Bountiful Butterflies: My Ragnar Experience

Round 3 started at 4:00 am on Saturday, April 20 in Carlsbad. Our first runner got a rude awakening as we were given only 40 minutes notice of the runner arriving and Louis was sound asleep. He was not happy about this at all. And we missed the hand-off. We were walking to the chute and heard our runner was already there. Oops! With the start of round 3 we were now 2.5 hours behind the estimated schedule.

Round 3 is when Ragnar becomes Ragnar. Your body is feeling it. Everything hurts and your mind is trying to hold on. Here are the distances:

1. Louis - 5.5
2. Sam - 7.0
3. Eva - 8.6
4. Aaron - 6.6
5. Shawn - 4.5
6. Birgitt - 4.2

Our exchange between runners 3 and 4 was right on the coast. It was a nice time of day and sort of refreshing to be there. Since Louis and Sam were officially done, they enjoyed dipping their toes in the ocean.

The parking lot was just a sea of Ragnar vans. Most teams rent their vans so it feels like clones everywhere. Our team was lucky enough to have vehicles that had the necessary capacity.

You can see a little more of the tagging on our van. There was a lot of love being sent out for Boston by everyone at Ragnar since the bombing at the marathon had happened only four days prior to our race.

You can see our "kill" tracking

We put nicknames on the windows for everyone in our van. I, of course, was "Shawnie"

After 24-plus hours living in a van ("DOWN BY THE RIVER!" -- sorry), you do what you can to freshen up.

Aaron and I were brushing our teeth

My 3rd run began at 10:50 (almost 4 hours late) in Del Mar. I'm not used to running this late in the morning, but thankfully we were close to the ocean, so the heat wasn't a problem. This leg was up and down hills that were pretty tough. I walked a lot more than I would have liked. There was an extremely steep downhill towards the end with sand that I had to be very cautious. I estimated this would take me an hour and I was 3 minutes over and I think only due to traffic lights. AND, one mile in, my iPod died! I had accidentally left it on after my first run and the battery finally decided to die. Thankfully it wasn't as torturous to run without music as I had feared. I had a buddy (in a super hero cape) for a little bit of the leg so that was a nice distraction.

I don't consider myself much of a beach person, but when I was done, that water had never looked better. I was ready to jump right in.

2 vans together

The final runner for our van finished at 12:36 in Torrey Pines and we were so glad to be done. Everyone was tired and hungry and sore.

So...what do you do...???

FOOD! BEER!!

It was a true feeling of celebration. We were laughing a lot and just enjoying our accomplishment (and even talking about next year...shhhh).

We then moved on to the finish line at the Embarcadaro in San Diego and we arrived around 3:00pm. Jim had taken the train and bus down to meet us. At that point our group split up for about an hour just to kinda get a break, do some shopping and reset. We joined back up at 4:00 and just hung out on the grass listening to music.