Check out part I and part II here
As we were preparing for our last legs of the relay race, we knew Van 1 would have a rough morning. They started their last legs around 8:30am (about 2 hours behind original projections) and they had 33 miles to cover before we would start our legs, including two runners with 9.5 mile legs – talk about rough! Our longest leg during the heat of the day was my 8 miler the day before. Luckily, our team was able to camp out at another school, grab some food and take advantage of the nice weather to get in another nap. As we expected, the other team struggled as much as we did with the heat (low 80’s), so our van started about 3 hours behind schedule. Our goal for the day was just to make sure that everyone stayed safe and would be able to enjoy our time in Key West.
I had the shortest leg of our van for this portion, with only 1.8 miles to cover, so around 3:15, I started my last leg of the race with the temperature hovering around 82.
- Mile 1 – 10:12
- Last .77 – 9:21
I felt really good during this leg. I kept up the 3:1 ratio again and was even able to get 1 kill, bringing my total up to 13 (6 in both of my other legs).
My three legs totaled 15.9 miles, with an average of 10:22 pace. Considering I’ve been focusing on longer, slower runs, I’m really happy with that pace and it turned out to be a lot faster than I felt when I was actually doing the runs!
Our last runner had 5 miles to get to the finish line and we almost missed being able to cross the finish with him! As we got into Key West, we were trying to find parking and ended up having to circle the block to be able to get into the parking area – which lead to an unfortunate incident where we ran over a chicken that was being chased by a dog into the middle of the street (roosters & chickens roam free in Key West). After all of the chaos, we were finally able to park and hurry to get to the finish line to await our runner. We only had to wait about 2 minutes before we saw our runner coming in and we all finished together! Ragnar provided us with the awesome photos below for free (who doesn’t love free race pictures)!
Even though we finished about 3.5 hours after we expected to, our team had a ton of fun and we’ve already started discussing what our next relay should be!
Have you ever done a relay race? Does my experience entice you to try one or scare you off altogether?
