Ford Escape Recall

Holy mackerel!

I was reading through my old blog post about the DC Ragnar Relay in 2011, and was reminded about when my Ford Escape had a "stuck accelerator pedal" failure the week before.

A year later, Ford makes a recall about the exact same failure scenario!
http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/26/autos/ford_escape_recall/index.htm

When the gas pedal is pressed almost all the way down, a cruise control cable can become stuck between the engine cover and a cruise control cable cover. The problem can occur whether cruise control is in use or not.

So it wasn't just me...   Apparently somebody got killed from this failure.  Eek!

Ragnar Pennsylvania 2012

I just got finished with the Ragnar Pennsylvania this weekend.  This is my second run, having done the PA Ragnar last year, with the same team.  I've done three Ragnars with team "NO JOKE", and they're really awesome!

I left on Thursday afternoon to drive up to the team captain's house in Narvon, Pennsylvania.  (No, I've never heard of it, either).  I spent the night there, and the whole team assembled at 0430 for an 0500 departure the next morning.  Our team started running in Lancaster, PA at 0700 on Friday.

This PA Ragnar was not as well attended as last year's event, with only 75 teams in attendance.  At the start line, our team only had 7 other teams starting at 0700, compared to the 15 teams or so last year.

I was runner number two.   This year's Ragnar was going to be different.  For the past three Ragnar races I've done, I started out too fast: killing myself on the first run, and limping along for the second two legs.  This one would be different.  The first leg was just shy of 8 miles, and I was not going to run that at my 10K race pace, or at my 5K race pace.