my makeup may be flaking

Sorry about the sparse comments, I have limited internet access at the moment.

Leg #1 It begins

The saga beings with me wondering around Salt Lake City looking for Wild Oats market, which is where I was supposed to meet up with Chad.  I eventually realized that Wild Oats had become Whole Foods, which was why I couldn't find it.  Fortunately I saw Adam. After that I had a long wait, during which time I got to talk to Chad, Kory, Cody,Bill,Mitch Zundell, Steve Cuttitta, Andy Mclellan and Steve Olsen. 

After a couple of hours, Andy and I agreed that we were tired of waiting (we were runners 11 and 12). The first van was really long, almost 4 hours, so waiting at the first exchange was the most downtime we had all night. I had seen the times that I was supposed to hit and I was getting a little psyched out. I'm a terrible altitude runner, and a below average climber, however Sasha was making predictions based on Boston, which exposes neither of those weaknesses. Then we were finally going and things seemed to go by very fast. The first four runners in our van were either right on or a little ahead of their projected time and we had opened up a huge lead on the Runner's Corner team.

I felt pretty loose at the start of my run which was nice and I just tried to relax and find a pace that I could maintain all night. I had about a 900 foot climb right of the bat which I just tried to cruise up. I didn't have a Garmin, but I could guess how much further I had to go by looking at how the above me the ridge was.  About halfway up my quads started to burn and I was a little worried that I had screwed myself for the rest of the night. I crested the hill and passed the 1 mile to go marker at just over 21 minutes (over 7minute pace!). I knew that I had to fly on the downhill mile (300+ feet down in the last mile) to stay on pace. My legs responded wonderfully and I was sprinting all the way down getting as much air as possible into my lungs. I doubt the mile to go mark was accurate, but if it was I ran about 4:35 for my last mile, when I needed about a 5:06. It probably wasn't. 

After a short sleep in the van (it was too cold outside) I awoke just before 2am.  I had plenty of time to warmup and was feeling pretty good when the time came for my next leg to start.  My 2nd leg was the easiest of the three, an almost flat 4.5 miles which I cruised at a little under 6 minute pace to beat my projected split by about 20seconds.

Then I repeated the cycle, getting about 2 hours of sleep while Van 1 did its thing. It was on the final van that things got interesting. I awoke at about 8am giving me very little time before we had to start. Bill was our first runner and Cody had told him the wrong distance at the start of the leg (too short), something that would have made me very worried. Bill did fine though and when Steve's foot cramped up on the next leg, Bill leapt out and finished it off for him!

Then came the two ridiculous legs ran by Kory and Steve C., they gained about 3500' between them. I noticed that every time we stopped, it was getting harder and harder for me to breathe. The van dropped me off at the top of Ragnar and I cramped up jogging over to the bathrooms (uh oh).  I knew that I was supposed to average 5:15 pace for this leg, but I could see that the first mile was up and I was going to run it in barely sub 7. When I got the hand off, I went off at a fairly conservative pace. I knew that it would be a long leg and I didn't want to destroy myself.  When I came over the top of the first rise I then had about 1000' feet to lose in the next mile (that's right). I flew through that mile, picking up speed the whole way, but I paid dearly for it when the road flattened out and I almost had to drop out when the road started climbing again. At 3.9 miles I was at 25:00, which was over a minute per mile behind my projected pace.  Fortunately, it was a friendly 5% grade down the rest of the way and I covered that in 16:21 (5:21 pace). When I crossed the finish line, my knees very nearly buckled and I could barely walk.  I would be sore from that run for a week. I was sore from Boston for only 3 days.