Napa Valley Ragnar, September 16th & 17th

A friend of mine invited me to be part of his Napa Valley Ragnar Relay team. His team had finished third at the Southern California Ragnar and wanted to win Napa.

The course started in San Francisco and ended 186.4 miles later in the wine country. The scenery was beautiful!

Our team of 12 was named "Post-Fontaine". We ran in the Oregon colors: a yellow singlet and little green shorts.

Our starting time was 2:00 on Friday afternoon. I was the second runner and got my first run done with quickly. It was a nice short leg, 2.7 miles.

After all 6 people in our van finished our first legs, we handed the baton to our second van and watched their first runner before going on a hunt for dinner. We ended up at Whole Foods where I found a delicious chicken pot pie.

We then headed over to the next major exchange zone to wait for our second van to finish. It was about 9:30 and dark when our van started again.

My leg took me 5 miles through Petaluma farm country. It was a beautiful, clear night with lots of stars. John came to cheer me on with David and Peter in their zippy BMW convertible. It was fun to have them leading the way, making sure I didn't get run over or lost and playing loud, fun music while yelling words of encouragement.
After finishing my second run, I went with them to their house in Sonoma for a shower and nap until starting my final 9.2 mile leg at 4:30 am.

Most of my last leg was in the dark, but was beautiful as soon as it started lighting up. I was running through fields and fields of grape vines.
At this point we'd caught up to a lot of the other teams that had started earlier than we did. It was fun to be running around other people. I had 35 kills on my last leg. (kill: passing another team)
A few hours later we crossed the finish line in first place in the mixed division as well as overall...beating the all mens teams.

I was glad to have met and spent time with so many fun, great people.

As always, I had an amazing supportive husband.

We were able to spend some good quality time in San Francisco and Sonoma with David and Peter as well as with our friends Cory and Kelsey Sistrunk.

Cory had just taken a job with David's firm. He and Kelsey were out there looking for houses. After a dip in the pool, we were off to the Girl and the Fig for some amazing food!