just like rob base and dj ez roc said...

joy...and pain.

the joy:

i did the Klondike Road Relay last weekend. a most enjoyable experience. The Klondike Road Relay is a 176 km running relay race from skagway, alaska to whitehorse. The race begins on friday evening and "runs" through the night. Teams finish in whitehorse on saturday.

This race is the Haney to Harrison on steroids. almost twice as long in total, the stages are nearly all twice as long as the h2h, it climbs and decends a 1000 metre pass and it's run in the middle of the night in one of the remotest parts of the country, traverses 1 state, 1 province and 1 territory. F$&^$@# awesome. ( I would use the work epic here but i have some sort of aversion to this term).

I ended up on a team called Miller Thomson: a law firm team out of vancouver. The team was great. Bunch of people out for fun and a good run. Some guy named "Murray" from the firm's whitehorse office got the thing rolling, paid the $600 race entry, and rented a 15 passenger van for the weekend. Then "Murray" went to south africa. Thanks "Murray"! Turns out only one vancouverite from the firm attended.

So the ten of us partied our way down to skagway on friday night for our start time at 9pm. Then partied out way back to whitehorse: riding the bus for 15 hours to the finish just before noon. When i say partied, i mean a few people had some guiness and some people tried to sleep. at about 7am, the van got jumping again when a few people cracked the irish breakfast and turned the music up. we started handing out orange slices to all the runners.

the pain:

a total of 134 teams competed in this fun event. Legs ranged from 10km (straight up a freakin mountain) to 26 km (straight up a freakin mountain with a little down hill at the end) I ended up with the 26 km leg #6. We had some incredibly strong runners as well as some newbies and we manged a very respectable 17th place overall in a time of 14:56:xx. The insane winning team from alaska completed in an unacceptable 11 hours and 20something minutes - a full hour ahead of the 2nd place team.

I may be trying to recruit you for a crazy running team in september next year. So start training and get ready to pack up your running shoes and your guiness.

...it's like sunshine...and rain.