True stories from The Relay

With a vanful of fellow crazies, we set out for “The Relay” race with both enthusiasm, and trepidation as is normally found before a marathon or climbing expedition. A mixture of nervousness and excitement produce stories of past experiences and all the funny, bad things that happened along the way. Some highlights of the “untold story”: – we were craving a good solid breakfast so badly on Sunday morning that we tried to find a Denny’s or IHOP along the way to the Santa Cruz portion of the race, but instead ran into ANOTHER bizarre race going on along the way. After we ran into the start, we asked the policeman how to get around it and get out of town, So after following his directions for awhile, we ran SMACK into the middle of the race and found ourselves stuck behind dozens of other cars that were trying to escape also! We had not choice but to sit it out and watch in the opposite lanes as a strange mix of young, old, very fat and some not so fat runners came by. This was NOT an elite race by any means. We saw people with dogs on leashes, kids in strollers and on their own leashes, and strolling by on their own until we finally saw the end of the race. It was like waiting for the caboose of some endless train that you are stuck waiting for at a railroad crossing – while in the hurry to be anywhere else but there! And at the end of the race line – bizarrely enough was a man on 10 foot high stilts, just making his way to whatever finish line awaited 5 miles or kilometers away. Meanwhile, needless to say, we never got our breakfast and had to hurry on to make it to meet Van 1 at the planned meeting place. (Note: on Wednesday of the following week, I made it to the local IHOP for a breakfast feast of sausage, bacon, eggs, potatoes and cream-cheese filled, blueberry and whipped cream topped french toast pastry.

After the race when we ran through the finish line together on the beach, and we found a restaurant on the boardwalk where we could get some severe calories and drinks after the grueling but fun last couple of days running part of the 199 miles. Our waitress was not the sharpest tool in the shed and after she fails to bring us food in a timely manner after the race, she offered to bring another round to everyone at our table on the house. Since one of our guys had ordered TWO beers in the first round (it was a long weekend after all!), she brought him two MORE beers and everyone else another margarita or soft-drink if they were drinking that. We howled – it was like doubling up in blackjack. Our poor waitress then proceeded to drip drinks on Michele, get my order wrong and just generally foul everything up so that the ending dinner took hours, but we doubled down anyway.

The van was in high spirits after the restaurant and the doubling down of drinks.So, one of our runners – who shall go nameless to protect the innocent – decided that mooning another white Relay van like ours on the 280 freeway might be a good idea. So she did …. It was hilarious except we could see the reaction in people in the van. It was a guy driving and a woman in the passenger seat closest to our van. They looked a bit – well horrified – not in the butt itself, but the fact that we might be a bunch of crazies who could do who knows what. They quickly sped up and must have been doing 80mph, anything to get out of our way! No pictures remain of the event, except one decidedly blurry picture of the alternate personality who pulled this off!!