Del Sol We started the race at 6pm with four other teams. Dave stared us off followed by Clyde, Sasha, Dan, Paul, and Jon. My van was second and our order was: Laud, Chris, Me, Ryan, Andy ,and Cody. We started the race off with the team and after being pulled over for having a brake light out and fixing it, we went to the first major exchange to chill until it was our turn. When we passed by our team we couldn't tell where we were, but the other two teamms were way behind Google, and Clyde. Google was pretty much running away from us at first but I figured we could hang with them overall. I was excited for the competition, I love to make it a race, especially when the other team thinks they will blow us out.
My first leg was late at night, probably 11pm arizona time. We were in the middle of no where, and my leg was 7.1 on a long gradual uphill slope. The uphill was gradual enough that I didn't really notice it. It was light because of the moon so I only used my head light when people were coming. I felt good and ran well, but was fairly conservative. I ended up graining over 3 minutes on my Google opponent. I made sure to cool down good after bcause I knew we had a long night and a tough close race still ahead.
When I got the wristband we were down by about 8:40 and when I finished we supposedly down by around 5:30insh. I had no idea what my pace was or how far I had went, but I ended up being almost right on where Paul had predicted I would be. I found out later from the Google guy that I was running against that I had actually done better than what I had thought I had, because instead of it being 6.8 or 9 like it was supposed to be, it was a bit longer 7.1. I ended up running it in 42:28 according to my watch, 5:58 mile average, and I gained a lot of time on my guy.
My van ran pretty strong in the first leg. I was a bit worried about Laud in his first leg because he rolled his ankle warming up and was swearing and all pissed off. Andy assured us that he is like that before and after every run whether he does good or not, and he was right. Laud lost a couple of minutes to his guy but ran well. Chris ran good on his leg and didn’t lose too mush time. He had to run through a flooded part of the road and got soaked, and I felt bad about it because it happened while the van was dropping me off at my exchange to warm up. Ryan ran great his first leg and lost some time but not tons. Andy picked up a couple of minutes on his guy, he ran good. He kept talking about how he always blows up in races from going out too hard, so I was worried after he took his first leg out hard, but there was no need to be, because he was strong the whole relay. Cody ran well and closed about 1:20 on his man. By the time we exchanged to Dave we were down by about 4:40ish, so between going up and down with our legs we still gained close to 2 minutes over all.
Del Sol continues on Saturday | 