Escape

The main event for Saturday was a race for Turi. My co-workers Amber and Chris talked me into going down to Carson City for the Escape From Prison Hill, a half-marathon that can be run as a relay. Amber ran it with her husband, Kevin, and I ran it with Chris. (Little explanation here - Chris is a frickin' serious runner. Wins races now and then. Fighting injuries lately, but still a few orders of magnitude better than I am.) Anyway, this is a seriously hilly race - in fact, there are few flat spots on the whole course - check out the elevation chart on the link above. I ran the first leg, 7 miles, and Chris finished the last 6 which were if anything, slightly steeper. Scary. I gave myself a goal of an hour for the first leg, and finished in 1:08. (Took a good tumble into a sagbrush on one of the downhills too, but only got a little scratched.) Not sure what Chris's goal was, other than to kick everyone else's butt, but he passed like 5 other relay teams and finished with a total time of 1:54. That was good enough for first in the Men's relay category, although a Mixed (M/F) relay team finished in 1:45. But we got a nice little plaque, and our team name mispronounced at the awards ceremony. We were the "Guy-Brarians", but the presenter read it as guy-barbarians. Nice. Anyway, thanks to Chris, I can now no longer say that I just run for fun and "have never won anything." Not that I'll be doing any winning on my own anytime soon...