It was another great year running the Grand Teton Relay! I know in the past I have gone it to a tremendous amount of details. This year, I won’t burden you with all of that. By now, I think you understand how the relay works.
I got to hang out in a different Van this year which meant that I got to be in the starting van. It was nice to not have to sit around and wait for hours to start after our team had already crossed the start line. We started with the last group of people this year. Apparently, they thought we were going to be fast. It turns out, we were even faster than expected! I was the second runner in the line up. It was great to finish my runs early on for each three legs. The times I ran were more normal other than my midnight run. At least I didn’t have to run at 3 or 4 in the morning and then try to sleep during the light of the day.
A couple eventful things happened for me doing this years relay, the first was that I got stung by a honey bee while running my first leg. I passed by a set of white honey bee boxes. The bees were swarming across the road as I ran through trying to just make it past. I had just passed by a lady as I got stung and proceeded to freak out in front of her. The bee stung me inside my noes and I was trying so hard to get it off as I flung my sunglasses across the road. The lady stopped and helped me. We got the bees off of both of us and took off running. It was the weirdest thing ever! I also haven’t been stung in years, so I forgot what it felt like. And, who gets stung in the nose? While running?
The second thing was how I rocked my last leg! I did a 5 mile run at an 8:05 min/mi pace. I haven’t done that in years! I did have a little bit of an advantage though as I was running a slight downhill the entire way. My sister rocked a 7:40 min/mi on her larger downhill 4 mile run! It was awesome. We were all doing so well on these last legs, that we ran about an hour or so faster than what was expected my our other van. They were late getting to the van transition area. Since the GT Relay is awesome, we were able to keep our last runner going until the other van met up about a mile and a half into their leg.
Our goal for this year was 28 hours which would have beat last year’s time by 1 hour (29 hours). Well folks, we did it in 28 hours and 39 minutes! We were all just a little excited about our time. We rocked it! We had such a solid team this year. Loved every bit of this year’s relay.
There were several other awesome things that happened and lots of good times that were had. This was the best GT Relay yet and I can’t wait for another year. Brent will be posting pictures soon! (Hopefully!)
If you are interested in being on our teams next year, let me know. We are registering in the next couple weeks to get a great discount. And yes, I said teams! Brent is going to do an ultra team this next year.
You must be logged in to post a comment.