Wasatch Back Plug

Well I have had some people ask me how the race worked and how far it was and stuff. So I thought I would give it a little plug so that my brother can stay in a job! He works for Ragnar who puts on all these races.
Anyway it was from Logan to Park City a total of about 180 miles. There were about 650 teams of 12 people each. You divide up into two vans of six people. Everyone is then assigned a runner number that corresponds to three legs of the race. So runner one would run leg 1, leg 13 and leg 24 and runner two would run leg 2, leg 14, and leg 25 and so on. Each leg is ranked as easy, moderate, hard and very hard. There are easier and harder legs obviously. I had about a medium leg. I was runner two and ran 7 hard miles at about 9:00 in the morning, and then I ran 3 easy (should have been moderate) miles at about 7:00 at night and then 5 hard miles at about 5:30 in the morning. When the runners are running in your van you can drive the course with them and cheer them on and then you drop of the next person to exchange running. When your runners aren't running you can eat, sleep, hang out or whatever. There really isn't that much time to do anything other than run but you try. We all only got about 2 hours of sleep throughout the whole thing. We slept from about 1:30 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. when the other van was ready for us to take over. It was quite weird to walk into some random high school gym filled with hundreds of sleeping runners in sleeping bags on wrestling mats!
They give out prizes for the best team names and the best costumes and van decorations so you get some teams that are quite decked out! There were some really hilarious names that made it humorous to see vans from the other teams on the course. My favorite were the team that actually strapped a couch to the roof of their van so that they could sit up there and cheer on the runners. I also liked the name FLDS (freakin' long distance sprinters). There was a team that was some sort of outdoors company and all their runners ran with different outdoor accessories. One guy actually ran with a tent around him! Then there were the Xena Road warriors that ran with gladiator costumes. Originally our team name was going to be "Like a Virgin....Running For the very first time" but then we were going to have a ten year old on our team and a boy so we changed it to " Because I'm Awesome". When we thought about it later we thought we should have made some reference to polygamy since we had one guy and 11 girls on the team. We thought that would have been kinda funny.
It sounded a lot more complicated than it really ended up being. I thought for sure that there were going to be vans just blocking the roads everywhere but it really wasn't that way.
They are all over the country now and so seriously look it up and try to participate. The Wasatch Back is their biggest race so far. I equate it to pregnancy and labor. While you are in it you are thinking that you would NEVER do this again but after a while you look back on it with a certain fondness that actually makes you want to do it again. I REALLY want to do it again! I am trying to get Dustin to do it with me this time.
Anyway I highly recommend it!