The Blue Ridge Relay | 208 miles | Grayson Highlands, VA to Asheville, NC | 27,000' elevation gain | 6-12 person teams | 99 total teams | 1052 runners
Nothing like being spontaneous and having a wicked awesome wife. One who is understanding and will let you take off to be gone for 2 days running a race through the blue ridge mountains on short notice.
I had friends on a team that needed a last minute runner and since I planned to get an easy 20 mile run in over the weekend I figured this would be a 'fun' way to get my miles in. My 3 sections totaled 21.5mi but there really wasn't anything easy about it.
Before I knew it I was off in a rental van w/ team 'Carpe Viam' on a wild adventure through the mountains.
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| 2010 Blue Ridge Relay 208 - Team Carpe Viam (L-R front: Luke, Lucretia, Karen, Stephanie, Emily, Anne Marie, Stephen, Bjorn, George L-R back: Anthony, Andrew & Eric slightly hidden from view) |
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| Carpe Viam - Van #2 for runners 7-12 & my 'home' for the next 30hrs |
With a 12 person team you run 3 legs of varying distances of the 36 leg race. I was runner #8 running legs 8, 20 & 32 with a total of 21.5 miles. Organized chaos is the best way I could describe the setting of this race. Very quickly it became clear that the challenge of dealing with all of the logistics would be just as important (if not more) as how fast you ran the actual race. Luckily for Carpe Viam we had a captain who had put an amazing amount of work into planning & organizing things for our team.
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| Elevation profile: 604' gain & 828' loss |
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| Elevation profile: 1,970' gain & 1,886' loss |
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| Elevation profile: 982' gain & 3,092' loss |
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| Icing down in a mountain stream after my last leg. The water was actually clear and looked nice before we stirred up the silt on the bottom. I didn't care how it looked... it was cold and felt great! |
We all had a lot of fun and everyone ran really well for our team! Even though our team said we weren't in it for the competition, we still placed 54th of 99 teams. Total time was 30 hours 10 minutes with a team average pace around 8:42/mi (within a minute of the estimated time by Emily our team captain!)
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| Carpe Viam finishing with team captain and final runner Emily in Asheville, NC |
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