good.  I’m going to try to take better care of this one.  I believe I can still learn new skills.

For my second leg I was going to be taking the fourth leg this round, Leg 16.  I had some time to sit in the van and try to encourage more recuperating before I’d be running.  My first leg had taken a lot more out of me than I would have hoped.  I was looking forward to running in the night this time, knowing my final leg was going to be an uphill in the heat of the sun.

At one point along the way, I think it was Kristi who was driving; she pulled over to thank some of the volunteers for helping to monitor the runners on a turn.  Kristi said, “You’re going to have a long night.”  And the volunteer, a woman in her fifties, bundled in a warm coat, said in a real country way, “Well, I’ll tell you, this is my favorite night of the year.  I look forward to this all year long.”  We had to laugh at that.  I thought wow!  Better than Christmas.  Better than New Years.  Better than her own birthday.  To stay awake all night in the cold air and watch thousands of runners go by at so many different paces and states of fitness, and so many body types and ages.  This is her best night of the year.  This is the night she lives for. And to think, it might be the night I almost die.

Midnight was supposed to fall about half way through my run.  I was beginning to toy with the idea of being known as “The Midnight Runner.”  I liked the sound of it.  I thought it would distinguish me from all of you summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots. . . .  Speaking of pain, it wasn’t that—I wasn’t feeling pain—but I sat in the van unable to chase away the exhaustion in my legs.  And my relay leg was coming up.

Shelley was going to hand off to me to pay me back for handing off to her on our earlier legs.  It was going to be around 1:00 in the morning.  We were far enough behind schedule at this point that I could kiss goodbye to the notion of my being henceforth known as The Famous Midnight Runner.  And I figured I could relax about another Eugene team, the Lactic Asses, passing me, as was predicted.  They had probably already passed us.  I was relieved knowing I wasn’t going to be personally held responsible for that humiliation, even though the humiliation was a reality written in the in the darkness and the breeze of that night.

Before the handoff I got out of the van to go wait for Shelley.  I wrapped a blanket around me and went over to use the porta-potty.  While I’m standing in line, someone sprints up to me like she’s really got to go bad, and I don’t know if I have time to let her get in front of me for her personal emergency.  Then I realize, oh my god, it’s Shelley, and she’s trying to hand off to me in the potty line.  I guess she’s a fast runner at night when there might be badgers on the road.  I hadn’t even located any satellites yet for my Garmin.  I took the slap wrist, turned my watch on while running, analyzed my bladder, and decided I didn’t have to go that bad anyway, so then, it was all systems go.  I felt bad that we didn’t have anyone supporting us on this exchange because she came in so soon. I had to hand my blanket and what-else to Shelley, the exhausted runner.  Kristi showed up just then to take over the burden I was unfairly loading onto Shelley.

And I was off—6.7 miles.  I would cross three cattle guards and wave to three sets of paired horseback riders.  My headlamp was great, stronger than the last one I owned.  Of course, every time a van passed me, the dust cloud would illuminate, and for a while I wouldn’t really be able to see much more than the individual grains of dirt before my eyes.  It turned out I didn’t do too bad.  My pace was only 35 seconds slower than anticipated—adding less than 4 minutes to the team’s predicted total time.  The cool night air did make a huge difference for me.  I handed off to Shana and climbed right into the van, because I don’t do stretches as Shana recommends.  She was off and running, and this time she wouldn’t be able to scold me about not stretching.

In the van Connor was still in the back, lying on top of a bunch of stuff.  How do people sleep like that?  That couldn’t even be comfortable.  He didn’t look comfortable anyway.  Indeed, comfort or not, how do people even sleep?  I was forgetting what sleep felt like.  I think it was something nice.

I heard Kristi yell at her mom, “Go, Banana.”  And I don’t know, there was something in the way Kristi said it that warmed my heart.  There had been that tension between them about Kristi’s dehydration problem.  Now there was true affection in Krist’s voice as she called out “Banana” to Shana.  It gave me an easy feeling, as I relaxed into the ride.

(To be continued.)

2011 Cascade Lakes Relay, Chapter 4: Rest

I had handed off to Shellie.  I was done with my first leg of three.  It felt good to be in the van, knowing two more people on my team would be running, then we’d get a little layover at Silver Lake while Van 2 took over and did their shift, and the next time I would ran would be in the night, the cool of the night.  I felt as if I might not be recovered by then, but a night run still sounded nice.

I looked at my Garmin 405 watch and its damage, and I didn’t look forward to having to carry it in my pocket for my next two legs, instead of on my wrist.  The duct tape had not worked.  It had lasted me four miles of a seven mile run.  And although we had a roll of it in the van, I did not feel it was worthwhile to apply it again, just to have it fall off again, especially at night.  If it went flying off my wrist again, it might be hard to locate in the darkness.  On Facebook, Jesse had told me to get something called 1000 Mile Tape to hold my watchband together.  I had never heard of it.  And now I wonder if there really is such a thing or if Jesse just made it up to mess with me.  Jesse . . .

Now I never shop at Walmart, because of the way they treat their workers, but sometimes it’s the most reasonable place to find just what you need.  (I once had one of my high school students ask me if I knew why so many parents took their kids to Walmart to spank them.  I had to laugh because I knew what he was talking about, not that I’ve been there enough to say for sure, because I never shop there because of the way they make their workers work overtime off the clock and without pay.)  Now I had noticed the week before when I was there that they had all these different colors of duct tape, although, as I said, I never shop there because of the way they discriminate against their women workers.  So I asked one of their associates, or whatever they euphemistically call their floor staff, “Do you have any 1000 Mile Tape?”  He looked at me like “How about you just keep walking, buddy, maybe a thousand miles away from me.”  So I settled on the black duct tape to match my band.  And I told myself once again that I will never shop at Walmart ever again because of the way they go into communities and destroy a bunch of local businesses.

Then outside our van, all of a sudden, we were inside some kind of cloud, a cloud of flying insects, insects of a rather good size.  I thought, oh my God, poor old Shelley was out there running in this.  She only had two miles to go when they hit, so I looked at the terrain ahead that looked the same, and I thought about how poor Kristi was going to have to run even more miles in it.  But then just as suddenly, the sky cleared and we came out of the cloud near the end of Shelley’s leg.  We asked someone what those bugs were and were told they were locusts.  Locusts!  Don’t they come out every seven years?  And if that’s right, what were the chances that a vicious plague of them would descend on our own Shelley at that moment, in that place?  What had she done to deserve this punishment?

Shelley then handed off to Kristi, and Kristi ran her leg bug-free, but becoming a little dehydrated by the end.  Her worried mother Shana actually had a medic come check her out afterwards.  Although the rest of us—I know me for one—would really come to appreciate Shana’s nurturing and mothering in our times of need, Kristi did not seem to like it at all, although, I do note, the rejection was in a loving way.  Of course, Kristi’s been putting up with it for about a quarter of a century, so her perspective might be different.

Our van had completed its first mission.  We were off-duty, so we headed to our first resting area, Silver Lake, where we saw no lake, or any silver for that matter.  Maybe we’d get a little food, some rest, maybe even sleep, and maybe . . . we had heard, there were showers.  We pulled over and Connor told a volunteer, an older gentleman named Gus, that we had heard there might be some showers, even though I tried to tell my teammates that I had received a tweet saying the showers in Silver Lake were not going to be ready this year.  (I don’t know if the guy was really named Gus and Connor had seen a nametag on him or what, or if Connor had just made the name up because the guy looked like a Gus.)  So we were stunned when Gus started giving us a weather report.  “Well, there are no showers being forecast tonight, but there is a chance of showers tomorrow, especially in the morning.”  We laughed before we realized he wasn’t kidding.  He had actually mistaken our question and didn’t know we were asking about showers for bathing.  When he realized what we wanted, he directed us to the cold hose shower near the fire station.  I personally didn’t care enough about my personal hygiene enough to take an ice cold shower.  One thing I can say is quite commendable about Shelly is her superior sense of cleanliness.  I think she ended up showering at every opportunity, which I must say I appreciate since in the van I usually sat in the same seat as she did.  Of course, she had to sit next to me.  Sorry, Shelley.

At Silver Lake we sat in some unpleasant, dry, poky grass and ate.  I remembered seeing some people resting and sleeping on some nice cool, green grass out in front of a school.  I suggested we head there, and we did.  I never slept, but it felt good to drink some coffee, to lie in the shady grass, and to see Connor reading “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and Kristi reading “The Help,” two books I myself had read recently and really enjoyed.  Shellie lay there with her pillow wrapped around her ears.  Shana and Sheri talked quietly; I don’t know about what.  Everything was slowing down for now, and quieter too.  I rubbed both my tired legs, thinking with some trepidation about the two relay legs I still had left to go, into the night and through the next day.

(To be continued.)

2011 Cascade Lakes Relay, Chapter 3: My First Leg

My first leg was the fourth leg of the relay.  It was around noon and the sun was beginning to beat down like sword blades.  My relay leg would be “unsupported.”  No van.  No van mates to offer me comfort or drink.  I walked across the sandy soil through the sagebrush and dry heat.  I promptly headed for the tent for my last little bit of shade. And I waited for Connor to break around the corner and hand off to me for the first time the yellow slap bracelet.   I would soon be entering the desert, before coming out on the other side of the wilderness, I figured, either as a new day prophet or dead, whichever came first.

I took the bracelet from Connor and slapped it on my right wrist.  My left wrist already had my Garmin on it, taped together with duct tape, because of a recent accident, where I had also injured my chest, thumping it against the earth .  I would be running on a dirt road for 7.1 miles.  My strategy, of course, was to find where the soil was the most compacted and run there.  Fortunately, there were two tire tracks which were a little more firm.  The surface was giving way under my feet a little more than one would desire, but not bad. My first mile was right about on my predicted pace of 9:30.  So far, so good.  On the second mile, I got “road kill.”  I passed one guy.  Right away, another runner killed me, passing at a pretty good clip.  I acknowledged to the Relay Gods, OK, you’ve handed out my karma; we’re even, now.  And in that acknowledgement, alas, a cloud appeared, and just ahead of me was shade, a sort of circle of shade, twenty feet in width.  In a little while—I looked forward—I would be bathed in the cool waters of shade, heavenly shade.  Unfortunately, I guess I did not express my appreciation enough to the Relay Gods, because my punishment was that cloud traveled at exactly 9:30 pace, just staying ahead of me, just out of my reach.  For almost a mile, that spot of shade eluded me.  And you might say it’s just sour grapes on my part, but I’m thinking that shade probably didn’t feel as cool as it looked anyway.

Then ahead was more road kill.  I passed another runner as if he were standing still.  To get around him, I moved into the other tire track, but in doing so I ran across the middle where the dirt really was like the dry sand on an ocean beach.  I had to labor sluggishly through it until I reached the other tire track, almost tripping; the change in surface was so sudden.  At mile three I saw that I had slowed down to exactly one minute off pace, slow.  But I still had passed someone!

At mile four I saw someone gaining on me.  I thought maybe this is avoidable.  I could kill myself and surely stay ahead of him for two more miles, so that I’d come out ahead with one more road kill than what my enemies had inflicted on me, but that wasn’t really an option, since I was already in the process of killing myself.   Not to be outdone though, as he passed me, I added a little unexpected flourish to my running.  Suddenly, my Garmin sprang from my wrist and landed out in front of me.  Just as he was about to console me with a sad but friendly “Good job,” he changed it up and remarked, “Oops!”  Without breaking stride I snapped that thing off the ground, checked its vital signs, and with its heart still pumping, I deposited it in my pocket.  It was impressive, if I don’t say so myself.  Actually more impressive than this guy passing me, as I thought, this probably won’t be the last person to pass me; it’s going to become quite commonplace indeed.

Two days before leaving for Cascade Lakes Relay, my wife Lisa and I had taken her high school friend Carmen to hike Silver Falls Trail.  With a little more than a mile to go, Carmen generously said, “Why don’t you run the rest of the way if you want?”  I looked pleadingly to my wife.  I had been restraining myself for five miles, chomping at the bit, with no sign of complaint from me about the slow pace of this thing we call hiking, which is really just walking dressed up with a decorated name.  Lisa graciously said, “Go ahead.”  And I was a Thoroughbred, whipping down that trail, with the trail-side vegetation just a blur beside me, falling behind me now.  With about a half mile to go, a root, the root of all evil, grabbed my right foot, pushing it up until I was suspended flat horizontal to the earth, before the earth rapidly rose up and slammed into my chest, hard.  I felt my heart loosen and bounce off the back of my ribcage.  My hands and knees and chin slid across the trail.

 I lay there thinking, “Oh my god, two days before the race.   I think it’s too late to replace me.  My angry teammates are going to have to pick up my 21.3 mile slack.”  Then I got up, no problem.  I brushed myself off, evaluating my body for injuries.  It seemed to be only my scrapes that were stinging—no bruises, no broken bones.  I walked a little ways; everything seemed fine, so I started running, a little more gingerly now.  About a hundred and fifty yards after my fall, I wanted to check my watch and see what that delay had done to my pace.  The watch was gone.  I ran back in a panic, thinking I’d have to look in the undergrowth for it, but there it lay, like a sad corpse, half buried in the dust.  Later that night, I realized my bloody scrapes had been nothing compared to the blow my chest had taken, and my chest was hurting intensely.

For the rest of my relay leg, no one passed me, and I passed no one.  It was a wash; I broke even, but my overall pace did end up a minute slower, adding an unplanned extra seven minutes to our total.  As it would turn out, I think Connor and I were chiefly to blame for the highest proportion of minutes our team was falling behind from our anticipated team time.  The two men, being shown up by the one other male from our other van, but mostly we were being shown up by a bunch of our studly ladies on the team.  To shame, to shame.

I rounded the corner, crossed the road, and was never so glad to see Shelley’s bright face like a beacon in the darkness.  And my van mates, all there.  In fact, the world was still there, as I exited the wilderness, still alive, and thus a prophet.  “This is going to be a long, hard race for this old man, sometimes known as the Mo’Dogg, when I’m being cool.  But right now I’m not all that cool.”

Shana encouraged me to stretch.  I said, “I don’t do stretches.  I just sit down”—sitting quickly in that straight-backed van seat, the only option here; sitting, a privilege, one of the few, of my advanced years on earth.  I sat there in the van, and my mind went blank, as I stared straight ahead to the nearly hundreds of miles of road still left to go.  I had completed Leg Number Four, and there were still thirty-two more legs left for my team to run, Running from Badgers.

(To be continued.)

2011 Cascade Lakes Relay, Chapter 2: On Your Mark

The whole team went to the starting line.  Kirsten, our team leader, got interviewed and explained the team name Running from Badgers.  She confessed her phobia of meeting up with wild animals in the dark on a long, lonely nighttime leg.  She had heard that last year a woman had actually been chased under just such circumstances by a badger.  Who even knew Oregon had badgers, but then I just learned in the last year, after living in Oregon practically my whole life, that we have moose too, or as the old question asks, is the plural meese?  Thus, our name—Running from Badgers—and our inspiration to run fast, especially at night.  Lots of people after seeing our name would ask if we were from Wisconsin, showing that badgers may be more closely associated with that state.  I think it was at some store along the route, Kirsten was asked once again by a woman, who was not running in the relay, how we chose our name.  Kirsten explained about the woman who was chased last year by a badger, after having rehearsed her story several times before because of how often she’s been asked about it.  Then, surprise of surprises, the woman says, “I am that woman.  That was me.  That thing came out of nowhere, and I turned around and ran the wrong way for awhile with that thing right behind me on my tail.  Then I quickly looped around and started running the right way again and left that bad badger behind.”

As I looked around at the competitors, I noticed again how predominantly young the crowd looked.  I’m used to seeing mostly younger people at races, but the youth factor here was really disproportionate.  Aww, to be young and foolish again.  So I thought, what is this 60-year-old fool doing here?  Am I such an old fool that I can’t even make a reasonable decision anymore, and am I making a huge mistake to think I am up to the challenge of running three seven-mile runs over the course of two days and a night, while basically resting in the discomfort of a straight-backed seat in a crowded, sweat-stinky van?  Will someone please take over power of attorney for me, and make my decisions for me?  Maybe I’m going to die!

It was the night before when I first noticed that it didn’t look like there were going to be that many runners over the age of 60. In fact, I had noticed two things as we signed in, decorated our vans, and had our dinner and an SOB brewski (for anyone who doesn’t know that’s Polish for beer—our teammate Danuta must know this because she’s from Poland, which by the way makes us an international team).  For some reason everybody was getting hit by mosquitoes, except me.  I’d get an occasional strike, but the others were being swarmed by dark, gray clouds of bombarding mosquitoes.  So I’m like what?  Am I so old and nasty that even the mosquitoes don’t find me attractive?  I was so embarrassed about this that I lamely remarked to one of my younger teammates, as her beautiful body is getting bombarded by an incoming fleet of mosquitoes, that perhaps I had eaten something lately that kept the mosquitoes away.  She replied, “I wish I knew what that was, because I want to eat some of that.”  That didn’t make me feel any better.  I know it sounds weird, but I was jealous because everybody was getting bitten but me.

So after a photo shoot at the starting line, where I self-consciously tried to hide my rejected-by-mosquitoes body towards the side and in the back of the group and behind my coffee cup, Shana was off, running the first leg of the relay for the team Running from Badgers.  My van mates and I loaded into the vans.  Connor was the driver with his girlfriend Kristi as co-pilot.  Sheri had a seat to herself while Shana ran, Sheri preparing to run the second leg, 10 miles of two miles downhill and then 8 miles up, up, and what must have been miserably up.  And I sat next to Shelley and sadly bemoaned the contrast of her youthful body compared to mine.

(To be continued)

2011 Cascade Lakes Relay, Chapter 1: Let the Races Begin

I made it through all three of my legs of the Cascade Lakes Relay, totaling 21.3 miles, despite the worried concern of my van mates on Leg 3, which must indicate just how close to collapse or maybe death I must have looked while running. It was three days and two nights on maybe two hours of fitful sleep, where the first night at Diamond Lake, I fell asleep once and dreamed where at least three of us overslept and missed the start of the race. I thought I had heard loud knocking on a door nearby (which in reality I had apparently incorporated into my dream, because I came to find out there really was some loud pounding in the night when some very drunk runners from another team tried to get into some of our runners’ room, but Jean chased them away with authority in her voice.). In this dream Jesse, Shelley, and I were awakened by the hotel management when they opened up an adjoining wall to our room, revealing a beautiful honeymoon suite where we were just a part of this more expansive suite, of which the hotel management was now giving tours. It was 8:00 a.m. and we had missed the 7:40 Start, and were now unable to find any of our teammates. I concluded that loud knocking during the night must have been our teammates trying to wake us up, but in failing to do so, left the three of us behind, and now we were never going to figure out what happened or what we should do.

The second time I fell asleep I dreamed I missed the start of my second leg when I got stuck in a horseshow that I couldn’t get out of. The trainer was explaining his brutal techniques, where he suddenly hit a filly on the face with a board, and then showed the board drenched with the blood spatter to the other horses who then would behave. He claimed this was a more humane way to train horses because he only had to beat one of them, perhaps more severely, instead of having to beat all the horses. I know. It sounds like a Republican trying to explain why cuts to the lower and middle classes will help the economy, while the only cuts the rich have to make are cuts to their taxes. Yeah, I say ironically, that makes sense.

I think I was then afraid to fall asleep again because then I would have some nightmare about missing my final leg, so I lay there awake until I arose at 5:30 to go get some coffee from the restaurant. And the beginning of the race went without a hitch. We were off on a 216.6 mile trek, taking the long way from Diamond Lake to Bend, through the dry heat, the night, and the rises and falls in high elevation. From nearly one sunrise one day until nearly sunset the next, we would, run, ride, and rest (if you can call it rest) over and over again, until it was hard to remember what life was like before this new way of life.

(To be continued.)