What an amazing day! Fro the third consecutive year, we did the Running with Ed relay race around Park City today and I cannot remember the last time we had such a good time as a family. We felt so united, it was wonderful. Our team name was Family Rocks and we went with a Flintstones theme. With Amy Sharman's help, the girls all had caveman outfits to wear on top of their running clothes (Jenna and I had "professional" costumes from a previous Halloween) and the girls had bones tied in their hair. We painted our names and team name on the car and tied bones to it in various places for extra fun.
Our start time was 8:45 and we arrived at the field house around 8:00am. Tons of people loved our costumes and kept commenting to us about them. A Park City radio station was at the start line and asked us to come talk to them on the radio. After that, we had a few different people come up to us and tell us they heard us on the radio and came over to the race start to see us. I think the girls liked all of the attention.
Our 8:45 starting group included one of Kayla's friends from her People to People trip to Europe last summer. It was fun to see Sabean and her mother and have a friend out on the course. We also became friends with another team that shared our start time - they were from an insurance company in Park City. We ended up talking to them often throughout the race as our runners were close to the same pace - until the end when Lindsay smoked their leg 7 runner and we pulled away.
We had a great time finding spots to cheer on our runner and ringing cowbells and yelling throughout the course. I am positive that nobody supported their runners on the course as much as we did... of course, the race bible told participants that the team vehicle should drive from one exchange to the next and not stop along the course. I think they let us slide since we had children out running on the course.
All of the girls did AWESOME in their runs. Brenna ran for the first time and did leg 2 of about 1.9 miles and had Lindsay accompany her so she was not alone. Kayla started the race and did legs 1 and 6. She always gets our team off to a good start and did a great job on leg 6 which is the longest leg of the relay. Jenna was super strong running up Olympic park and was so fast that I barely got to the exchange in time for the hand off. She ran the entire leg and passed a ton of people who had to walk up the steep mountain where they did Olympic ski jumping and sliding events. I pushed up the rest of the mountain on leg 4 and was able to beat my time from last year by 3 minutes, dropping my pace from 8:59 last year to 8:25 this year. I had a hard time breathing on my way up the mountain and was never really able to catch my breath, but was able to push through. I handed off to Aubrey who cranked through the 4.4 miles of leg 5 with a smile on her face. She did a great job and appeared to be happier than last year. Kayla was then up for her second leg and then handed off to Lindsay who ran the 4.85 mile leg 7. Lindsay started a little behind one of our friends from the insurance company and ended up passing him and beating him by about a minute. At the exchange, he said that trying to keep up with Lindsay (which he said he could not do) made him run the leg 5 minutes faster than he would have run it on his own. Then it was Jenna's turn again to hit the road. Unfortunately, leg 8 and 9 don't go on or by roads much so we were not able to see her while she was running. She pushed through her 5+ miles and handed to me for the second to last leg. I really struggled with leg 9 last year, including tripping and rolling down a hill on the trail. This year I felt much better and was able to really push myself to go hard. In the end I cut 10 minutes off my time from last year cutting my 6 mile pace from 9:47 to 8:16 per mile. It was a beautiful trail run, but there were a lot of hills and I can't remember the last time I pushed myself to go so hard even when I was tired. I handed off to Emily who ran the file 3 miles and we joined her for the last 20 yards so we could finish as a family.
All in, we completed the 41 mile course in 6 hours and 15 minutes, an improvement of nearly 40 minutes over last year. Even better than our race time, we really enjoyed ourselves as a family. I don't think we wildly cheer each other on enough and this races gives us that opportunity. I am so proud of the girls and how awesome they did and excited to start thinking about what our theme will be next year.
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