one of the best worst ideas ever

242 kilometers (150 miles). 19 hours and 50 minutes. approximately 25 minutes of sleep. no dinner, no breakfast (substitute crackers, snickers bars, and innumerable liters of water). add this all together and you get dead2red, the team relay road race i ran this past weekend here in jordan from the dead sea to the red sea.


needless to say it was insane, but also insanely fun. with a team of ten friends, appropriately named team fun-and-run (though later upgraded to team mulan), we set off thursday afternoon for a crazy 20 hours of running.


the afternoon desert air was hot and dry, but luckily we only had about two hours until the sun went down. the running was accomplished in rotations of one or two km each, with the rest of the team riding along in the car and van. i think we violated every rule of healthy running i've ever learned, since with jumping in and out of cars immediately before/after running there was no option of warmup, cooldown, or stretching. miraculously though, two days later the soreness is on its way out with no serious repercussions. actually, that is not quite true, i did manage to slip down a gravel/sand pile on the side of the road right before the start of the race and scrape the entire back of my left leg. luckily the cuts weren't too deep and stopped bleeding in time to start the run (which was good since it would've taken ten bandaids to cover the length of the scrape haha). so i guess i do have a good war wound to show for it :) anyway, the running part was fun and a great personal and team challenge- we were very proud to meet our goal of finishing in under 20 hours! but as the larger percentage of the race was spent not-running, we had lots of good times in the vans to pass the hours: n*sync dance parties which our jordanian drivers enthusiastically joined in on, numerous games of hot-seat, innovative snack concoctions, cheering on our team and the three other ciee teams, watching the sun set and rise, looking at israel across the border, high-fiving the village children who came out to cheer us on, and lots of other fun team bonding.



the morning hours were the toughest, with all of us fighting sleepiness, aching muscles, and the desert sun. however, when we reached aqaba and caught a glimpse of the red sea, we found the energy for an intense last kick- spurred on by walid, our van driver (who considered his role to include being the coach), we rotated every half km or so with each person sprinting small sections. walid kept telling us the end was near, and kept being wrong, but eventually we spotted the finish line and all got out to cross it together. i have never been happier to see a finish line :)
after dropping our bags and grabbing our swimsuits we headed down to the beach for a wonderfully refreshing dip in the red sea. to our right was the city of eliat in israel, to our left the saudi border was also in sight, and across the water we could see egypt- quite the international setting. we napped on the beach for a while, ate some falafel sandwiches that miraculously appeared thanks to ahmad, then enjoyed a shower, clean clothes, and a huge buffet dinner put on by the race organizers. the next morning the sea was sparkling in the sun, its rocks gleaming red and its water eight shades of bright turquoise and blue.



we spent the morning soaking it all in before driving back to amman (with numerous jokes being made about whose turn it was to get out of the car and run haha). dead2red was an absolutely crazy but really fun experience- would i do it again? not the same route, i'm not that much of a sucker for punishment, but i would do something similar. the challenge was worth the reward and the fun :)