Racing

So, it's spring time (though today it felt like summer...88 degrees in March...wow), and spring time means running outside (actually that's not totally true either, in Philly - at least for me - basically summer is the only time I DONT run outside.  The winter is usually mild enough that running outside bundled up is totally do-able.  The summer on the other hand gets a little hot and humid for my running taste).  Enough with the digressions, I haven't written much about my running in this blog (in the fall I was so focused on climbing that it sort of fell by the wayside), but I have a few cool races coming up, so I figured I'd blog about them.

The first race I'll be running is what I like to call a team relay ultramarathon.  Basically me and 11 of my med school classmates (well, actually 8 of my med school classmates, plus one of my classmates girlfriends and two of her friends - I'm going off on all sorts of tangents in this blog) will be running from Los Angeles to San Diego in a ragnar relay (http://www.ragnarrelay.com/race/southerncalifornia).  It'll be the third Ragnar I've done (there will be five of us running this one who have done all three).  The first one we ran was the Ragnar Las Vegas in October of 2009, where the race wound 181 miles through the desert, finishing at Red Rocks Casino in Las Vegas.  Then our clinical rotations threw a wrench in training, so our next one wasn't until we conquered the Ragnar Florida Keys which meandered 199 miles from Miami to Key West in January of 2011.  This April we'll be running Ranar SoCal. 

The way Ragnars work is it is a relay race that Ragnar has divided into 36 unequal legs.  Twelve runners on each team run it as a relay race.  You rent two 12 or 15 person passenger vans.  Runners 1-6 are in Van 1, and Runners 7-12 are in Van 2.  Van 1 begins the race, and runner 1 runs leg one, hands off to runner two etc with Van 1 drives along, providing support for runners 1-6 (giving them water along the way).  The two vans meet up when Runner 6  (from van 1) hands off to Runner 7 (then van 2 is the active van, and van 1 can drive to the next major interchange where Runner 12 will hand off to Runner 1 (who will be doing leg 13).  Each runner runs 3 legs of the race.  Your team runs continuously until they finish the race (our last two both took us around 24 hours).  I'll be Runner 2, so I'll be running leg 2 (5.1 miles), leg 14 (8 miles) and leg 26 (7.4 miles) for a total of 20.5 miles.  The last two Ragnars have been two of the most intense things I've done in my life, but also two of the most fun. 

The next race I'll be running is the Broad Street 10 miler in Philadelphia.  I've run this race twice before (in 2008 and 2010).  Basically, it's a race hosted by Independence Blue Cross in Philadelphia each year.  Each May they close down Broad Street (which is a major street that runs right through the heart of Philadelphia), and 30,000 runners run the 10 miles from just north of Philadelphia to the Naval Yard just to the south.  There are a ton of people in the race, but even more than that lining the streets cheering.  It's really an awesome race.  I'm very excited for it.

The final "race" I'm running is the Rugged Maniac 5k.  While it's only a 5k, there are 18 obstacles put into the race from army crawling through mud to climbing a rope over a 10 foot wall.  I've never done anything like it, but it looks like a blast.  Check it out, this race still has availability (http://www.ruggedmaniac.com/).