Catie Sanchez's Staging Area

And I will probably run it again next year. The uphill is so gradual that you barely notice, but then on the downhill you just fly. And race production wise, Orca always knocks it out of the park.

The race overlaps with a lot of my favorite local routes – you get views from Juanita Beach, looking out to Seattle from the Cross Kirkland Corridor, and some pretty fall foliage along Forbes Creek drive. We had bad luck with weather when I ran it a couple years ago (rain and puddles!), but this year was perfect.

Doing a Ragnar (or any relay, really) has been on my bucket list for awhile, so I was really excited to run this! I also didn’t totally know what to expect. The experience is going to be highly dependent on your team, your teams pace, which van you’re in, which legs you run, and the time of day those legs end up happening. Most of my legs were in neighborhoods or downtowns, and either during the day or at dawn/dusk. For the night/highway runs, Ragnar puts out cones and also has mandatory requirements on safety gear… But it still made me nervous from a safety POV. Some of the legs had you crossing a highway, or running on a very tight shoulder in the same direction as traffic. Since it’s such a long distance, everyone is quite spread out — during my legs I probably cross paths with ~10 people each time, so it’s not the same feeling as running a normal road race. Ragnar offered a tracking system to help your track your runners, and while the “1 mile out” notifications were mostly accurate/helpful, there were still glitches so you couldn’t 100% rely on it. PNW scenery is beautiful, though, and, for being my first relay, I overall thought it was as well organized as one could expect for a race that spans such a large geographic area.

Evergreen calls this “intermediate” which means that all of my trail training runs were “beginner” 🥲because I definitely underestimated how much trail would be in this trail run! It was also suuuper muddy and rainy, you had to hop on logs and slippery rocks (all of which they advertise ahead of time, and I don’t know why but I didn’t listen 😂). All in all it was a lot of fun, very well organized race by the folks at Evergreen as always, but if you’re just dipping your toe into trail runs (like me!) then try to do a practice loop a few weeks out from the race so you know what to expect!

This was my first ultra and first trail run, so I don’t have a lot of reference points, but to me it felt pretty average. The location is very pretty but unfortunately we were completely enveloped in fog until about four hours into the race. The course is three laps — for the first two, there were plenty of volunteers helping to point you to the trail, but by the time I had got to my third lap, the volunteers were gone! I had to double back a few times, or wait for other runners, to make sure I was still on the path. The course marking was great in some spots, but not very good in others 🙁 after the race they had pizza, chocolate milk, Oreos, candy, and bananas. There was only one aid station (and then the starting line), so you could get water every ~5 miles or so. This worked for me, but I did see lots of people carrying their own water too. There was one very steep uphill and one very steep downhill. The downhill felt kind of dangerous – lots of tree roots. They had ropes you could use to guide yourself down, but for the first two laps, there were multiple people trying to use the ropes at once, and it was a bit chaotic.

Orca always has well organized races. This course is nice because you have all the (gradual) uphill upfront, and then can coast on the way back.