| *This is the second in a series of GAP Relay recaps for the DiMarco Workhorse Team. Today’s submission is written by Elijah Shekinah. Eli lives in Pittsburgh and has a marathon PB of 2:37:50, and a 5:44 Beer Mile.
Agreeing to the Gap Relay again with the same group of misfits as the last two times didn’t really take much thought, though it should’ve given my race schedule for October.
London, Boston eight days later, then the Relay 4 days after that!? I’ve made dumber decisions but not many.
Regardless, I couldn’t miss it and I figured we’d have it in the bag easy just like the previous two years. But this year wasn’t anything like the last two.
For starters we were going the opposite direction, Pittsburgh to Cumberland. Personally I liked that idea since it made getting to the start a piece of cake, I only live about a mile away!
But right from the start we had all kinds of anomalies and screw ups that could’ve totally derailed us. Before the race even started I had to head back to my house to get stuff I’d forgotten and then meet van one at the first exchange. No problem though since like I said I lived so close.
So everything seems fine as we’re waiting for Michael to come in with the lead after leg 1. Except he didn’t. Instead some youngster that looked like Freddie Mercury came blazing in about a minute or two ahead of Michael.
No worries though, we got some big guns on the team that would relish the opportunity to chase some poor sucker down.
Then something weird happened. Scott took the hand off from Michael as if that’s how we had planned it. Thank goodness that’s how it went because Tony wasn’t there to take it like he was supposed to.
Tony had gotten misdirected by some rogue signage during his warm up on leg 1 and got lost. He eventually found his way to the exchange but we had to scramble to get van 2 to drive to the second exchange so Scott would have someone to hand off to.
Fortunately they were on top of it and Steve was there for the hand off despite originally thinking he wasn’t running for a couple more hours.
This combined with the threat of another team challenging us put Tony’s coaching mind in gear. He took the original lineup and completely reorganized it to maximize our potential.
Unfortunately we didn’t get the message to van 2 fast enough so we ended up shuffling the lineup again. But then my dumb ass wasn’t ready to take the hand off for my second leg after the shuffling so Steve, once again, stepped up and ran when he wasn’t originally scheduled to.
And then Scott literally busted his ass trying to keep our lead during his second leg, which he did. But he was out of commission after that so yet again Tony shuffled the order. This was fortunately the last time for that although I’m not entirely sure we finished the rest of the legs exactly as he’d written it up.
In the end we pulled away from the young guns and triumphed a third time by an hour and fifteen minutes. Our slimmest margin yet but still plenty good enough to keep our reign as the only team to claim the top spot at this Relay in its short history.
The young guns were worthy competitors, despite their questionable choice in facial hair grooming. And to their credit they ran with six guys instead of eight so we’re all looking forward to them coming back with an eight person team next year.
So a totally different year with lots of drama and possibilities for us to blow it but the result was still the same, overall champions!
Like I said at the beginning, there was really no thinking about it when Scott got us together again and there likely won’t be next year either. | |
N of 1 Running