I am not a great runner. I am not a fast runner. But, I think it is safe to now call me a dedicated runner. Because I spent all day Saturday--all day--in the 20- and 30-degree weather, running a relay race with four men I'd never met before.

Now, it wasn't originally supposed to be me and four strangers. It was supposed to be me, my husband, and these three guys he used to work with. But at the last minute Eric had to be out of town on business. And--strangely enough--I wasn't able to convince any friends to spend their Saturday running 10 miles in the freezing cold. Don't they know how to have a good time? So instead Eric's replacement was yet another guy I'd never met.

These men were all pretty nice though. They were all engineers. If I may generalize a bit, after having been married to an engineer for eight years, I can say that your standard engineer is a loveable, mechanically-inclined mega-nerd. They love machines, computers, comic books, sci-fi, and spreadsheets. Engineers are very big on spreadsheets. This is why I wasn't really that surprised when, the day before the race, the team captain e-mailed me a spreadsheet.

He had titled it "crude estimates," but it was anything but crude. He had taken our self-reported 5k running times, coupled that information with how long the various legs of the relay were and who was assigned to which leg, and calculated out--down to the second--exactly how long each leg should take each runner to complete. So that, just in case I was curious, I could look at my spreadsheet and see that I was due to start my first leg at exactly 9:20:50 a.m. and complete it at 9:40:54 a.m. Good to know.

I was pretty nervous about the race. I'd never done a relay before, and I was afraid of a lot of things: that I would be incredibly slow and mess up the spreadsheet calculations; that something I ate wouldn't agree with me and I'd have to be dashing for a port-a-potty all day long (or worse, the side of the road); that the four engineers would not like me and it would be a long, awkward, silent day in the car whenever I wasn't running. However, I am happy to report that none of these fears came true.

Since this was a "sprint" relay, the legs were nice and short. My shortest leg was 1.8 miles, I believe, and my longest 2.6. When you know you've only got to go 1.8 miles, you can push yourself a little harder. It didn't hurt that it was in the low 20s when I started running, either--you could just whisper to yourself as you jogged along, "The faster I run, the sooner I can get back in the car." My toes were actually numb for awhile, but eventually all the running got the circulation going again. Plus, I really didn't want the guys to think I was a horrible slowpoke (some of them were pretty fast--like running a mile in under 7 minutes) so I did my best to push myself, and was able to run faster than I thought I would.

Also, the food thing didn't trip me up at all. I ate two Luna bars and a tangerine and drank some water over the course of the race, and that was it. I really wasn't hungry at all and I didn't get all crampy or anything. I was suddenly, intensely hungry once the race was over. We were driving back from Eugene to Albany and I saw the big glowing sign for the Pioneer Villa and I wanted a hamburger sooooo bad...but during the race I was fine.

And, I needn't have worried about getting along with the four sweaty guys I was riding with. They were nice, and we found things to talk about...and when we did lapse into silence, I think it was mostly just because A) they are guys, and most guys don't feel the need to chatter incessantly; and B) we had been running all day. We were all really tired.

At the end of the day, our team ("Army of Darkness"--I didn't pick the name, someone else did; I told you engineers like sci-fi) came in 15th out of 25 teams. We ran the 50-mile course in 6 hours, 58 minutes, and our average per-mile pace was 8:04. I was pretty impressed with that, but there were teams who were much more amazing than that--the winners did it with a 5:21 per-mile pace! Oh, and the down-to-the-second "crude estimates" spreadsheet? We were within two minutes of the finish time the team captain calculated. Pretty impressive. If ever you need a handy-dandy spreadsheet, just ask an engineer.

So would I do the Civil War Relay again? Yes, I definitely would. But next year I'm going to be looking for at least one other girl with the guts to run with me. And some temperatures that are above 40 would be nice. Maybe 50 degrees, sunny, no wind or rain. In Oregon. In December. Anything's possible, right? Check back next year to see if that happens.