There are a few things every team can count on at the Cascade Lakes Relay, a 216.6-mile, 36-stage relay race from Diamond Lake to Bend held for the 10th time Friday and Saturday.

First, your team will run through taxing heat early in the race, and then be plunged into near-freezing temperatures when the sun goes down. Second, nobody is sleeping or eating properly until the team crosses the finish line in Riverbend Park. And third, no matter how carefully your team plans, it is almost certain that something will go wrong.

Even the most experienced teams are not immune. Sole Brothers, a 12-man elite team composed mostly of Bend residents, won for the fifth straight year with a time of 22 hours, 38 minutes, 4 seconds, beating second-place Fellowship of the Run by more than an hour. But Sole Brothers captain Jason Adams, 38 and of Bend, said the team lost seven runners to injury or illness in the weeks before the race.

“We had only five guys from last year’s team back,” Adams said. “Even the day before, a guy dropped out with a knee injury. So there was a lot of chaos getting to the start line, and people dealing with not being ready fully or even knowing what the race was even about. But once we got out there we just ran. And the cool thing about it is I made four new friends, and that’s why I’ve been a captain, is to meet runners.”

One of those new runners was Fletcher Hazlehurst, who ran his three legs despite having a swollen left foot from a bee sting.

“Jason cold-called me probably a week ago and said they’d had some injuries and were looking for people, and I said sure, sounds like fun, sign me up,” Hazlehurst, who also lives in Bend, said at the finish Saturday morning, his foot still noticeably red and swollen. “On Thursday, I was just walking around the block at work, and I got stung on my foot. It swelled up pretty good, so it was a battle the whole time to try and keep it down. I borrowed some compression socks from one of the guys. I don’t think it affected the running too much, it’s just annoying how big (my foot) was.”

A total of 206 teams finished the full CLR this weekend and another 53 completed the walk relay or CLR 24, a shortened version of the race that starts at the same time as the CLR but begins at Silver Lake and covers only the final 24 legs of the race. Many teams have at least one member who gets sick or injured during the relay and cannot finish all of their legs, but there are plenty of other mishaps that can slow down a team.

Tonya Koopman, who has been the captain for the all-women Bachelor Beauts for 10 years, said she once finished running a leg and found just one of her teammates standing at the handoff area instead of five teammates and the van, as she had expected. It turned out her teammates had accidentally locked the keys inside the rental van, and the next runner had hitched a ride with another team while the others had to remove a window from the van to reach the keys.

“So we have some rules now,” Koopman, 47, said. “You don’t leave the keys in the van, and you don’t take them into an outhouse. Those are our big team rules.”

Mark Rhoden, a captain for the Prineville-based team Agony of DeFeet, said that during one of the early years of the relay he and some of his teammates drove their van to a secluded campsite off of the main course to get some sleep before their next turns to run.

“We knew that it was getting to be time for us to run again, and we go to start the car and the battery is dead, and we’re in the middle of nowhere,” Rhoden, 58, recounted. “We had this chiropractor who was running with us, and he decided he would go wander around and see if he could find somebody. And I don’t know how he did it, but he went out and he found two guys, all dressed in camo on a four-wheeler, and brought them back to jump (start the van). It was just odd, but we made it to the checkpoint in time. That’s the peril of not sleeping in the main areas.”

Adams, the Sole Brothers captain, said it can be difficult for teams to keep track of their runners during the nighttime portions of the race. Several years ago, one of the team’s vans was waiting for a runner at an exchange point, but after waiting for a bit the teammates in the van started to worry that they had not seen their runner, and they decided to double back on the course to see if he was injured along the path. While they were searching, the runner reached the exchange, and for several minutes he stood there alone wondering where his teammates were.

“It wasn’t a big deal, but we were trying to chase the course record, and every minute counted, so we were like darn, we just gave up eight or 10 minutes,” Adams said. “So we have a new rule: If you think somebody got hurt, leave the next runner at the exchange, and that way if (the first runner is) fine they can just go.”

Adams said Sole Brothers has the goal of winning the CLR each year, and the team tries to set course records in the years when weather conditions will allow it (between triple-digit temperatures on Friday and smoke from wildfires near Crater Lake, this year’s conditions did not allow it). But Koopman and Rhoden said their teams are built largely of friends and family members, and while some team members are talented runners, the main goal is to have fun and enjoy each other’s company.

“You look forward all year to running this, but by the time you’re on your last (leg) you’re like, man, I wish this was over, because you’re all in pain, you don’t eat right, you don’t sleep right,” Rhoden explained. “But the whole idea of us running together, getting 12 people together in two vans, and just the camaraderie of hanging out together, is almost more fun than the running.”

After the Bachelor Beauts reached the finish line just after 6 p.m. Saturday — 36 hours and 38 seconds after starting the race Friday morning — one of the team members declined to go into too much detail about any antics during the race, saying “What stays in the van, happens in the van,” not quite paraphrasing the “What happens in Vegas” tagline. (In fairness, she was sleep deprived.)

“You always go in waves; everybody is so excited on the first leg, it’s just so fun,” Koopman said. “And then on the second leg it’s cold and everybody’s tired and you’re like, why are we doing this? This is so stupid. And then the last one, you’re so excited because you’ve covered so many miles and the other teams are all fun to be around. And for the women, it’s nice to have time with your girlfriends to hang out. One of my teammates, she said she almost looks forward to CLR more than Christmas.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0305, vjacobsen@bendbulletin.com