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Rock the Creeeeeeek Relay!

September 29, 2019 (Morning)

Exercise Type: Run

Comments:
Joined Anthony, Mark, Ethan, and Zeke for the fourth annual Rock the Creek Relay in an attempt to defend last year's title. As always, the race started from Lake Needwood in the northernmost reaches of Rock Creek Park in Derwood near the Fark and made its way down the Rock Creek bike path to Jones Mill and Connecticut just inside the Beltway, from whence it turned and headed back up again. I ran second leg this year, a lovely rolling stretch from somewhere far out in Montgomery Country to some other point far out in Montgomery Country. I have no idea where I was except that I crossed Randolph Road at some point, which is a place I've heard of on traffic reports. The course was reasonably unambiguous and the longest hills weren't longer than 20 seconds until the climb out of the park at the very end to the exchange zone in a local elementary school south of Knowles Road.

I decided to start off at "generic hard pace" and not think too much about how far I was about to run. I'm still unsure of the wisdom of this strategy. Mark handed off the baton (or rather, that slap on bracelet we were issued) to me in an excellent moving handoff and I took off like a banshee, flying up the trail at a wildly unsustainable pace and breathing hard for the entire first mile. In fact, I continued breathing hard for all five miles, because once you're out of breath for that long you never really catch it again unless you slow down dramatically. The race has staggered start times and since we had a pretty fast seed time we were the last to depart. Mark had made quick work of the other two teams in our flight and there was no one in the slot 15 minutes ahead of us, which meant that I had no one to run with until I started catching the teams who started 30 minutes before us at the very end of my leg. It's hard to make yourself go fast when there's no one around to compete with and you're not on a track, but I did my best to focus on going hard and asking myself what I'd be saying to the GDS team if I were coaching them through it. I used the mile markers to motivate me, both as a way to check my pace and as landmarks to look forward to, and once I was more than halfway there I began to get excited about how close I was. I managed to catch 5 leaves of the course of the race, each of them counting double so that was very satisfying. I pushed hard up the final hill and may have had a little more left than I intended coming into the handoff with Ethan, but on the whole, I felt like I pushed myself well and contributed my fair share to our team's ultimate VICTORY and COURSE RECORD. All in all, no better way to spend a Sunday morning than with these awesome coaching running a ridiculous relay race.