Red Rock Relay ~ The BS Report

On September 9th and 10th, we participated in the Red Rock Relay. For those of you who have heard of the Ragnar Relay, this is very similar. It is essentially a twelve person relay race that went 187 miles from Brian Head to Zions. Each person runs three legs that vary in length from 2 miles to over 8 miles. You are split up into two vans, with six people in each van. Everyone in one van will run a leg then you hand off to the other van and try to get some rest while they run before it's your turn again.

It was quite an adventure trying to get enough people for our team, and the connection between some of us was being the spouse of a friend of a friend. Or the old boss of a friend who was once arrested and may or may not at one time have gotten a camo paint job on his car. (I was tempted to add details that weren't true claiming artistic liberty in story telling, but believe it or not, all those details are true.) Needless to say, we had a pretty interesting group.

Since we were in two separate vans, we didn't get to interact very much with Van 2, but in Van 1 we had a blast. Our characters included the following people: me, Sarah, Sarah's friend from high school named Meghan and her friend Kate that she plays hockey with, Rita, a chemical engineering student from Taiwan, who started running on her mission because her mission president made it a rule to run every day, and Bill, who just happens to be that old boss mentioned in the previous paragraph. If you haven't figured it out, Bill was the most entertaining team member to have.

I'm sure our parents are now very worried that we spent almost two days in a van with a criminal, so if anyone is interested in reading more, check out my post about cops. As long as we're giving disclaimers, this next story may be too graphic for those with young children, so feel free to skip the next two paragraphs.

The race started with Bill riding a ski lift to the top of Brian Head, then running down the mountain, where he handed off to Sarah, who had a killer run that gained over a thousand feet of elevation in little over two miles. She then handed off to me, where I began my 8.4 mile run (I believe this was the longest leg of the race, but I don't know for sure). It was a little bit chilly, and for a while I was actually running in the snow.

(Warning, this is the graphic part I was referring to. Consider yourself duly warned to skip this paragraph if you don't like graphic running stories.) As I was a little more than halfway through my run, I was started to get some pretty bad gas pains in my stomach. At one point I farted every stride for at least twenty strides in a row. As a side note, I had already pooped that morning before we left and once again in a porta-potty when we got to Brian Head. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it until the end of my leg, like I had initially hoped. I made a dash for the woods and took care of business there. One guy that I had passed earlier, passed me while I was taking my break. He said to me "I was wondering why your pace was slowing down a little bit, but now I know." Needless to say, I passed him again. After our van finished, we headed to Walmart, where I just so happened to poop again. So, for those of you keeping track at home, that is four bowel movements in four different places in less than a twelve hour span of time. Since we're still in the graphic paragraph, I'll mention here that Kate also threw up on her first leg, and then ran awesome from there on out.

Welcome back, those of you who skipped the graphic paragraph (although I'm sure it was enticing to read given it's great length. Our next set of legs was running from SUU to Whitecastle, some of which was on dirt roads, pretty late at night. For our final legs, we ran from Veyo to Washington City, where we handed off to Van 2 and then met them at the finish line - the entrance to Zions. We may or may not have forgotten to take pictures during the first two legs, so here are the pictures from our last legs, and then at the finish line.