Red Rock Relay

Today Kortney mailed off a check to Cal Schoenrock for $184. This money will serve to register our team into the second annual Red Rock Relay. That's right, only Utah's newest epic running event. Now that the money is gone, there is no turning back, we are really gonna do this.

Cal was my coworker for nearly two years at the BYU Math Dept. She is our team captain and the reason that we are involved in this. She has been quite an inspiration to me. She is one of those stories of people who decide to set an impossible goal and eventually reach it. She just completed her first marathon in May after months of training for it. It was very interesting to hear her progress as the race date arrived and follow her training story on her blog. She lost something like 40 pounds in the process and developed a love for running along the way. Well, after the completion of her marathon, she started seeking out the next endurance event she could participate in. And here it is, The Red Rock Relay.



I first heard about the RRR from my manager here in St. Louis. He and his wife joined a team to run it as well and were using that as their motivation to get in shape this summer. I thought it would be cool to also find something to motivate us since getting into shape was something we both expressed interest in doing. Later, I saw Cal's status on facebook that she wanted to run this race and was looking to organize a team. When I inquired about joining up with her, there were only two slots left. It was fate.

The Red Rock Relay is a 24-hour stage race, run by teams of 12 in relay fashion, that cover 180 miles of amazing Southern Utah scenery. I feel somewhat guilty for having lived in Utah and never having taken advantage of the amazing Southern portion of the state and am grateful for this opportunity to begin redeeming myself. Anyway, the race is divided up into 36 legs and each runner will run three of them. The legs will be anywhere from three miles up to eight miles each and so some serious getting into shape is in order. We have until September 10th to get into race shape and that has motivated us to work out more than ever before.

In a twist of fate, Kortney's little brother Travis was on the team before we were. We were both surprised to learn this. It turns out that Tyler, Kortney's older brother who replaced me at the Math Department, had tipped Cal off to Travis, a TN track star, when she was originally looking for teammates. He signed on before us and that only solidified our decision to do this thing. Now Tyler is also on our team and so a third of the runners will be from the same family. We need to have two van drivers, as well as two vans, so if anyone out there wants to volunteer, please step forward. Also, if anyone is interested in volunteering at an aid station or anything, get in contact with us, they need about 400 volunteers to make this work.

Since deciding to do this we've been hitting the track of our local high school nearly every night. We are slowly improving and getting ready for our first official race. We started out running 4 and 6 laps respectively, and tonight, we both busted out 12! We now know we can at least run the shortest leg. Its all uphill from here.