Bourbon Chase Relay

                “And fixing his eyes on him, with John, Peter said “Look at us.” So he gave them his attention expecting to receive something from them.  Then Peter said, “Silver and gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.”  And he took him by the right hand and lifted him up and immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength.”  Acts 3:4-7

                This past weekend I was given the privilege of running the 200 mile Bourbon Chase relay through the hills of Kentucky on a very fast team filled with extremely elite runners.  This was one instance where I could honestly say that I was the slowest and most out of shape runner of the group.  To put it bluntly, I was the weakest link.  To make my weakness even more apparent, someone decided that I should run the first leg to start the race off.  This was a 7.1 mile course filled with a 4.5 mile ascent at the start with no downhill AT ALL!  Needless to say, out of the last wave to start, I reached the handoff point last.  However, I was not the only one out of my element.  We had a late edition with one days notice named Rebecca who had been taking some time off from running and only decided to run the race when one of our other team members got hit by a car during a training run days earlier.  (she was okay and only received a concussion)  Another member of our team, Hunter Heathcoat, had never ran a race any further than a 10k (6.2 miles) and his second leg of the race was going to be 8.5 miles. A member of Van 2, Ray Wilson, had been heavy laden with running injuries since June and knew that every step of this race was going to be agony.

                The first half of the relay was competitive even though it had its share of highs and lows.  Our team would lose the lead and then regain it.  Back and forth seemed to be the ebb and flow of the race.  All of our runners were giving there all.  Each leg of the relay required more effort and on each leg our team seemed to step up to the challenge.  I even recall on the 8.5 mile leg that Hunter had to run, when he crossed the finish line and collapsed to the ground only to splatter the concrete with his own vomit.  We were all exhausted but we were determined.

                We hit a little speed bump at about the midway point when one of our runners missed a sign and did not turn on the course and wondered around for about an hour and 15 minutes until returning to his starting position.  He then poured out the little bit of strength that he had left and finished his leg of the race.  Our team was a bit down and even more exhausted at this point.  I recall lying in the back of the van as the rays of the morning sun began to rise over the Kentucky hill side.  We were bummed out and had a small sense wanting to give up because we had lost so much ground.  One of our runners, Victoria Martinez (who had been an Olympic trials qualifier in the 800), told everyone to suck it up and run harder.  When most teams were running low on energy and complete fatigue, ours had a new life of determination.  Writing about this now, I cannot begin to describe what we began to witness from our team.  All of our final legs were ran faster than the first.  We started trying to keep tabs on the number of teams that we flew by but there were so many that we could only estimate it at 10 to 30 teams per leg.  In the end, we battled back to finish the race 2^nd overall and most importantly, I made a new group of friends that I was proud to call teammates.