The one thing that's been consistent about this race since 2005 is that there's always a surprise. This year had a few of them.
For one, the weather was fantastic. As far as that goes, the weather all weekend was fantastic. It was a nice little taste of what's coming, neatly packaged with one foot in summer and the other in fall. The weather has never been like that for this race. I won't delude myself into thinking the heat is over until next year, but it was a good reminder that it will, in fact, cool off. Pretty soon I'll be complaining about forgetting my gloves or some crazy stuff like that.
Secondly, for the first time in the history of this relay race, there was a baton involved. That's right - an actual tube, carried by each runner through their entire leg, and handed off to the next person on the team. It was the timing chip for your team, too. In years past, there have been a couple variations on wrist bands being used as batons, which gave the general feeling of a relay. And then there was last year's race, which did away with the concept of a "relay" altogether (we'll leave it at that). This time around though, we got batons. Some teams got creative and decorated it with flowing ribbons, or made a sling that they could use to "wear" it with. We just ran with it. I was a skeptic at first, but after half a mile or so with a baton in my hand, I felt empowered. Not only that, the race was split into six legs of equal distance, so every runner ran the same course...
...except for the first leg (which I happened to be running). That was the third surprise. Though I guess it really shouldn't have been a surprise - for some reason this event always seems to have a distance snafu on some part of the course. Somewhere between the first and second legs, they got it fixed, but all (or at least most) of the first leg runners ran a little shorter. We ran about 3.9 miles while the other five legs had 4.37 ish.
Our team (the SiLabs SloMos) placed 13th in the "Just for Fun" category with a combined 3:27:16. And it was fun! Between the beautiful weather, running around like a track star with a baton in my hand, and catching up with a couple good friends, It was great. I also got to run fast, which if you read my last post, is very exciting these days. During my not-quite-four-mile portion of the race, I contributed 23:47 to our total time. For me, right now, I think falls into the realm of "hauling buttock". My buttocks have both reserved the right to disagree with me tomorrow, but for now all three of us concur that it was a good day.