GRR Day 1: Hurry up and wait!

Okay, so my attempt to have some appearance of chronological order in our accounts has been majorly stymied by me being a blogging slacker. I spent most of yesterday travelling home to Boston, and today trying to meet up with friends, so cut me some slack :-)

So now some Van 2 stories! (although ours aren't nearly as exciting :-))

So the weirdest thing about being Van 2 is that you start this race... and you don't get to run for hours... you watch everyone else run, but you don't get to. So by the time you start, you are all primed up.

So after sending Van 1 off, we went back to the hotel and checked out, went to the grocery store, ate a massive breakfast at Perkins and headed on our way to Exchange 6. We also missed Exchange 2, so that wasn't just Van 1 being silly! So we got to the exchange at about 12:30 and then waited.

We played cards.

We ate cheese curds (it's Wisconsin!).We played the naked game (which consists of looking at fellow runners and deciding who would look good naked - I am sure that Tim, the lone male in our van, appreciated this).

Finally about 3:30ish, Van 1 rolls in and we get Nisha ready to start us off. By that time, it was hot. She had a 6.2 mile leg on just brutally exposed highway. We pulled over halfway through her leg to give her water. During this time, we let Tim pick out which girls he liked. See we are equal opportunity oglers in Van 2 :-)

Nisha handed off to me. By the time I got to run, it had cooled down a little bit and I was at least off the dark pavement. I ran down this tiny country road. It was quite nice actually. Amazingly, my foot didn't bother me either! I merrily trotted along, starting off way too fast as usual. As captain, I got to assign myself easy legs :-) Actually, I got easy legs because I had barely run in the last month because of my foot and I wasn't sure how it was going to hold up. So my first leg was supposed to be 5.3 miles. But my Garmin said 5.7 and I finished in 57-something and I was pushing a bit so I would be waaay surprised if I was running almost 11 minute miles. My average page on that leg was 10:08, which I'll totally take given my spotty running lately!

I handed off to Kori, who booked it her whole leg. She was cruising! And of course looking hot in her white and pink running skirt. This first set of legs was Kori's double set. She had a 7.9 mile leg as runner 9 and then was taking the 6.5 mile leg for runner 12.

She passed off to Kimberly who had a hilly 8.3 mile leg, the longest of the relay. She busted her butt on that one too, with a nice PR to show for it at the end of it all.

It was nighttime by the time Tim got to run. Tim was the ringer in our van. The rest of us ranged in the 9 to 11 min/mile range, while Tim is down in the 7s. He passed 15 people during his 7.9 mile. 15! He took down his 15th about 20 feet from the exchange. We got short notice of Tim's arrival, so Kori hurried to get to the exchange but another team was coming in ahead of us... except that Tim totally wasn't having that and pushed past the other guy right before the exchange. In the dark though he didn't see that Kori wasn't in the exchange yet so there was a bit of "hey, over here!" going on.

So we sent Kori off to finish up almost 14.5 miles for her that day. And then we went and got beer. Because that's what Van 2 was all about - beer and nakedness :-)

Kimberly before her first leg --->
(she is much happier here than she was at the end of the race!)