Ragnar 2023 at Los Coyotes Reservation. Arrived at dusk. The team paid extra for the glampground, which is glamorous camping. Very nice. You move into the already setup modular tents, with luxury portable bathrooms that you change in. No set-up and no take-down. The evenings were forecast for a 40 degree low. But the first night it went down to 29 degrees. The longest night of my life. In shivering pain I had to visit the bathrooms 3x, only because my bladder was hurting more than the rest of my body. Such was my first experience of glamping. But the stars were gorgeous.
There was little quiet in the nights. They had great music playing 24hrs. You could hear talking and laughing thru out the night. The energy was tremendous, esp. during the day. It was like a mini Woodstock as I imagine it, with a different intent. These people loved running, the pain didn’t matter. There were over 1,000 runners, hundreds of cars in an area of about 6 acres. Each runner ran three different courses which totalled 14+ miles, but with the elevation changes and rough terrain basically equaled a marathon run. On the last day many more ran an 18 mile run with a 3,500’ elevation change. The atmosphere was dry desert, hot in the day and cold at night.
The highlight of the event for me was my volunteer time. I got probably the best opportunity helping runners and car traffic to blend without incident. I felt such a sense of oneness and belonging. Everyone was so appreciative of my volunteering. The waking of the day at 6:30-9:30 was nature’s beauty at its best. One more thing off my bucket list.
A near miracle – we were expecting to get out in time to get to the finals soccer game, but we couldn’t. We were about 3 hours late. But the opposing team was a no-show so we won by forfeit. This moved us up a spot to 4th in the league out of 8 teams.
Hidden in Plain Sight 