Ragnar Relay Pennsylvania
Ragnar Relay Pennsylvania
( 4 reviews )-
Lancaster ,
Pennsylvania,
United States - June
- Relay
- Road Race
- Event Website
Samantha Roderigues
Massachusetts, United StatesOverall
T-Shirts/SWAG
Aid Stations
Course Scenery
Expo Quality
Elevation Difficulty
Parking/Access
Race Management
I want to start off by saying Ragnars are great races and that I would recommend everyone does one at some point in their life! But my team and I all felt this particular Ragnar was pretty poorly executed.
As always you get the really soft cotton shirt and puzzle medals that you must put together to form a sentence. That was great. But rest of the "after party" was really disappointing. The "meal" was only a hotdog, which was even already put in a bun (so although hotdogs themselves are gluten free, I could no longer eat it). Also I'm pretty sure we finished with some of the elite teams but we still weren't fast enough for them to not already have run out of soda.
Aid stations were mostly non-existent. We had to stop to buy our own water constantly. I'm all for cup-less, but it seemed they almost were going hydration-less as well. One of the only water stops I saw was during my night leg, pushed way back from the road in a completely unlit little truck stop that I wasn't about to go use.
The course was mostly highways. And not scenic highways either.
Pennsylvanian hills are no joke. They almost feel never ending. It doesn't help that the roads are super winding so you can never see the top. I would have loved to run elevation like this elsewhere.
Parking was always fine since most exchanges were at places with parking lots. I'd still say access was poor though since I'd consider that access to runners as well for Ragnar style races. The roads almost never had anywhere you could safely pull over to cheer for your runner. This made for much less cheering than the other Ragnar I ran and that was really disappointing.
I don't want to completely bash race management because they put on other Ragnars which are amazing! But I'm not sure what they were thinking with this one. The course wasn't very safe since the road shoulders were generally extremely small or non-existent. It was often on high traffic areas/highways. The course signage was pretty bad for runners and non-existent for vans causing a lot of getting lost for both. It honestly seemed like the roads they chose in Pennsylvania just weren't made for this type of race and they need to rethink the course.