Monday, August 27, 2012

Hood to Coast - Round 1

Hood to Coast began bright and early at Mt Hood's Timberline Lodge on Friday morning.  Our team, Vancouver USA Marathon, started the race at 9am.  Thankfully, I was leg 10 in van 2 this year and got to sleep in (well, that was the plan anyway. The boys decided 5am would be a great time for a party, so I only got about 4 hours of sleep Friday morning.)

Around 10am we headed up to Sandy to get the van ready to rumble.

Decorating the van

The leg 6 runner didn't arrive until almost 2pm, giving us plenty of time to relax.  The opposite happened to our van 1.  They got a late start out of Portland, ran into traffic and barely made the start with 20 minutes to spare.  There's enough nerves at the start of a race, I'd hate to add stressing out over being late too!

The start of leg 7 in Sandy

Exchange 6

Van 2 is off!

Leg 7
Mt Hood in the distance

Leg 8
Our van had a smooth start.  The first three runners and exchanges went quickly.  My first leg was next.

Silly me: when I was planning my food strategy, for some reason I thought I should stop eating around noon to have everything settled by 2.  Not good because my leg didn't kick off until closer to 5pm.  From exchange 8 to exchange 9 (the start of my first leg), our van took a small detour (and I was driving, another bad idea).  I didn't have time to prepare and in the rush I forgot my race belt with Gu's in the van.

Looking for my teammate at exchange 9

We made the exchange with only few minutes before Darren's arrival.  I started off at an easy pace knowing I needed to conserve energy for my next two legs.  I realized the nutrition mistake almost instantly when my stomach started cramping up.  Leg 10 runs just over 5 miles on Portland's Springwater trail, giving no opportunity for support from my van (although a nice family was handing out bottles of water).  There was very little shade and the afternoon sun was unrelenting.  I took plenty of walk breaks and finished in 56:16, almost an 11 min/mile pace.

Coming into exchange 10

The hand off to Erin, my SIL

Happy to be done

Johnson Creek

Exchange 11
At exchange 11 in Johnson Creek, our last runner was off and the rest of the van headed down to the Willamette River.  Round 1 was almost complete...

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