We had another great weekend out in the Oregon summer sunshine. Saturday we joined a team of seven intrepid (or more likely slightly insane) runners and ran 69 miles across the Oregon Coast Range from the Harris Bridge winery in Philomath to the Rogue Brewery in Newport.
The race is called the Barrel to Keg relay and it is a fundraiser for a local charity, the Community Services Consortium. They started about 115 teams of runners and walkers, which ranged in size from 1 person to 7 people, in waves between 5am (solo runners) and 9am. The course is organized into 14 legs that varied in length from about 4 miles to 7 miles. In theory, they start the slower teams earlier, so everyone ends up at the finish around the same time. Somehow, we ended up in the second to last wave… which left a lot of people for us to catch up to.
We had so much fun, that this is the only picture I got all day. I swear we posed for a picture with the barrel and the keg, but it somehow didn’t make it to my phone. This was before the start… that is why we all look so happy and clean! Ed was not in the picture because he did double duty and filled our volunteer spot early on the course, then ran a leg later in the race.
Despite being the person who actually got to assign legs to people on our team, I somehow managed to assign myself to 11 miles with almost 900 ft of climbing. Clearly I did not take a good look at what I was getting myself into. Bret ran almost 10 miles too! It was a HOT, sunny day so the race was quite a challenge. We went through a lot of water and quite a bit of PBR (energy drink of champions). Two people on our team ran the longest distance they had ever run in a day… so a lot of accomplishments were accrued. We finished in about 10.5 hours!
The next day, we were a little sore. Oval had a lot more energy to burn than any of us, so we took her to the Willamette to run around with her friend Maia. Her swimming is coming along nicely (she is the big splash right in front of me). She was even swimming out to fetch balls all on her own!
Needless to say, we all slept pretty well last night.