Bracelets As Batons. Pass The Awareness Please.

The crazy part isn’t that I’m sleeping on the ground in a meadow behind a cheese factory 30 miles north of San Francisco.

No, the crazy part is it’s some of the best sleep I’ve ever had. At least in the top 10 naps of all time. And that’s a tough list to crack.

This year, there are at least four teams from Fresno running in “The Relay,” a 199-mile foot race from Calistoga to Santa Cruz, a happy little jaunt that winds through Napa Valley, down into the city, across the Golden Gate Bridge and down to the boardwalk on Santa Cruz Beach.

At least that’s allegedly what happens. As of Saturday evening, we were still resting in a meadow, lounging like those happy California Cows you see in the TV commercials.

Actually stepping onto that beach seems about as plausible as time travel. And if someone does invent a time machine, I’m going back to the moment I said, “Instead of telling me how it was, what if you let me be on your team?” That one lapse in judgment would explain why my left foot has a blister the size of a TV tray and it’s all I can do not to vomit food I ate two holiday meals ago.

Go figure. Any trip that would be a four-figure cab ride probably shouldn’t be done solely on one’s soles.

My goal is survival, but most of the 200 teams from around the country have a goal to raise money for organ donation. Also, there is the always elusive raising of awareness. Did you know there are 95,000 Americans waiting for organs? There, I have done my part.

Back in real life, where I am sitting at a basketball game or downing a ninth cup of coffee in front of my computer, contemplating whether you will get a “WKRP in Cincinnati” reference, those stats don’t mean much. But when you’re running on the shoulder of a four-lane highway, sweating and aching and cursing the existence of pavement, and you get passed by someone with the words “For Jim,” on the back of their T-shirts, it smacks you harder than an audit.

The people on waiting lists have faces and families.

That particular team, it turns out, is from Pennsylvania and they run for their father, Jim Saunders, who waited two years for a heart that never found him. He died in 2000, so technically, they don’t run for him. They run for your dad and my dad and that’s about as cool as it gets.

The relay, itself — often called The Relay for Organ Donation — is not so cool, unless you’re one of those people who enjoys DMV lines and biting that same spot inside your mouth again and again.

Each team has 12 members who each run three legs. I’m running a total of 17.8 miles, legs No. 4, No. 16 and finally No. 28, a 5.1-mile leg that I’m probably hobbling through as you’re reading this, a section of the “course” that goes up 330 feet in elevation. Not that I can complain to the guy who I hand off to. (The “baton” is a rubber bracelet, which represents the passing of healthy organs). His last leg goes up 1,000 feet, roughly the height of the Sears Tower, in three miles.

So each team has two vans with six runners apiece. The van serves as transportation, hotel, changing area and restaurant for the 30-hour trip. It’s a lot like living two consecutive days in a bathroom stall, getting out only to run and shove pasta into your mouth at an occasional restaurant.

The first van started in Calistoga on Saturday morning at 7:30 (the slowest teams leave earliest) and we will all run the last section of the last leg together on the beach in Santa Cruz sometime this afternoon.

As I’m typing this, the members of our van are sleeping off our first runs behind the Marin French Cheese Co. as the other team makes their way toward us.

It never stops. Someone is running now. Someone will be running at 3 a.m. My second run will be sometime this evening around 11 p.m. (last night, as you’re reading this), flashlight in hand, cars whizzing by, praying the cheaper reflective vest was the right place to pinch pennies.

Yeah, I’m already complaining this much, and we have a long way to go. Our 13th team member and driver, Dave Cruce, a Fresno realtor and budding comedian, keeps us entertained by waiting until the person riding shotgun falls asleep, then slaps him in the middle of the chest and screams, “LOOK OUT! HOLD ON!” as he swerves the full-size van back and forth on the highway. It’s great fun, unless you’re in the back, lightheaded from running underneath the midday sun, already feeling carsick.

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