Ragnar Preview

I am running the Reebok Ragnar Wasatch Back in a little over a week. A friend from Michigan (who now lives in Oregon) has a sister who lives just a few miles from us. When said friend was in town for spring break, we met up at a park and met her sister for the first time. In the course of conversation, she mentioned that her family was running the Ragnar in June and were short a couple of runners. I not-so-casually mentioned that I would be very interested in joining a group. A few weeks later, it turns out that they still needed someone, and the price was very right, so I'm signed up.

How excited am I? Even before I officially had been offered the spot, I might have started developing my own spreadsheet to evaluate each leg of the race based on distance, time of day and elevation gain, and to estimate their relative difficulty. I started my packing list. And of course I've been talking about it to the point that Shannon probably wishes it was over already. (Also, their website has some typos, and the rule book has a couple of minor inconsistencies. But who's counting?)

If you're not familiar with Ragnar, it's a relay race, usually run with teams of 12. The route this year is 184 miles long, and will take a very mediocre team like ours something like 30-32 hours to complete (I think). They stagger the start times for the teams letting the slowest teams start first, for logistical reasons. We'll be starting in Logan at 8:30 on Friday morning, and hopefully finishing somewhere around 5pm on Saturday in Kamas. The 184 miles are divided into 36 legs, and each runner does three of them. (Some teams are crazier and do it with fewer runners.) Just in case you don't quite appreciate what 184 miles is like, here's what the route looks like in map form:

I get to run legs 12, 24 and 36, which I've roughly marked on the elevation map below between the pairs of red lines. It was only once I did this that I really got to appreciate that I get to do 2 of the 5 biggest climbs and run the highest part of the race. The jury is still out on whether I should consider this an honor or a punishment.

As this is a continuous relay, the team will be running through the night. My legs should work out pretty well in that regard, as I expect to do my first leg around 6pm, the second at 6am and the last at 4pm. I still haven't met 9 of the other 11 runners, and probably won't until the night before at the earliest, so it's going to be a big adventure hanging out with them for that many consecutive hours. I'll try to remember to take some pictures, and you can be confident that there will be a lengthy write-up of the race afterwards.

And if that doesn't get you excited, then just wait until I unveil the next epic running adventure that is planned for late July. It makes the Ragnar look like a walk in the park.

Never Ending Stories (and their reviews)

The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie
Yes, that's Hugh Laurie, the guy who played Dr. Gregory House on TV. Or perhaps you think of him as the the Dad from Stuart Little, or Dr. Cockroach from Monsters vs Aliens, or you remember back to his days on Blackadder. But in his first novel, the role that I was thinking of most was that of Bertie Wooster from Jeeves & Wooster. "But this is a book he wrote, and not a TV show he's acting in," you say. And you're right. It's the story of a PI who turns down a job that don't meet his morals, and then ends up getting dragged deeper into the immoral morass than he ever wanted. It's got thugs and politics and assassinations and conspiracies and all that, but at the center of it, the main character has the personality of a P.G. Wodehouse character injecting a hint of silliness into the most desperate of situations. I suggest reading the book in your head as if Mr. Laurie himself is reading it aloud to you. (perhaps there is an audio book that does just that?)

Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov
This is a collection of Sci-Fi short stories by one of the great science fiction writers. The first story is also included in I, Robot, but the stories are generally not about robots. They are about people in the sometime near, sometimes very distant future, and like many short stories, each story is there to frame a single central idea or question. How would humans get along with aliens, and what if one species is inherently dangerous to the other? What if computers know us better than we know ourselves? As computers start to do all of our thinking for us, will we still learn how to think? Many more of the stories center around computers rather than robots, and along the way its fun to see what Asimov saw of the future, back when computers were brand new to the world. Like many, he didn't appreciate how quickly computers would become both extremely small and extremely cheap. He doesn't seem to imagine pictures taken without film that needs to be developed, or the invention of user friendly computers. But what he does find is questions and situations that are compelling, even if the technology around them seems at times both out of date and futuristic.

A Zion Canyon Reader edited by Nathan N Waite and Reid L Neilson
This is a collection of essays and things about Zion Canyon. 28 of them make up the 244 pages, so they're not long, and they cover things from geology to plant and animal life in the canyon, to early settlers, to more modern concerns. Writers feature well known names like John Wesley Power, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey and Juanita Brooks, as well as plenty of people you've never heard of before. Occasionally it was way too touchy-feely, "feel the spirit of the canyon wash over your soul", but even at its most annoying, that essay would be over in a few pages anyway. The more interesting ones (to me) focused on early Mormon settlers, as well as some of the first (white) people to document trips through the canyons.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
This is the second book I've read by Kim Stanley Robinson, and I'm noticing a trend. Most sci-fi books have a well defined story line, where even from the beginning you know what bad guy needs to be defeated, or curse reversed or whatever. The fun is in the details and journey along the way. Mr. Robinson, however, writes books that don't go where I expect them to. This book is about a spaceship taking a multi-generation trip to colonize a new planet, Aurora. So it's a book about setup up a new colony, right? Nope, we spend a long time on the ship just getting there, dealing with the impossibility of maintaining a self-sufficient biosphere for 160 years. Then we get to the new planet, it sucks, and we have to make a new plan, and start a new trip with new challenges, and surprises along the way. Really, when you think about it, most novels are contrived in the way they have such clear cut story arcs that lead up to a big conflict at the end. Real life, at least my life, doesn't have such clear cut beginnings and endings to stories, but is just a single story that lasts a lifetime.

Eastlake 5k

I won a race. There are no pictures, nor any other evidence to document this.

We all ran a race, in fact, though details are sparse. The girls' elementary school had a 5k/1mile race as a fundraiser. We won't be attending the school next year, but apparently will pay to run on the sidewalks in our neighborhood that are free to run on all other times of the year. (In fact, they were free to run on even while the race was going on.) The race was small, not all that well organized, not terribly competitive and had a few major flaws. Oh, and it was raining the whole time, too.

As this was put on by the elementary school and was a family event, they had a 5k and a 1 mile race. Unfortunately, they started the 5k, and then a few minutes later started the 1 mile, so the 1 mile was pretty well over by the time the 5k finished. This does shorten the overall timeline of the evening, but not without a significant drawback: if my wife and I are both running the 5k (which we were) but our children, ages 10 and 7, are both running the 1 mile (which they were), we are completely unable to provide any supervision or encouragement for them. Further, there were no details about the timing of the races provided beforehand, so it was impossible to know about this until minutes before the race. For a race for families, this wasn't terribly family friendly.

So, Julia and Ella both did the 1 mile race. I don't really know how it went, other than Julia ditched Ella and Ella wasn't happy about that. I'm not sure how long it took them either, as the event was essentially un-timed.

Now about the 5k. The course ran through the neighborhoods of Daybreak, starting and ending at the school, and passing by the temple and the lake. It stayed on sidewalks and asphalt paths. I have some questions about how close to 5,000 meters it really is, because it is very difficult to hit distance targets when you have a single start/finish line and nowhere in the course where you can make small adjustments in the length. Maybe the design of the sidewalks and paths in the neighborhood fortuitously line up to give you a perfect 5,000 meter race, but I suspect they just picked the streets that gave them the closest result they could find. My watch and Google both put the distance at 3.19 miles, though those measurement systems certainly have their limitations, too. One last note about the course: it starts with a 90° left hand turn. Not like a turn near the beginning, but the start line was literally perpendicular to the course at the start. There was a turn zero feet into the race. It is always apparent when people planning a race have no experience running races.

The actual race was essentially an individual time trial for me. There were some kids that were in front of me for the first 50 yards or so, and then a pair of teenager that I could hear behind me for most of the first mile. But from there on out, I was completely alone running in the rain. I finished mile 1 in 6:24. Mile 2 has the most up and down and is the part of a 5k where you question whether you went out way too fast. It took me 6:36. Somehow, my watch thinks that I spent 4 seconds of that mile not moving. I promise you that is inaccurate. Mile 3 had the water station (no thanks, it's 56 °F and raining), and I was with it enough to notice that they were running out of the red tape they had put on the ground to mark the route. The pieces of tape were getting smaller and smaller and then in the last mile they switched to black. (It should be pretty simple to calculate putting a piece x inches long every y meters, plus some more for corners and things. Or, start with how much tape you have and back calculate your tape usage. See, you need basic algebra skills even as the PTA putting on a 5k fun run!)

Despite running low on tape, the course was still sufficiently marked. One danger of being in the front of a very small race is getting lost, which was thankfully not a problem. Mile 3 came in at 6:31. (Again, I apparently took 3 seconds worth of breaks. My watch is a liar.) If you're doing the math at home, you'll see that this brings us very close to the finish of the race, and very close to 20 minutes of elapsed time. That magical 20 minute barrier comes out at 6:27/mile, and I've never broken it. I've never come all that close either, except for that time that I totally smashed it, but not in a 5k. Let me explain: This was my 9th 5k. I know, to the rest of you it probably seems like I've done a lot more than that, but I haven't. Seven of them are the Rex Lee Run, plus this one and a 5k put on by my stake in St. George. Seven of these races are from 2010 or earlier, when I was young but not a consistent runner, and two of them are this spring, so there was a seven and a half year gap between 5k races for me. My PR was in my very first race back in 2004 when I ran it in 20:41.6 (6:40/mi). And that one time that I totally smashed it? Thanksgiving 2015, when I ran a 4 mile race at a 19:16 5k pace (6:14/mi). But the whole point here is that I was in the ballpark for sub-20 5k, though I wasn't sure how close.

Not that close* as it turns out. I finished in 20:35.5 on my watch (6:38/mi). I'd give you the official time, but there is no official time. In fact, when I crossed the finish line, no one noticed. I won the race (second and third finished together several minutes later) and I am confident that I was the only person there who knew it. Apparently we don't run for the glory. At the very least, it was a PR by 6 seconds, and seconds are hard to come by when you only have 3.1 miles to make them up in. At the very most however . . . . did you notice that asterisk at the beginning of the paragraph? And 3 paragraphs ago where I mentioned the distance? Again, I don't have a precise way to measure the length of the course. I suppose I could get a tape measure and spend the afternoon looking like a weirdo. I am confident that the race was not officially measured or certified in any way. If we assume the course was 3.19 miles long, then my adjusted 5k time would be 20:00.6. (But if we use the Google distance of 3.1931 (because it is totally accurate to that many significant digits) then my adjusted 5k time would be 19:59.5!) Now, let me be clear, there's nothing official or precise about any of these distance measurements, or my time measurement. I'm not going to claim this as a sub-20 5k. But I think I'm close, and I think I was closer than 35 seconds off last night. I suppose I'll have to find a nice flat, straight 5k and try again, but I've got a Ragnar to run first.

p.s. Shannon set a PR by 3 seconds, if I'm remembering her time right.