All through the night

Update from the road! We've been out of email contact most of the night but can now report proudly that Team Rosie is significantly ahead of the game! We're on track to beat our projected paces by a cumulative hour or more. Roger is pulling energy out of somewhere; Paul is proving Matt's 8:30 bet last week to have been a good one; Sally and Amy are shining; Erica, Heather, and Ulli from Van 2 are all happy with performance, and Merle is rocking her very first road race of any length--what an initiation. Kathy has pulled out 11 miles while suffering from a stomach flu and all that involves (!). Rival teams have been trying to get Ali to defect using very lucrative contract offers. (So far she intends to finish the season with her current club.) And the problem with being Matt and Sue, of course, is no one gets particularly surprised or worked up about their usual stellar performance. And all of us are doing this on no more than 2 hours' sleep if we've been lucky, and no sleep at all if we've been the norm.

We met with our first major misfire when Van 2 was a good 15 minutes late meeting Van 1 at VTA 18. Fortunately Runner 7, Ali, had taken her own car instead of riding the Green Line, so was there to pick up her leg just as scheduled. Otherwise, judging from the growls coming from the Orange Line, there would have been significant team-induced injuries. The rain held off until around 1am, and even then there's so many other discomforts to think about that it's barely registered.