Rain can make me miserable. Not for a training run, but for a race, I'm already feeling a little anxious and on-edge. Then when I go all day never getting totally dry or warm I seize the opportunity to grumble about something. That's how I know that Providian was a great time - it was raining and muddy the whole way, and I barely even noticed.
Ogliore recruited me for The Juice: Terror in Meatspace at the Providian Relay.
I was worried because of the mild strain/aching in my hamstring, but it held up well and the relay was great fun. We each ran three legs, totaling 200 miles between the twelve of us. My actual running felt choppy and labored all the time, and the 6-7 mile stretches felt long, but I held up okay.
I only knew about half the team beforehand, but I got to meet all the runners as we went along. A few things that I think made the day work well were:
- The men on our team were reasonably close in ability, and so were the women. There was no worrying about if "that one guy" was going to totally bomb. On the other hand, the legs were all very different and there was no trying to one-up each other. The result was we had a mentality of a single unit.
- We started in the back and continually caught teams (I passed maybe 10 runners on my middle leg, which was typical for the team. I think Jesse and Katherine both passed in the 15-20 range during a leg.) That kept us feeling like were were on a sort of a mission. It was different than running an race from scratch and trying to hold someone off or catch them up. We weren't focusing on any single competitor. The nature of the competitors (a different group of teams every leg) meant we couldn't focus on them. We were basically forced to focus on our own running.
- Ryan's eclectic mix tape.
- The relay was pretty well-organized. I only had one moment of confusion about the course (at the intersection of Henry Road and Henry Lane), and nobody on the team got lost. The bathrooms were decent by my standards, the course was generally challenging, interesting, and scenic.
- The atmosphere was friendly. The vans stopped by the side of the road always cheered, and everyone was full of smiles at the exchanges.
- The JUICE is a very cool crew.
- Running is fun.
2 comments:
Yay! Glad you were part of our victorious squad.
*I had so much fun!*
I was very glad for how cool everyone was - and how legit. It was really inspiring on each leg to think about how fast everyone else was running, and it made me not want to be the "weak link". Also, I thought everyone stayed in really good spirits considering lack of sleep, etc. That was really cool.
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