Beach, reached!
I am back from Spain and sloooowly putting together a trip report. But, as you may have forgotten, my vacation actually began with a trip to New Hampshire for the purposes of running across (much of) it, so I want to put down a few things about that, mostly for my own purposes (but you can read, too). Also some photos, taken by my teammates (mostly by David Sheehan).
This was my second Reach the Beach - I also did it in 2015, on the same team, although with a slightly different group of people. (This marked Team Chocolate Mile's tenth year, though only a core of about a half-dozen runners have done it every year.) As before, we had both a regular team (12 people, or "King Size") which I was on, and an ultra team (6 people, or "Fun Size"). In order to get both teams starting together - teams start at 15-minute intervals roughly in reverse order of speed, so the slowest teams start earliest - we had been asked to put carefully-calculated but fictional paces on our entries. The practical result of this was that we started at 10:45 with generally slower teams, and ended up passing a lot of runners.
The way RTB works is that the roughly 200 miles of course between Bretton Woods and Hampton Beach are divided into 36 legs. Each runner on the regular team runs three legs, each ultra runner runs six. When I did this before, I was in the #6 position (legs 6, 18, and 30); this year I opted to be runner #2, which would give me a bit less distance overall but some hillier legs.
I flew into Boston Logan on Wednesday night, and after some delay got the shuttle to my hotel, which turned out to be a surprisingly long drive despite its ad touting its 'airport' location. My friend and roomie-for-the-weekend Barb was already there; it turned out that she would be runner #2 for the ultra team, so she'd be running the same legs as me (in addition to the legs of our #8). After breakfast and a bit of hanging out, using the hotel wifi, we caught the shuttle back to the airport where we met the others who were either flying to, taking the train to, or lived around Boston. Then it was time to get our rental vans and drive to our hotel in Littleton, New Hampshire, where we met up with the Vermont and New Hampshire folks, who had a third van. Logistics are a bit complex when your team members come from all over the country! (We always have a hard time explaining when someone asks where our team is "from".)
The next morning after breakfast we headed over to the start. Since the first leg is almost a loop, ~400 feet up a ski trail and then back down another one, the first exchange was just a short walk from the start. After cheering our two teams' first runners as they headed up, Barb and I went over to wait for them at the exchange point. Both of our runners, ultra and regular team, came down together, so Barb and I also started off together.
Leg 2 was also almost a loop, with ~300' elevation gain and loss, though a distance of 4.1 miles as compared to the 1.4 of leg 1. It started out on the ski area's Nordic trails, then went uphill into a housing development. Even though the elevation here is like 1600', since I live at nearly 7000' this felt basically like sea level, so I had lots of extra oxygen in my lungs to power up the steep hill, and I passed a lot of people, including Barb. My splits were 8:17, 8:52, 7:37, 7:45, plus a burst of speed at the end for an average pace of 8:05 (you can see the big climb was in mile 2 and the big descent in mile 3). It was a fairly cool day, which was nice, but by the time I approached the hand-off I was sweating.
(The orange "baton" is actually a slap bracelet! It makes things easy, because it's stiff for the hand-off but then wraps around your wrist so you don't need to actually carry anything in your hand while running.)
Because we'd started more than an hour earlier than the last time I'd run this, the Spaghetti Shed wasn't open yet during Van 1's off time, so we found another restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner, then drove to the school where Van 2 would finish and we'd start again. I put all my warm clothes on and stretched out in the sun in my light sleeping bag, trying to nap, but no dice. Eventually I got a cup of tea and joined my teammates at the transition where we cheered our ultra runner, who came in first, then our King Size runner, and after we waved off Amy, our runner #1, it was time to hop in the van and drive to the next transition.
It had gotten dark while we waited at the school, and when I set out on my second leg, it was 8:10pm and full dark. I was kitted out in my blinky reflective vest (required, borrowed from a teammate), headlamp (required, my backpacking headlamp), and color-changing LED fiber optic barrettes (not actually required but I bought a bunch, and distributed them to my teammates, because I thought they looked cute). There was (coincidentally) a full moon that night, but the trees on both sides of the road mostly blocked it.
Still, it was really nice to run at night, especially since I ordinarily don't. I liked seeing the flashing lights of a runner ahead of me...and passing them. (I passed A LOT of runners. I've forgotten, now, how many "kills" I had, but it was around 30, I think!) This was a rolling leg, with lots of ups and lots of downs, and I found myself passing people on most of the uphills. It was cool enough that I didn't sweat; I was wearing my running skirt and a t-shirt, and it was just perfect. I ran the 6.9 miles at an average pace of 8 minutes flat, which was enough faster than my expected time that Ron, our #3, was not quite ready when I arrived at the transition!
The next several legs were longish, and we were all getting sleepy by the time we collected runner #6 at the next big transition and drove to the park where we'd be spending the (rest of) the night. Six of us in the van meant that the two drivers got to sleep way leaned back in their seats, one person made a bed in the back luggage area, and the rest of us each claimed a bench. It sounds great, but it was cold, and other teams' vehicles drove by every so often, and someone on our team snored, and...needless to say, I might have managed a half-hour or so of sleep! But some crappy coffee at the transition area, and we were all on our feet if not alert to watch our #12 runner come in and send Amy off again. (The Fun Size ultra team had dropped out at the van transition; one of the runners had aggravated an old injury, and although it's within the rules for an injured runner to drop out and the others to take that spot, with an ultra team they're all already running over 30 miles each, and the added distance would have been too much.)
Legs #25 and 26 were what's called wild cards. There's no designated transition; instead, the runners pick a place to swap within a designated zone, allowing for some adjustment of the leg distances. Amy and I had agreed to split the total distance, so she ran the first 5 miles, then handed it over to me for the second 5 miles. I took over running at about 7:45am. Again, it was a hilly leg, though honestly Amy had more of the uphill! Still, there were a few uphills where everyone other than me was walking, and again I passed a lot of people. It was cloudy and cool, which was good because it was also very humid. 5 miles, 8:35 pace, and then it was over to Ron and I was done! Ron's last leg was relatively long, so I went to grab some real breakfast before we got back in the van.
After we handed over to van 2, we got donuts (yum!) and then drove to the finish at Hampton Beach. The humidity had fulfilled its promise and become actual rain, making the beach a less pleasant prospect, but we piled our extra clothes on and huddled under the finish tent eating the BBQ and beer (the beer was not free this year, and it also wasn't that good, phooey) until we got word that our last finisher was on the beach and headed for the finish line. We all went down to meet her - fortunately, the rain had quit - so we could run the last little bit together, then posed for a photo with our ridiculously huge medals.
Our final time was 28 hours, 3 minutes, and a few seconds, which put us in 25th place out of 156 in the Mixed Open division - alas, two people on the team are under 40, so we were not in the Mixed Masters division this year. Overall in the Open division we were #47/238, overall overall #77/344. The winning team finished in 19:25, though, so we were still quite a bit behind on time. But it was a good event, a lot of fun, and really reassuring to see I could still pull off 8-8:30 race pace despite running all my training runs much slower than that.
Originally posted on my primary journal at https://ilanarama.dreamwidth.org/174638.html; please comment there. OpenID and anonymous comments are welcome.
This was my second Reach the Beach - I also did it in 2015, on the same team, although with a slightly different group of people. (This marked Team Chocolate Mile's tenth year, though only a core of about a half-dozen runners have done it every year.) As before, we had both a regular team (12 people, or "King Size") which I was on, and an ultra team (6 people, or "Fun Size"). In order to get both teams starting together - teams start at 15-minute intervals roughly in reverse order of speed, so the slowest teams start earliest - we had been asked to put carefully-calculated but fictional paces on our entries. The practical result of this was that we started at 10:45 with generally slower teams, and ended up passing a lot of runners.
The way RTB works is that the roughly 200 miles of course between Bretton Woods and Hampton Beach are divided into 36 legs. Each runner on the regular team runs three legs, each ultra runner runs six. When I did this before, I was in the #6 position (legs 6, 18, and 30); this year I opted to be runner #2, which would give me a bit less distance overall but some hillier legs.
I flew into Boston Logan on Wednesday night, and after some delay got the shuttle to my hotel, which turned out to be a surprisingly long drive despite its ad touting its 'airport' location. My friend and roomie-for-the-weekend Barb was already there; it turned out that she would be runner #2 for the ultra team, so she'd be running the same legs as me (in addition to the legs of our #8). After breakfast and a bit of hanging out, using the hotel wifi, we caught the shuttle back to the airport where we met the others who were either flying to, taking the train to, or lived around Boston. Then it was time to get our rental vans and drive to our hotel in Littleton, New Hampshire, where we met up with the Vermont and New Hampshire folks, who had a third van. Logistics are a bit complex when your team members come from all over the country! (We always have a hard time explaining when someone asks where our team is "from".)
The next morning after breakfast we headed over to the start. Since the first leg is almost a loop, ~400 feet up a ski trail and then back down another one, the first exchange was just a short walk from the start. After cheering our two teams' first runners as they headed up, Barb and I went over to wait for them at the exchange point. Both of our runners, ultra and regular team, came down together, so Barb and I also started off together.
Leg 2 was also almost a loop, with ~300' elevation gain and loss, though a distance of 4.1 miles as compared to the 1.4 of leg 1. It started out on the ski area's Nordic trails, then went uphill into a housing development. Even though the elevation here is like 1600', since I live at nearly 7000' this felt basically like sea level, so I had lots of extra oxygen in my lungs to power up the steep hill, and I passed a lot of people, including Barb. My splits were 8:17, 8:52, 7:37, 7:45, plus a burst of speed at the end for an average pace of 8:05 (you can see the big climb was in mile 2 and the big descent in mile 3). It was a fairly cool day, which was nice, but by the time I approached the hand-off I was sweating.
(The orange "baton" is actually a slap bracelet! It makes things easy, because it's stiff for the hand-off but then wraps around your wrist so you don't need to actually carry anything in your hand while running.)
Because we'd started more than an hour earlier than the last time I'd run this, the Spaghetti Shed wasn't open yet during Van 1's off time, so we found another restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner, then drove to the school where Van 2 would finish and we'd start again. I put all my warm clothes on and stretched out in the sun in my light sleeping bag, trying to nap, but no dice. Eventually I got a cup of tea and joined my teammates at the transition where we cheered our ultra runner, who came in first, then our King Size runner, and after we waved off Amy, our runner #1, it was time to hop in the van and drive to the next transition.
It had gotten dark while we waited at the school, and when I set out on my second leg, it was 8:10pm and full dark. I was kitted out in my blinky reflective vest (required, borrowed from a teammate), headlamp (required, my backpacking headlamp), and color-changing LED fiber optic barrettes (not actually required but I bought a bunch, and distributed them to my teammates, because I thought they looked cute). There was (coincidentally) a full moon that night, but the trees on both sides of the road mostly blocked it.
Still, it was really nice to run at night, especially since I ordinarily don't. I liked seeing the flashing lights of a runner ahead of me...and passing them. (I passed A LOT of runners. I've forgotten, now, how many "kills" I had, but it was around 30, I think!) This was a rolling leg, with lots of ups and lots of downs, and I found myself passing people on most of the uphills. It was cool enough that I didn't sweat; I was wearing my running skirt and a t-shirt, and it was just perfect. I ran the 6.9 miles at an average pace of 8 minutes flat, which was enough faster than my expected time that Ron, our #3, was not quite ready when I arrived at the transition!
The next several legs were longish, and we were all getting sleepy by the time we collected runner #6 at the next big transition and drove to the park where we'd be spending the (rest of) the night. Six of us in the van meant that the two drivers got to sleep way leaned back in their seats, one person made a bed in the back luggage area, and the rest of us each claimed a bench. It sounds great, but it was cold, and other teams' vehicles drove by every so often, and someone on our team snored, and...needless to say, I might have managed a half-hour or so of sleep! But some crappy coffee at the transition area, and we were all on our feet if not alert to watch our #12 runner come in and send Amy off again. (The Fun Size ultra team had dropped out at the van transition; one of the runners had aggravated an old injury, and although it's within the rules for an injured runner to drop out and the others to take that spot, with an ultra team they're all already running over 30 miles each, and the added distance would have been too much.)
Legs #25 and 26 were what's called wild cards. There's no designated transition; instead, the runners pick a place to swap within a designated zone, allowing for some adjustment of the leg distances. Amy and I had agreed to split the total distance, so she ran the first 5 miles, then handed it over to me for the second 5 miles. I took over running at about 7:45am. Again, it was a hilly leg, though honestly Amy had more of the uphill! Still, there were a few uphills where everyone other than me was walking, and again I passed a lot of people. It was cloudy and cool, which was good because it was also very humid. 5 miles, 8:35 pace, and then it was over to Ron and I was done! Ron's last leg was relatively long, so I went to grab some real breakfast before we got back in the van.
After we handed over to van 2, we got donuts (yum!) and then drove to the finish at Hampton Beach. The humidity had fulfilled its promise and become actual rain, making the beach a less pleasant prospect, but we piled our extra clothes on and huddled under the finish tent eating the BBQ and beer (the beer was not free this year, and it also wasn't that good, phooey) until we got word that our last finisher was on the beach and headed for the finish line. We all went down to meet her - fortunately, the rain had quit - so we could run the last little bit together, then posed for a photo with our ridiculously huge medals.
Our final time was 28 hours, 3 minutes, and a few seconds, which put us in 25th place out of 156 in the Mixed Open division - alas, two people on the team are under 40, so we were not in the Mixed Masters division this year. Overall in the Open division we were #47/238, overall overall #77/344. The winning team finished in 19:25, though, so we were still quite a bit behind on time. But it was a good event, a lot of fun, and really reassuring to see I could still pull off 8-8:30 race pace despite running all my training runs much slower than that.
Originally posted on my primary journal at https://ilanarama.dreamwidth.org/174638.html; please comment there. OpenID and anonymous comments are welcome.