Big congrats to the NETT-heavy Wings Reach the Beach team that completed yet another successful run at the 180-mile relay. Here's the report from Cap'n K:
It was another memorable year. It reminded me again of how incredible a group this is. For the first time, we did have a few curve balls. When we had a runner go down early with an injury. Poor Peter. We read the rules which said that the next runner had to take over, and could move forward either doing doubles (i.e. all of his and the injured runner's legs), or we could completely switch the rotation, moving the next runner into Peter’s legs etc. and having the last runner doing an extra leg.
By minor miracle, the person who was next in rotation was Tom — the only person on the team who is running a 100-miler in two weekends, and for whom the extra miles were a gift. So he came into Van 1 (we now had 7) and he did each of the injured runner's legs and his own. In the meantime Peter, who now lives in NH and could easily have gone home, stayed with us (in pain and barely able to walk) and navigated for the next 24 hours.
Everyone ran beautifully — each person inspired by the person before them. In the end we came in 3rd out of 120 ‘mixed open' teams and 23 out of 518 teams total. I credit everyone’s absolute fear of disappointing their team mates for the unbelievable performances. The course was a little longer this year and the legs were longer too (most people did higher mileage than in the past) and everyone rose to the challenge. Having 7 legs to cover in one van also meant that sleep time was cut by at least an hour, because the van couldn’t advance to the van transition area until the 7th runner was done (instead of the sixth). We figure we had about 2 hours total over the 25.
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