Twenty-four Feet of Foolishness
The Relay
199 mile relay run
Calistoga-Santa Cruz, California
October 15-16, 2005

I no longer pull all-nighters. I only did one real one in college, none in grad school, and one when I worked at NOVA. I like my sleep too much to get involved in any job that requires me to stay up for twenty-four hours at a pop, even for overtime. But for some reason I keep ending up in a van at 2:30 in the morning with five sweaty guys and a bag full of Fig Newtons and Tostitos. No, it's not what you think, and it's not like it happens every week or anything. But three out of the last four Octobers, on the weekend of the full moon, things have gone a little haywire. It's the Relay, 199 miles of party, insanity, and sleep deprivation with a healthy dose of running thrown in.

The way it works is a little complicated. Each team has twelve members, split up into two vans. Each of the twelve members runs three legs of the relay, averaging around 5-6 miles per leg. At the start, the first runner in the team, who belongs to Van 1, jogs off through downtown Calistoga, and Van 1 heads off to the first exchange point. At the exchange, the first runner hands the sacred baton (a coiled plastic wristband with a tag on it) to the second runner, and so on through the sixth leg. At the sixth exchange point, both Van 2 (which has been off eating a hearty breakfast, sightseeing in the wine country, and generally loafing about) and Van 1 meet up at the van exchange point, and the sixth runner from Van 1 hands off to the first runner from Van 2. Now Van 1 is the "resting van" and is free to go off and eat a hearty lunch, see the sights of the wine country, and generally loaf about, as long as they get to the next van exchange point, the one after the twelfth leg. Got it? This continues all day Saturday, through Saturday night, and all day Sunday until finally the teams reunite at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk for a group trot across the sand to the finish line.

Teams take pride in coming up with weird names and decorating their vans, too. I run for a team named "Just Watering Your Flowers, Ma'am," which has been doing the Relay since its inception in 1992, and has been permanently awarded the race number 3 in recognition of its long service to the race. So we have hand-drawn posters illustrating the team name in cartoonish and un-graphic detail.

The Relay (once known as the Providian Relay, then the Saturn Relay, then just the Relay) is run by Organs R Us, a ghoulish name for a very nice organization ("organ"-ization, huh? Funny? No. OK) that raises money and awareness for organ donation. Team 1 is always Organs R Us, Team 2 is Team Dean, about which more later, and Team 3 is Just Watering Your Flowers, Ma'am. So we're pretty special, clearly. One of the main things that makes us special is our captain, Gordon Gillmouth, who looks only a little bit like the mild-mannered accountant he is in his other live but much more like the mad scientist of relays. His eyes glitter with a manic gleam behind thick classes, and his greying hair curls in ringlets that bear a disturbing resemblance to Shirley Temple's.

Gordon is a bit of an organizational genius, which is handy for an event this complicated. He makes hotel and restaurant reservations, collects entry fees, arranges the rendezvous, sets up room assignments, rents the vans, figures out who will run which legs of the relay based on their speed, strength, climbing ability, and history of running those legs in the past, and goes shopping for water, Gatorade, Fig Newtons, beef jerkey and Dr. Don's Liniment, which we believe is actually only intended for veterinary use. That's what the smell indicates, anyhow. Gordon puts together race packets with maps, phone numbers, and directions to key meeting points like the team dinner at the end of the Relay. He also researches esoteric wineries that we must visit before or during the Relay itself. This year it was some place called Milat? I think, I wasn't crazy about anything but the cabernet there, but I only get out wine-tasting once in a blue moon and don't know much about it when I do.

But I get ahead of myself. Gordon's organizational genius deserted him slightly when he determined that I should take BART out to Walnut Creek on Friday afternoon so the vans could pick me up and head up 680, over the Benicia bridge, and thence across to Napa. The traffic on 680 was nightmarish, and I couldn't help thinking that picking me up in Berkeley and going through Marin wouldn't have been worse...but I shouldn't pick nits, since I'm not the one who's willing to make all the zillion logistical arrangments that Gordon makes. Anyhow, we eventually made it into the Napa valley and piled into the tasting room at Milat.

The whole team wasn't together yet; some would trickle in that evening, the next morning, or even out on the course. But so far we had Gordon, myself, Dave O'Neill, a perpetually cheerful guy with a mop of sandy hair and a constant stream of irreverent comments. Dave is also a fast runner who routinely qualifies for the Boston Marathon and had just run the Chicago Marathon on a training regimen of one four-mile run per week. He still finished it in under four hours. Dave's friend Ellyn joined us for the first time, and Bill Fu, who is lean and incredibly fast, especially for his age. There was Randy, an organized and pleasantly geeky ultramarathoner, and Ray from Washington, who I hadn't met before but seemed like a friendly pirate with his beard and earrings. Sue Ann and Eileen made up the rest of the female contingent, the largest I'd ever seen in the team. Gordon claimed this would be a "civilizing influence," but I wasn't sure about that. Relay culture isn't known for its genteel nature. I knew Eileen and her wicked sense of humor from previous Relays, and Ellyn and Sue Ann both seemed like extremely congenial teammates. Sue Ann announced the she and I would be rooming together at our Santa Rosa hotel that night. I warned her that I should stop at a drugstore and buy her some earplugs because I have been told on more than one occasion that I, ahem, snore. "You snore??!!!" Sue Ann exclaimed with what seemd to me to be a strange degree of enthusiasm and excitement. "Me too!! That's great!!"

"I sleep like a log," I informed her, "so you won't bother me at all."

"Me too!" She exclaimed. We were already bonded.

Traffic meant that we only had time for Milat before our dinner appointment, a pre-race meal for the race organizers and any teams who sign up for it at the Calistoga Inn. We were out in the back, not the nice patio area with lights and heaters and trellises, but the way back, the sawdust covered picnic area. It was dark and pretty cold, but the food was tasty and Chuck showed up with his girlfriend Paige and several bottles of the wine he makes in his garage, pretty darn good wine too. Chuck and Paige like spelunking.

There was near mutiny in our van when we realized we had to drive over the mountains on a gnarly-ass back road to our motel Santa Rosa, especially when we knew that the race start was only a half-mile from where we were eating. But the venerable, strangely funky Nance's Hot Springs Motel, with its shag carpet remnants and "Honeymooners" style kitchenettes, had been bought out by the resort next door and the room rates were now $225 a night. So we drove over to the Sandman, getting only slighly lost on the way. We browbeat poor Gordon into making our team meeting 6:45 the next morning instead of 6:30, and we made our way to our rooms. I was not aware of Sue Ann emitting any snores.

It was dark and drizzly when we ventured out to the motel lobby for our ritual set of instructions. Gordon had all the exchange times projected down to the minute, based on the per-mile running paces we had all given him when we signed on, so we knew when we had to be at the main van exchanges, but we went over it all in detail. A quick banana at the breakfast room, and we were loading up the vans for real. I was in Van 1, and I was running the second leg, so I couldn't eat too much or relax too much. The drizzle abated as we drove up over the mountains again, getting slightly lost in different places, and the foggy autumn landscape was gorgeous. I was looking forward to running in cool cloudy conditions through California's most famous wine country.

We milled about for an hour or so in the wet field where the Relay starts, cheering on groups of runners as they took off in their staggered starts (the slower teams start early, the fast teams start late so that we all end up in Santa Cruz at around the same time). Team Smack Me Sally got my biggest laugh. At 9 a.m. we got our team picture taken under the big start banner and cheered Ellyn as she jogged off through downtown Calistoga. Van 2 headed off for its hearty breakfast and we jumped into Van 1 to meet Ellyn at the Three Palms Winery parking lot. The sun was coming out and I wasn't too chilled when I doffed my sweat pants and windbreaker. I strapped on my heart rate monitor, downed a gel, did a few warmup exercises over by the barn and went out to the road to see if I could see Ellyn coming. Nope. So I did a few stretches and drank some Cytomax. Runners were coming in to the welcoming shrieks of their teammates, handing off their wristbands, and stumbling off to the side of the road, panting. Ellyn appeared pretty much on schedule, and I cheered her loudly into the exchange zone.

The first thing I noticed as I started to rumble down the Silverado Highway (isn't that a great name?) was that the sun was fully out and it was getting warm. I had forgotten to put on sunscreen in the early morning rain and had also eschewed my visor, and I felt like my face was developing basal cell patches all over. Or maybeI was just warm from exertion. I was trying to go along at a measured pace, determined to save my legs enough to get through the three legs over 22 hours or so. Still, you get warm when you run, and I burn about twice as many calories per hour as the normal (read "skinny") runner so I get warm pretty quick. I was also feeling a weird knot in my left calf, a remnant from some track work earlier in the week. Michelle and I had been doing drills in the dark, practicing gettingour stride rates up around 90 per minute, and I had felt something tweak very mildly on the last 200. I hadn't worried too much about it, but now it was a little sore.

It was weird running on the right shoulder of this rather radically cambered road, too. I usually run on the left so I can see oncoming traffic, but race rules mandated the right shoulder, so that's where I ran. It was slanted so hard to the right that I felt crooked, and my left foot felt a little numb on top. I loosened my elastic shoelaces and kept going. The van pulled over to check on me and I requested my visor, which helped a lot with the sun. The minor annoyances gradually faded, but the beauty of the early fall in the Napa Valleyjust got more intense. The leaves on the vines were starting to change color, wraiths of cloud spun through the hilltops, and the air smelled of long-dry grass getting its first rain of the season and of bay laurels. It didn't suck at all, except for those bits where I was going uphill, and there weren't many of those. Going up one hill, I smelled spearmint very strongly, which was very weird because I was all alone. No one within a quarter mile of me. As I came down the hill on the other side, I saw a Relay van on the shoulder with "Spearmint Rhinos" painted on it. I don't know about the spearmint or the rhinos, but it explained the smell. Sort of

I wouldn't say the 4.7 miles flew by exactly, but I felt pretty good at the sweeping left turn that offers the first view of the next exchange point. I was working hard, but not crazy hard, no end-of-race chest-burning leg-screaming stuff. I picked it up a little bit to hand off to Chuck, and did my own stumbling to the side of the road thing. I fixed some Endurox, grabbed my towel out of my bag so I wouldn't sweat on the seat, and managed a few quick stretches. Then we wer e off to the next handoff, passing Chuck about a mile down the road. He looked pretty comfortable and waved us on to the exchange point.

The rest of the morning proceeded in similar fashion. One runner running, the rest of us driving slowly, parking with other vans in the designated lots, laughing at the other vans ("Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Cruz"), eating cookies and bananas, drinking Gatorade, making stupid jokes, calculating our paces and rendezvous times. Most of us had some minor physical woes: Dave's feet were blistered from last weekend's marathon, Chuck was constantly icing his balky Achilles tendons, Randy had had cartilage problems in his knees and was on a heavy dose of glucosamine. I was concerned about my calf. Ellyn seemed unscathed, and Bill was as indestructible as beef jerky.

We wer e right on schedule for our meeting with Van 2 at the Baptist church in Napa. The van exchange points are amazing affairs, with dozens of vans coming and going, runners and their clothing strewn about the parking lots, food and showers, depending on the facility, and of course runners waiting for their leg to begin.You have to pass on the official race watch and clipboard to the next van, so they can record the start and end times of each of their runners, and then you're free to eat, rest, and entertain yourself until the next van exchange. Bill, our last runner, got a little lost and came into the exchange point on the main highway instead of on the parallel bike path, but other than that the handoff was without incident.

Bistro Don Giovanni was just a few minutes back up Highway29. It's a little foofy for a bunch of sweaty runners, even if we had mostly changed into clean shorts and t-shirts along the way, but they led us to a patio table with only a slight grimace and started bringing us plates of light but chewy bread with rosemary in it. We ate a lot of that. Then we had a variety of pasta dishes and passed around some yummy desserts. Dave's high-falutin' butterscotch pudding was the biggest hit. We also tried a house made fruit grappa which tasted like pear and apricot, not like lighter fluid the way a lot of grappas do.

We stocked up on snacks and essentials at Target and started to make our way across Napa and Sonoma counties into west Marin. Gas and ice in Petaluma, and gorgeous scenery as the sun went down over the golden hills. It had been in the upper sixties most of the day, maybe even warmer, but after sunset the temperature dropped quickly. When I stepped out of the van at the Marin Cheese Company I started shivering uncontrollably. The ice I'd had on my calf may have chilled me too. I decided to risk the barbeque chicken dinner, since I wouldn't be running until about 11 p.m. and there wasn't much else in the way of dinner options in this rural area. The dinner was really bad - dried out chicken breast, watery pasta with bland tomato sauce, lame salad, stale roll - but at least it kept me from eating too much. I got more gratification from hanging out by the giant bbq pits, soaking up warmth. On myway back from the portajohn, I saw our Van 2 pull into the giant lot, and I went to meet them, but they disappeared into the maze of vans and darkness. With about 20 minutes to go till Sue Ann's arrival, we started to get Ellyn ready for her nighttime leg. Reflective vest, flashlight, blinky light for her back.

It's hard to see who's arriving in the dark, so the race volunteers go up the road a ways and shout out the number of anyone they see. But it's still a chaotic scene, so any wristband pass in the dark is worth a cheer. Sue Ann came in and Ellyn headed out, and we were right behind her, weaving our way out past a slew of vans, some sporting strings of twinkling lights, and in one case, a neon sculpture of a runner. Very impressive. But soon the lights faded, and we were out in the deep darkness of West Marin, one of the more rural areas within 30 miles of San Francisco. We saw slow moving vans, reflective vests, and blinky lights, and not a whole lot else. Ellyn's leg went off without incident, and Randy, who was switching second legs with me, took off next. Chuck roused himself from his stupor, brushed off a pile of tortilla chip crumbs, and got ready to switch off at the nice little church in San Geronimo where they always have nice clean bathrooms, hot chocolate and soup.

My second leg was picking up from Chuck at a shopping center on the outskirts of Fairfax, still pretty deep in Marin County, but definitely a town and not a cow pasture. I had run this leg before and I knew what to expect, more or less. I kind of dislike it because you're running along a major road, in the dark, on sidewalks that are uneven, jutting up at all kinds of angles thanks to some overgrown tree roots and poor maintenance. Sometimes there's no sidewalk. Sometimes there are lights and sometimes not. I'd much rather run by the light of the full moon out on the shoulder of a quiet road, let my eyes get adjusted to the darkness and trot along. But you take what Gordon dishes out when you're on Team JWYFM.

About a half-mile into my run I noticed that my left foot seemed to be falling asleep. I banged it on the asphalt a bit and kept going, but it kept getting worse. By about mile 2 I could barely feel the foot at all and I was freaking out. I felt like I was going to step funny and roll over and break my ankle. I loosened my laces. I shook my foot. I stamped. Finally I decided that it was something to do with running on the right side of the road, and I got back up on the sidewalk. With some determined shaking and stamping, I got some feeling back into the offending appendage, and I was able to concentrate on where the heck I was. I went roughly west through Fairfax and San Anselmo, and then I sort of cut south through the foofy little town of Larkspur, and into the other foofy, but slightly larger town of Corte Madera. The cutesy downtowns were lined with restaurants and bars, whose patrons gave me the occasional curious glance. Runners passed me with regularity. A black coupe whooshed by, and its inhabitants leaned out the window and yelled "Bitch!" as loud as they could, which was pretty loud. I gave them a splended unidigit salute. Then I got scared when I saw a black coupe parked a little further up the road, but it turned out to be a yuppie couple.

I wasn't really enjoying this run that much until the last mile and a half, when my foot seemed to regain normal circulatiion and the course started to head a little bit downhill. My other foot was starting to feel like there was something in my sock, but I didn't worry about it as I "sprinted" to the handoff and gave the wristband to Dave. Dave had the wilderness run along a trail, so we couldn't do much to support him. We went over to Sausalito and waited to send Bill off over the Golden Gate Bridge, always a big highlight. I was driving by this time and I was tired, so I really just remember really, really, wanting Bill to hurry up so we could go back up to the team motel in Mill Valley and get a couple hours of sleep.

It seemed wrong to be driving back north again, and it was almost impossible to actually get to the motel, even though it was clearly visible from the freeway. Once I caught a shower and a quick nap, though, I was pretty chipper, and even volunteered to drive the other hardest leg, the 5:30 a.m. stint down to Canada College. Once we got there and got parked, our whole van sacked out again for a half-hour until the sun came up. Then we headed over to the road to wait for Sue Ann. Dave kept thinking she was coming, but his powers of discernment were a little off at that time of day and he actually identified a 6-foot 5-inch guy wearing an Afro wig as Sue Ann at one point. She did show up eventually though, and we were on the road again, chasing Ellyn down the road.

My last leg was up next, starting at the Dutch Goose in Menlo Park and cruising along Alameda de las Pulgas to Junipero Serra to Foothill Expressway. We were in my home territory now, on roads that I ride my bike on all summer, so I didn't have any navigational issues. I even got a nice flush toilet stop in at the Starbucks across the street. The line was extremely long, but we had some time. I got my running shoes on for the last time and waited for Ellyn to come in as the sun rose a little higher in the sky.

It wasn't long after I started that I realized the thing in my sock was actually a blister on the outside of my right foot, a blister that was growing bigger and more painful by the second. The blister, I think, was caused by the same phenomenon as the numbness in the other foot - the strain of being canted to the right for mile after mile.You'd be amazed at how steep an angle these roads have between the peak in the middle and the edge.

Anyhow, my foot was hurting, and it was hurting bad. On the other hand, the calf issues that plagued my first run had vanished, and my left foot was no longer numb. Now I just had a blister to deal with. And a certain fatigue, since I'd already run 10 miles the previous day. But mostly my foot just hurt a lot. I even resorted to sob-story self-manipulation to get through it. My mom had had a bone marrow biopsy on the Friday before the relay, and I made myself imagine how much pain she had to go through, having a six-inch needle stuck through her hip and into her pelvis. I told myself I just had a little blister and to suck it up. Eventually I started visualizing myself snorkeling off the Kona coast to take my mind of my foot and to make myself seem weightless. Then I imagined dolphins coming up under my elbows and carrying me along the road. I think I was a little tired.

I knew exactly where I had to run to - the Roche building on Foothill - and I was understandably delighted to see it. I was also incredibly annoyed to see that the actual end of the leg was 200 yards further than I anticipated, at the second Roche driveway instead of the first. I didn't have much left in the tank with which to pick up my pace, but I gave it a little extra oomph and handed off to Chuck. The walk back to the van was unbelievably long. Every step onto my right foot felt like a barefoot romp on molten lava, but I did have that good warm satisfied feeling that my Relay was done.

Our next handoff was at the parking lot of an Albertson's so I hit the pharmacy for foot care products, the hardware section for duct tape, and the grocery section for Wheat Thins. Thus supplied, I strapped up my foot with gauze pads and duct tape and stuffed myself full of crackers. Hey, after an all-night running and driving romp, the body craves what it craves. Our next leg took us up into the foothils of the Santa Cruz Mountains, where Dave was going to run a super-steep uphill leg on a road so narrow they wouldn't let the vans follow. I was still behind the wheel at this point, and it was a close shave to get the van around through Saratoga, up Highway 9 and into Camp Swig's chaotic parking lot in time for the handoff to Bill, who was as cheerful and unworn as if he had spent the whole night on a Sleep Number bed.

Once we picked up Bill at the top of Saratoga Gap, our whole team was done and our only duties were to find food and make it to the rendezvous and finish at Santa Cruz. We scooted back down through Saratoga and over to my hometown of Los Gatos for an enormous and tasty brunch at the Los Gatos Brewing Company. I notice as I get older that I can't drink beer in the morning the way I used to. It makes my thighs burn, as though I'd just climbed six flights of stairs. Weird, but there it is. But I had a half-pint of lager and a yummy dish with eggs and potatoes, and life was seeming pretty good. It was an unseasonably hot October day, and Los Gatos's foofy little downtown was packed with Relay teams looking for food. Fortunately Los Gatos is able to accommodate them, being full of restaurants serving everything from home fries to sushi to foie gras.

Bill and Randy left us at this point, so the four of us who were left cruised on over the hill to Santa Cruz and spent a couple hours napping and reading on the bluffs overlooking the beach at Natural Bridges State Park. Well, Dave and Ellyn and I were out on the bluffs; Chuck fell asleep in the van with ice on his Achilleses. Finally it was time for the grand finale over by the Boardwalk, a fine old-style beachfront amusement park with a wooden rollercoaster built in 1929 (and impeccably maintained to this day). My mom and dad came over from Los Gatos to meet us, and Tim drove over too to join the crowds. There weren't many crowds cheering the end of the relay, just the teams themselves and a few bystanders, but the beach and boardwalk were packed with tourists and sun worshippers. It seemed like it took a long time for Sue Ann to appear on the Beach Street sidewalk, but I ran that last leg two years ago, and I know how tiring that final run can be. Finally she showed up, looking pretty shot, and we all jogged across the line together. Gordon picked up our team medals and presented them to us with a little speech for everyone, and photos were taken all around.

The final event of the weekend was the team dinner at 99 Bottles of Beer, a brewpub downtown with marginal food but plenty o' beer. I find I can't drink that much beer in the evening these days either, but I got pretty hyped up on Coca Cola. We gave out the Moel Award to the person who provided the greatest service to the team, and the Gary Burt Award to the person who rendered the greatest disservice to the team, named after a long-ago runner who didn't show up on race morning, leaving his teammates to run extra legs. We made plans for the team party in February, and after much eating and drinking, we said our goodnights.

The Relay is moving to April next year, seeing as Nike keeps scheduling its Womens' Marathon in San Francisco at a time that makes it hard for people to do both. So there'll be another 36 legs, 1 sleepless night, 2 vans, 12 runners, and 4 hand-drawn posters in the springtime. Stay tuned.