This is the 2nd year that Creighton and I have run the Athena trail relay and it was awesome again, to say the least. We had two new team mates this year, one of them (Andy) is a guy that we compete with regularly and he is hands down fast. Anne, I have not raced with before but she is an instructor for Seal Team so I knew she would be in great shape. Anne started us off with a blazing speed of 54.08 for 6.55miles of trail which is a great pace. She was the first woman back and then Andy took off. He has been nursing a hurt hamstring for awhile now and said he would know within the first mile how it was going to go. I honestly thought he would dominate regardless because he is a work horse but that did not happen. He was hurt pretty badly and came back in 1:03. Creighton took off for the 3rd leg and I knew he'd finish somewhere around :53, he has been putting in so much running time right now and he is in great shape. He and I both have put on a 40 mile running week this week though so I think we were feeling that a bit as well. I was the anchor on this relay and truthfully, just like in track, I don't like to be the anchor. I need to be able to chase someone and that doesn't necessarily happen on races like this. As predicted, C came back in 53:58 and I took off. There was a guy from the team right in front of us that left about 30 seconds before me so I took off on a dead sprint to try to catch him. I ran my first mile in 6:18 and he was NO WHERE in sight. He was blazing. So, I decided to settle into a normal pace and hoped that he would fall out somewhere along the trail and I could catch him then. The problem was, with this course, it's hard to find a rhythm. There is so much off pitch terrain and so much climbing and scrambling that it's hard to find the groove. Finally, at mile 5, I felt like I was settling in and just tried to dig in for the final 1.55. I finished in 54.11...not great and not what I should have gone but it was good enough to secure a 4th place finish for our team. We were 13 minutes behind the winning team and 3 minutes behind the 3rd place team. We actually finished better than we did last year which is good. We need to heal Andy up for next year so we can really go after the 1st place spot.
Literally, 10 minutes after I crossed the finish line, C looked at me and asked, "Are you ready?". Yep. I choked down 2 fig newtons and a bit of water and we set off for our second lap of the day. C is running the 50K with me this summer and our plan called for 12 today. So, we set off at 50K pace for our second lap. That quickly turned into our normal 8:00 pace which was not feeling so good to be honest. We made to the aid station about 4 miles in and luckily they had some bars and water. I was bonking big time. About this time, we got a call from our teammate Anne, who told us to "hurry" back because they were about to do awards. Ouch. So, we made it back just in time to jump on the podium for our trophies. It was a great race and an awesome afternoon. I am looking forward to this race again next year. The course is tough but I love it.
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