Unlike the three "Part III"s that are out at the movies now -- Pirates of the Caribbean, Spider-Man and Shrek -- this is the best part of this particular trilogy. Not necessarily for the writing, but the adventure.

Quick movie review: Saw Spider-Man 3 a while back. Entertaining bad guys. Plenty of action. If you want deftly woven plot, read a book. Haven't seen either of the other two, but I'm sure they are highly disappointing as well. Just ask the critics.

But back to our trilogy, and unlike those others, this is the end. You're probably in for at least eight more Pirates and six more Shreks. And now, back to the story of "The Relay," a 199-mile running relay race from Calistoga to Santa Cruz. I ran with a team from Fresno, and we, like everyone else, raised money and awareness for organ donation.

(Again, you will probably not understand what's going on if you don't go back and read the last two posts, and probably the column itself, the one that began this seemingly endless series of blogs. Just kidding. It's a trilogy, as previously stated. Not endless.)

I realize it's hard to imagine if you weren't there, so here's a picture of some of the runners near the beginning. This is what it was like. There was no "course," besides signs that told you where to turn. It was mostly just running by yourself on the edge of highways, wondering why your van drove TWO MILES AHEAD WHEN CLEARLY YOU NEEDED WATER EVERY MILE!

So we had a small problem about midway through the relay, and this is where the plot-thickening began. One of our runners, who will remain nameless, other than to say he is Jim Anderson, 591 S. Cambridge Lane, Fresno, Ca; social security number 520-124- ... OK, that's made up.

But anyway, "Jim" had some knee problems in his second run, both legs hurting so much that someone else had to finish the last couple miles for him. Which is completely within the rules, by the way. So no one knew if he could finish his third leg. He would be the guy who I handed off to after each of my runs, just for background information, just in case you didn't see where this was going.

"Jim," you should know, is tough, real tough, tougher than navigating the California DMV in one day, so he decided he would try to walk his leg, or walk as far as he could with me going with him, and when he was in too much pain to go on, I'd finish it. So after I finished my third leg, five miles or so, I made it to the hand-off point to find out that the next leg was so steep -- 1,000 feet up in just three miles -- that the van couldn't even go up there, so "Jim" would have no exit strategy.

I was on my own. Two legs in a row. In the heat of the day. It's not like I didn't know the next leg was 1,000 feet up in three miles. There were maps of every leg, rated by difficulty and such. In fact, here is the map of the leg I'm talking about. It's just hard to comprehend 1,000 feet until you're halfway up, crying.

The point is, I survived. It wasn't nearly as tough as I'll say it was in the annual Christmas letter. My whole body ached, but it would have ached with or without a couple extra miles.

We handed off to the last van, finally, drove to Santa Cruz and checked into our hotel. I don't have many pictures of the last half of the race, because I was too tired and lazy. Technically, I have no evidence we ever crossed the finish line, because I was in a rental car on the way to cover former Fresno Grizzly Tim Lincecum make his debut for the Giants that night and wrote a column about that.

But they say the finish line on the beach was beautiful. We finished in 34 hours, 29 minutes and 21 seconds. Good for 169th place, and most importantly, ahead of six other teams. (An improvement over the year before, I'm told.)

By the time I got back to Santa Cruz that night, everyone had eaten and gone directly to bed. But "Jim" woke up and hung out for a while. He's a good guy, that Jim. And he owed me one.