My Life, As Told Between (Baby Cakes') Naps

Back from a very short trip to Vegas for T’s race, the Baker to Vegas Relay.  It’s a 120-mile relay race for law enforcement personnel.  There were hundreds of teams (each with 20 runners) representing all aspects of law enforcement – police officers, sheriffs, FBI agents, correctional officers, district attorneys, etc.  Most of them were from California, but we saw some teams from Canada and one from Hamburg, Germany.

The race began at 9am on Saturday morning for the slowest team (the teams started based on their projected finish time) and ended at 9am for everyone on Sunday.  T’s team started at 5pm on Saturday evening but T’s portion of the race (5.3 miles with a 2% incline) didn’t start until 10pm Saturday night, so we headed out at 7:30 for a small town 60 miles west of Las Vegas, where T’s leg started.

It was  unlike any race I’d ever participated in or seen, not only because it was extremely long, and a relay, but because the roads weren’t closed for the race.  Instead, runners run along the shoulder of the road with “follow vehicles” behind them to protect them from traffic and to provide light (as parts of the race take place in desolate areas in the middle of the night).  It was really neat to see runners and their follow vehicles along the road as we drove past.  The logistics of getting that many people out there and coordinating that many vehicles for that long a race is mind-boggling.  It was amazing how well they pulled it off.

We, on the other hand, did not do such a great job pulling off our trip.  We made the trip too short (given the timing of T’s leg of the race, we weren’t able to do much in Vegas), spent too much on airfare (we both should have taken a day off and driven) and then waited too long to rent a car (they are so expensive to rent in Vegas!).  Plus, T was sick leading up to the race.  All in all, we weren’t particularly looking forward to the trip or the race, but we had a great time when we got there!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Trips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.