Race Report: Reach the Beach - September 14, 2011

Hard to do a race report for an event that lasts 24 hours. I could write a book. All the funny things that happen, and the strange little places we ran through, or pitched a tent in the middle of the night...

Team Rowayton Runners 2011 - at the beach!

The Reach the Beach running relay has got to be one of the craziest and most-fun things I've ever done: a team of 12 runs 200 miles over a 24 hour period. The race starts at Cannon Mountain, in the highlands of New Hampshire, and ends on the New Hampshire coastline at Hampton Beach. 


Each team member runs three or four segments - sometimes an 8-mile segment at 2:00 in the afternoon, sometimes a 3-mile segment at 3:30 in the morning. Everyone, and I mean every team member, of every one of 400+ teams - about 5,000 people, rides from staging area to staging area in vans. White vans. So many white vans.

Our team, the Rowayton Runners, is a great group of people from town that I've known for years. The team includes some pretty strong runners, and I felt honored to have been invited. I knew I would have to kick it to earn that honor. I was a last-minute recruit to fill-in for an injured team member, recruited because I was already fully trained and ready to compete, not because I am a rock-star runner (improving, but not as strong as the rest of the team!).


I can't really talk about my own performance that much, because I was so humbled by the effort and performance of my teammates, but I think I did fairly well for a guy who isn't principally a runner. As for the team results, we did very well, but lost first-in-division to our arch rival, Team Big Brain, by only 16 seconds. That's right - 200 miles and twenty-four hours of running, and we lost first by only 16 seconds.


We all lived and re-lived each of our segments many times on the van ride home, thinking about where we could have found 16 seconds.


This was a really fun thing to do, and a really really solidly fun group of people to do it with. This post can't do justice to the experience. But for sure, I would do that event again next year in a heartbeat.