Salt Flats Half Marathon

The second annual Salt Flats Half Marathon was held on September 4th, 2010.  The scenery is absolutely spectacular and because the venue is completely flat, you can actually see the curvature of the earth!  Some might say "13 miles, out and back, completely flat...a little boring?"  NO WAY!  The experience is unlike any other race on earth!  Put it on your bucket list.  You won't be disappointed!

We even had one of our participants fly in for the event from Ogden, Utah and land his plane right on the salt.  Honestly, what race can boast that??

But probably the best part of the event for us is setting up the course.  We blast the music in our car, Josh sits on the back and puts out cones every 1/4 of a mile so that during the race, our participants won't wander off the race course onto the ungroomed salt.  When we get to the end of the course and our car is empty of any cones, we drive back to the starting line as fast as we can in our mini-van.  Okay, so we don't set any land speed records, but it still is fun!



And our shirt this year?

What could be better than that??



We Need A Truck!

Imagine staying up all night, packing a trailer full of water jugs, cones, tables, mile markers, etc, etc, so that you could leave the next morning for a half marathon on the Bonneville Salt Flats...

and this is what you see after you have driven out of your driveway at 7:00 in the morning (after staying up all night, mind you) with the sounds of "scraaaaaaaape" on the pavement:

It's not the best feeling.

To make matters worse, on the way home from the Salt Flats, my parent's had asked us to bring home a mattress for them (assuming we would put it in the trailer) but as you see from the first picture, there was no room for a mattress, so sadly, it went on top of the minivan...



Apple Dumpling Gang or desperate for a truck or both?  You decide!

Once Upon A Time...

...there was a married couple that really, really liked to run.  They would run races all over and call them vacations even though there was no laying around on a beach ever (what kind of vacation is that?), but they loved it.  Then three years ago, something happened.  The couple went to two different races, one in Utah and one in Nevada and as they were coming home through the vast and somewhat brown expanse known as I-80, they had an epiphany as they talked about all the things they liked and didn't like about the different races.  "What if we put on our own races?"  The brainstorming began on that day in a 1999 Toyota Camry with 250,000 miles and it hasn't stopped since (and neither have the ideas =)). 

So this blog is dedicated to enlightening all of our readers about the woes and foes of race directing. I know that most of you probably think that you wake up race morning and the t-shirts and port-a-potties magically appear out of nowhere.  But, alas, this is not the case, and you will find out that the scenes behind a Redline Race are quite comical.  For example, did you know that at the 2009 Jackson Hole Half Marathon, the night before the race, there was a huge windstorm and our port-a-potties blew over?  That was fun tipping them back over.


Or how these neatly folded race shirts came to be.

Or how this lone man can be so sleep deprived.

So stay tuned as the drama unfolds on the Redline Races Unplugged blog!

Happy Racing!