Five takeaways from my Ragnar Relay experience:
- Travel with a big bag of change. This isn’t really relay-specific, but it’s a good life lesson. If you’re going to be driving in and around big cities, have some change for unexpected tolls. Gathering up change from every person in the vehicle to pay a $1.50 toll a nickel and dime at a time did not exactly endear us to the other drivers in the toll line. One toll I missed paying completely so I am likely a wanted woman in the state of Illinois.
- You don’t need all those snacks. Seriously, how much do you really eat in a 24 hour period? Because you will already have so much crap piled into the van that the last thing you need is five times as many snacks as you will eat. I can neither confirm nor deny rumors that I ate an entire can of Pringles by myself over the course of the weekend, but other than that and a package of breakfast cookies, I returned home with all the snacks I packed.
- Just sleep between runs, it will be fine (insert a million laughing emojis here). Unless you can fall asleep anywhere, I would let go of the fairy tale notion that you’re going to get any sleep. So go on and drink that large coffee or 32 ounce Coke at midnight! A passenger van does not exactly make for a smooth ride from place to place and even when you’re parked, it’s hard to find a comfortable sleeping position with so many people and so much stuff. Our team was also so quick that it seemed like it was almost always time to get ready to run again.
- Things are going to go from PG to R-rated pretty fast. Oh, you don’t normally curse? Just wait until the rental company doesn’t really have your vans, the slight chance of rain turns into 18 hours of constant drizzle, you miss your final runner finishing because Ragnar won’t let you park anywhere close and you have to wait on a shuttle bus…the f-words will be flying!!! Additionally, there will be almost constant partial nudity. Just go with it. Head up, booties out!
- Haters gonna hate. I started to get the feeling that some people didn’t like us. I’m guessing it was because we were super-fast and passed like 300 people, plus we had sweet matching track suits. At one point, a lady at an intersection called to let someone know how far I was behind them as I passed by. And she didn’t even cheer for me! But there were also plenty of kind people who were curious about what we were doing, which gave us the opportunity to be ambassadors for Oiselle. This might be one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had so I enthusiastically explained the Podium Project to anyone who would listen!