DAVENPORT, Calif. — I have so much to catch you up on, including my fear of heights tested on a famous bridge and our van allegedly making contact with another van and phone numbers and license plates being exchanged. We are, after all, good citizens who do not leave the scene of an alleged accident. And, the other van’s occupants were right there.

The relay is finished now. I’ve been home a couple days. I wanted to give constant updates throughout, but there were just too many areas without wireless card reception, and too many moments when typing blogs in the back of a swaying conversion van did not seem like the thing to do, medically speaking. And here’s the other thing: Are you really experiencing an event if you’re blogging while you’re doing it? I’m still figuring this blogging thing out, for the most part, but it’s like that relative you have that wants to stop every three minutes to gather everyone up and take a picture. And then you get home from the vacation and a friend says, “What did you do on your trip?” and all you can remember is taking lots of pictures.

Point is, a lot of what makes The Relay so memorable happens when you aren’t even running. It’s stopping the van on the side of the road to cheer a teammate up a 400-foot climb or through a nasty downpour. It’s getting out of the van in the middle of the night to give your runner Gatorade and a pat on the sweaty back. It’s catching a luke-cold shower and three hours of sleep on a gym floor at Cañada College in San Francisco, literally on the hardwood, because the entire gym is coated with runners and all the Ritz-thin mats are taken. It just didn’t seem right to be on the computer the entire time. Oh, and the inevitable vomitting from car sickness.

It sounds worse than it is. Or maybe it just doesn’t seem that bad because I’ve re-discovered deodorant and my thighs stopped burning. It’s definitely one of those events that shines best when reflected on, and looking back I think we did well. And by that I mean, no on got attacked by a mountain lion. Here’s the final review: Our team name* was “The Fast, The Slow, And The Pretty,” and we left Calistoga, Calif., at 9 a.m. Saturday and arrived at the finish, a strawberry farm outside of Davenport, Calif., at 5:50 p.m. Sunday. The race has ended in Santa Cruz, Calif., the last few years, but apparently there was some sort of disagreement and Santa Cruz backed out this year. That’s 200 miles in a finish time of 32 hours, 50 minutes, 11 seconds, good for 200th place out of 228 teams. Although to be fair, one of the 28 groups we beat was “Team Dean,” which is the famous endurance runner Dean Karnazes running the whole thing by himself. “Google 1″ was the overall winning team for the third consecutive year, and as it turns out, its runner passed our team on one of my legs. (This 6-foot-4 Google guy went flying by me, and as I had suspected, he was in a hovercraft.) Here are the unofficial results, should you get really, really bored.

*Favorite team names from this year: “Jeans Were a Bad Choice,” “Blazing Turtles,” “Tramps Like Us” (because all references to Springsteen songs are cool), “We Run This Town,” “We Got The Runs!,” and “Donor Party,” which I’m assuming is a play-on-words reference to organ donation, and also the ill-fated Donner Party of the mid 1800s, some of which resorted to cannibalism. Luckily, The Relay did not come near that level of desperation.

It’s hard for me to complain about the rain too much, simply because any runner would take rain over 85 degrees. That said, the rain got old. It paused occasionally, but only to re-load. In the course of running three legs during a 32-hour period, every runner got rained on, meaning our van was a caldron of soaked, nasty running clothes. You can imagine that smelled like heaven. Assuming heaven smelled was the inside of John Candy’s gym bag.

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I realize this is somewhat like the sport of cricket, or being married to Liza Minnelli, it’s hard to imagine The Relay without actually participating. The basics, though, are that each team has two vans with six runners each and a driver. Van 1 goes for six legs while Van 2 relaxes, sips margaritas and gets foot massages, or whatever you imagine them to be doing while you’re suffering in the rain. (They’re actually trying to figure out how to sleep in a crowded smelly van.) The vans trade off at pre-determined locations, my favorite being the first exchange at the Marin Cheese Factory in rural Marin County, an area that is remarkably close to the Bay Area for having no cell service of any kind. It’s a beautiful little place amongst green hills and known for its brie. They make world champion brie. I’ve seen the trophies and plaques. They do not, however, have the world’s most accessible bathrooms, as evidenced by the Space Mountain-looking line at the women’s bathroom. The men’s line was quite short, of course, which always leads to that uncomfortable glare from the women’s line that says, “We give birth. We go through menopause. We suffer cramps and aches and stretch marks. We age faster. We put up with your whining and your tardiness and your general disregard for our feelings. We work harder for less money. We sacrifice our bodies to have children and wear high heels. We have to shave and twease and pluck, and you sit on the couch scratching yourselves. And what do we get in return?! We get to stand outside in a damn bathroom line for an hour at a freaking cheese factory!? Yeah, that seems fair.”

At least that’s how I imagine it. OK, back to the running. Here’s a mini-recap of my three legs …

Leg #6,  4.5 miles, Easy – They put one of four labels on each leg: “easy,” “moderate,” “hard” and “very hard.”  One of the great things about The Relay is you can have runners of all levels, since each set of legs is ranked 1 though 12 in difficulty. So you put your fastest runners on the longest legs, your good climber up the mountains, etc. My first leg (easy) happened around noon Saturday and it was short and flat, on the sidewalks in a town, not that I’d know which town. They all kind of blend together. I jogged alongside a guy from Menlo Park for a while, chatting, running at an appropriate speed and for whatever reason decided I should leave him and try to run faster. I really have trouble running comfortably. Maybe it’s that I’ve decided running should be painful, so I always run at a pace that makes me hate it. This went OK until the end of Leg 6 when my legs suddenly gained 20 pounds each and then I came upon an orange traffic cone. I knew there was a right turn coming up, but was this it? Why was there one single cone on a street corner? I stopped, turned around, put my hands out in some desperate plea to the gods of wayward runners. The gods scoffed. Luckily, another runner about a block back pointed straight ahead and so I kept going. The lesson here, I think, is always trust strangers. Never believe traffic signs.

It was toward the end of this leg, after the actual right turn, that I went to duck under a tree branch and misjudged its height or the size of my head. BONK! It didn’t really hurt that much, but the tree was covered in pollen and when my head smacked it, it all lept directly to my sweat-soaked bandana. So I must have looked ridiculous coming into the exchange point, my head doing a decent impression of an ice cream cone dipped in sprinkles. It’s funny watching the transformation as The Relay goes on, whereas you start the race actually caring about what your hair might look like, or making a decent impression on the opposite sex in your van, or the other van, or on other teams along the way, and then within six or eight hours you could suddenly go to prom in sweatpants and curlers without blinking. A good comparison is probably “Survivor,” when everyone shows up looking nice and excited about making their TV debuts, and a day later they’re covered in mud and an eyelash from killing a crocodile with a knife and eating it raw.  Maybe that’s an exaggeration. You’ll notice below one of our team members shaving her legs on the side of the street, and a guy from another team sleeping on top of a van in a parking lot. It doesn’t take long to stop worrying about what people think.

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The first van exchange point is a church where they have hot meals and showers, and where two years ago I noted that the water comes in only two temperatures, and those temperatures are roughly 70 degrees apart. This year all the showers were out of order, so I guess they showed me. We “showered” with Wet Naps in the van, or maybe they were baby wipes, and we went to lunch. This is the point where you might say the van started to smell differently. We spent the next few hour lounging at the cheese factory, waiting in awkward bathroom lines, noting the rich history of the locally-made brie. Do you ever wonder if enough people are eating the weird cheeses to really make it a lucrative business venture? I understand the swiss people are doing well, the chedder folks are thriving, but are enough of us enjoying the fancy cheeses to make them worth making? And we live in one of the rich nations, so if Americans aren’t eating it, the people of Bangladesh probably aren’t picking up the slack. Then again, I don’t know anyone who drives a Lamborghini, but the company still makes money. Or maybe it doesn’t. Who knows. Lamborghini is probably owned by Pepsi and the cars are made by Korean workers in a Ford factory near Mexico City. What was I talking about again? Let’s move on.

Leg #18,  5.8 miles, Hard – This was the one I was looking for to. By this time we’d made our way through the northern suburbs. It was late Saturday night, darker than “Kill Bill” outside, I got the handoff*in neighborhood near the Bay, where the volunteer monitoring the handoff area was intense. Very intense. He told everyone no cheering, no clapping. We were in front of some shops and a parking lot, so I’m not really sure what he was worried about, but you’ve got to respect a man who takes his volunteer job seriously. Also, he was freaking huge.

*The “baton” is a rubber bracelet that is passed between runners. It’s always entertaining to watch the teams who’ve lost their bracelet and have to high-five or chest bump or forearm bash or whatever it is they decided to substitute for a handoff. And there’s always that great look when one van hands off to the other and the recipient gives that “Seriously, you guys lost the bracelet?” look. Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention how the cheese factory exchange point became a love-fest. There were kisses between runners, butt slaps, hugs, romantic embraces. And the funny part was, it was obvious some of the handoffs were between husbands and wives, which means they had chosen to participate in The Relay together, but in separate vans. That’s how you make a marriage work, designed distance.

I was excited, of course, because this is the leg that crosses the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d already run across it — the San Francisco Marathon crosses it twice — but that was a different. For the marathon, you’re actually running in a blocked off lane of traffic and can’t see nearly as well as on you can on the pedestrian path. I arrived at the bridge around 1:45 a.m., and there was an attendant opening the electronic gate for each runner. (The Google guy nearly knocked me down on his way past just before the bridge.) Normally, you can only pedestrian it across the bridge during daylight hours, which made the experience even cooler. The only thing that stinks about Leg #18 is the two miles leading up to the bridge are a 45o-foot climb, a fact I had ignored up until the time I was dying and cursing San Francisco and hills and everything else. I finally arrived, though, after about 17 Gatorade stops from the van, in the fog and the haze and the drizzle. One of the runners in the other van had taken a wrong turn and run about two miles in the wrong direction, so we were behind our expected time. It didn’t matter, this was the Golden Gate Bridge and I, one on one.

The Golden Gate Bridge is tall, unimaginably tall, taller than the Washington Monument. It’s long, ridiculously long, 1.7 miles across. I’ve read that it’s 220 feet from where I was running to the water below and I believe it. I honestly couldn’t see much because it was so foggy, but I believe every crazy stat about that bridge. You can feel how massive it is. I’ll admit that I’m scared of everything, but it was frightening. I’m so glad that it was too foggy to see down to the water. It was so foggy, I actually thought I had crossed it when I reached the midway point. It just kept going and going and I was running faster and faster, scared of the dark and heights and death and spiders and homicidal maniacs and whatever else might be out there. I passed five people on the bridge, passed a guy in a wedding veil, which seemed odd. I didn’t have time to stop and ask. You think of bridges as flat, but it’s a climb to the middle of that thing, a pretty decent downhill on the other side. I was probably three-fourths of the way across when apparently a barge passed underneath me and blew the loudest horn I’ve ever heard. If I’d have been Marilyn Monroe, my dress would have gone over my head. I almost fell down. My heart-rate instantly went from 145 to 614 and then leveled off at 4o0. It was horrifying. For the next 100 feet I was Usain Bolt. And keep in mind that I couldn’t see anything. Not the skyline, not the shore, not the water, not much of the bridge besides whatever mass of steel was closest to me. It was an Alfred Hitchcock film and what you couldn’t see was more intense than if you’d been able to see it.

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At least 84 percent of The Relay is spent decorating the van. If it was a van decorating contest, we'd have at least been in the top 150.

Leg #30,  3.1 miles, Very hard — This is payback for getting to run across the bridge. Leg 30 is evil. Pure evil. It’s a 1,200 foot climb in three miles. I like to refer to it as the world’s worst 5k. A friend of mine calls it “The Suck,” and that about sums it up. I think I walked more than I ran. This was nearly noon on Sunday and the rain unleashed again. It was miserable, one of those moments when you’d trade what’s left of your 401k just to make it end. I haven’t done hill training since, well, pretty much ever, so it didn’t go well. Eventually, I got to the top and our van was done. We handed off so the second van could do the final six legs to the strawberry farm.

The farm was not nearly as cool as the beach in Santa Cruz, that’s for sure. The rain pretty much turned the farm into a mud ranch and at least two or three vans got stuck and had to be pulled out by a cute little tractor. When you run a strawberry farm, you can’t very well have enormous John Deere 4-wheel drive tractors. You need cute. I think I ate a few hundred calories worth of jelly samples before the other van and our runner finally got to the farm and as is customary, the entire team ran the last 100 yards together. We got some pictures taken. We wore these flower things on our heads which I still don’t entirely understand, but hey, when you’ve run 15 miles and haven’t really slept in 48 hours, you do pretty much whatever you’re told.

This could be the head contusion talking, but I’m ready to do it again next year. This time without the bridge. My heart can’t take it again.