Mad City 50k Relay

Does it still count as a PR if it was part of a relay?  I think so.

The Mad City 100k event is three races.  There is the 100k and 50k race for the hardcore ultra marathoners.  And then there's the 50k relay.  The instructions for the relay were simple.  At least 2 members for a team, and each member must do at least a 10k.  Age brackets were calculated based on aggregate age, with someone's age twice if they run two laps.  The 100k started at 6:30am and the 50k starts at 8am.

Ear warmers as race swag for the relay runners.

Barry suggested back in February getting a team together to run the 50k relay.  He suggested Ellie as a part of our team with Ellie doing one lap and me and him each doing two laps.  But Ellie wasn't sure she'd be in town that weekend, so we asked fellow runner and trivia teammate Joe to join us and run our fifth lap.  Come the day before, Barry and I reassessed our abilities to do two laps.  I'd been sick all week after my 20 miler and Arboretum Spring Sprint and hadn't gotten any miles in because of a sore throat.  The course for all three races was my beloved Arboretum loop. I've been training on the Arboretum loop for almost all of my runs outdoors, but I've always ran it in the "wrong" direction, i.e. I run it clockwise on a map so the mile posts count down rather than up. Joe warned me that the "correct" direction feels like quite a different course and the hills more difficult.  I tried the course the "correct" way Friday morning with 20 mph wind and hail blowing in my face.  I ran it in 1 hour and 20 minutes because I had to stop and walk.  Oh boy.  Barry had ran the course on Monday in 54:01, but he felt terrible after.  Neither he nor I felt sure about a second lap.  So Friday morning, after my trial run on the course, I asked Ellie again if she wanted to take a lap since she will be in town after all.  She thought about it, looked at her schedule for work and said, "ok," if she can take the first lap that starts at 8am so she can make it to work by 10:30am.  Hooray, Barry and I thought, and decided that he and I would flip for the last lap depending on how we felt after the first one tomorrow. 

Berbee Derby 2012

This is perhaps the first race for which the alarm clock inexplicably failed me.  I woke up literally a minute before my friend Barry called to tell me he was outside in the car waiting.  I told him I needed 10 minutes.  I threw on contacts and running clothes and headed out the door.  I counted on the weather being the 50+ it had been all week.  I did not count on wind.

After I crossed the finish line.

This is the 9th annual Berbee Derby.  The event happens on the morning of Thanksgiving Day and runners often don turkey hats on their heads.  I saw a couple of people dressed as M&Ms or carrots as well.  I think anything that might show up on your dinner table later that day makes for an appropriate costume.  The Berbee Derby has two events: a 5k run/walk and a 10k run.  It's an unexpectedly large event.  They were telling us at the start that there was something like 8000 runners.  I registered fairly late.  I wasn't sure I was going to do this run, and I kept procrastinating on the registration.  Come Monday, I'm down at the Copps on Fish Hatchery buying some Thanksgiving Day supply when I saw the Berbee Derby registration office.  I took that as a sign.  Half an hour later, I was registered.  They assigned me to wave B for the 10k, though I informed them to expect only a 10 min/mile pace out of me.  I wanted a workout on Thanksgiving Day, not so much a PR.  It's my first 10k race though so it's an automatic PR anyway.  As luck would have it though, this 10k is slower than the first "10k" at Lake Monona.