Part Fun, Part Logistics
I joined The Red Eye Runners, Steve’s Reach the Beach team, at the last minute when one of his teammates had to drop out. My friend Lisa commented that Reach the Beach is supposedly fun but a logistical nightmare. Luckily for me, this was the team’s fourth time running the race, so they had their system dialed. All I needed to do was show up and run. Our friend Kevin also joined the team, so we had a strong climbing contingent and I felt right at home.
Me, Kevin, and Steve, ready to ascend if needed
Reach the Beach is a 200 mile relay race that starts at the foot of Cannon Mountain and ends at Hampton Beach. Our team consisted of twelve runners, each of whom would run three legs. My legs were 7.8, 3.8, and 9.3 miles for a total of 20.9 miles. I was given the plum position of starting first and although I worried about having my hardest leg last, it worked out very well.
The Red Eye Runners at the starting line
Crew and Be Crewed
A big part of the Reach the Beach experience is supporting your teammates. The organizers don’t provide water anywhere on the course, so teams need to not only bring their own but strategically position themselves to hand it out. That meant that we were all both runners and crew.
Crewing for Steve along his hardest leg
It also meant a lot less downtime than crewing for something like the Vermont 100. As soon as someone was off and running, the rest of us were off and driving to the next rendezvous point. On shorter legs, that might be the next baton hand-off point, but on longer legs we usually stopped and met the runner at least once along the course. That way runners didn’t have to carry their own water.
My van mates waiting to crew for me on my first leg
Having never had a crew before, I didn’t quite get into the rhythm of chugging fluids at designated points. On my first leg, the crew met me halfway as agreed, only to watch me shake my head and blow past them. I’d almost caught up to someone and didn’t feel like slowing down.
Flying by my crew
I like being able to drink when my exertion level is lower, so I’m not always in the mood when a hydration stop comes up. In road races, there’s a fluid station every mile or two, so you can afford to miss one, but going 7 miles full tilt without a drink would have been tough if it hadn’t been a cool, drizzly day.
My second leg was too short to bother with a pit stop, but for my third, longest, and warmest leg, I sent the crew on ahead and carried a water bottle.
By the time we’d met the runner halfway, driven the rest of the way, gotten the van parked, and walked to the hand-off point, there usually wasn’t long to wait before the runner appeared. Crewing made the time go faster between running gigs and getting my own chance to run made the crewing more rewarding.
Kill! Kill! Kill!
One of the unusual aspects of RTB is the staggered start. The organizers want everyone to finish at the same time, so each team is assigned a start time based on their estimated completion time. Our team was assigned 11:00 am, which put us pretty squarely in the middle of the pack.
In a normal race, the people in front of you are faster than you are and the people behind you are slower. After all, that’s how you got into those positions. So if someone passes you more than a few miles into the race, it’s not a good sign.
At Reach the Beach, the people in front of you are slower and the people behind you are faster because the organizers stacked the deck that way. The farther into the race you get, the stronger this strange effect becomes and the more crowded the field gets. Theoretically, we all catch up to each other in one blazing dash for the finish line. (Fortunately for the already tortured logistics, it doesn’t quite happen that way.)
The Red Eye Runners track how many times you kill (pass someone) and how many times you get killed (are passed). For my first leg I was running with people who’d started at the exact same time as me, so in order to keep my kill scoring simple I made a point of being the last one out of the chute. I ended my leg somewhere in the middle of the clump, which gave me credit for six kills without any risk of getting killed myself.
Leaving the gate
By leg two, things had changed. It hadn’t gotten crowded yet–this was still only leg 13 out of 36 overall–but there were runners from all different start times on the course. I passed two; two passed me. It was a dead heat.
On my last leg, I was blowing past people as fast as people were blowing past me. The effect can be demoralizing if you don’t recognize the hopelessness of holding off someone whose predicted pace is two minutes per mile faster than yours. On the other hand, if you’re the fastest runner on your team like Steve, you can feel like a hero picking off kill after kill.
“This is our home now.”
Like most teams, ours rented two vans. At any given time, one van was on active duty, with its six runners rotating through their legs, and the other van was doing its best to eat, sleep, and stay out of the way. Crammed into each van were six runners and everything they owned–running shoes, sleeping bags, bottles of Gatorade, and bags of trail mix.
Lunch at Echo Lake State Park with Whitehorse in the background
As Kevin commented partway through the second day, “This is our home now. This is where we live.” The van starts out as a vehicle. You cram your bags in the trunk and sit upright in tidy rows with seat belts on. It ends as a dorm room. Clothes–wet, smelly, worn, and muddy–carpet the floor and hang from random protuberances. Pillows and sleeping bags are draped over the “couches” where recline semi-coherent, unwashed humanoids. Food is wedged between the seat cushions, eaten at all hours, and tossed across the room on command. At bedtime every surface becomes a bed. It’s a claustrophobic, messy, friendly environment that happens to roll.
“It’s a white van. Have you seen it?”
Our vans were white. So were everyone else’s vans. Apparently this race uses up the entire inventory of white rental vans for the Eastern Seaboard. As you get farther into the race, the transition areas get more crowded and the quantity of white vans grows beyond the imaginable.
Breakfast amongst a sea of white vans
I came to realize why the legs are such random lengths–that’s how far it is to the next place you can park 200 white vans. With more than 300 teams and each team having two vans, it’s possible to have as many as 600 white vans at the key spots where teams switch from one van to the other. Of course not everyone has a white van. Some people have a white mini-van. And woe be unto them. It was crowded enough in a full size van.
To give themselves a fighting chance at finding their own particular white van, people decorate them. We decorated ours with washable markers. In keeping with our team name, Flo drew large red-eyes floating atop tiny bodied runners on the back windows. Then it rained. During our van’s first down period, when it was no longer raining, we decorated it again. Then it rained again. The second time, she apparently used a more resilient marker to draw the bodies of the runners so the bodies remained while the eyes washed away. From then on, we were the headless runners.
Views of the Serenity Van during the short time it was decorated
Our van was called the “Serenity” van because it holds the nicer half of the Red Eye Runners. In this, I was clearly misplaced, but I did my best to be serene and confine my competitive mutterings to my own times.
Flo, Sue, Kevin, Jane, me and Steve – The Serenity Van crew
Running Against the Numbers
It’s been almost a year since I ran a road race. I’ve put in a lot of mileage since then so you’d think I’d be getting faster but the numbers didn’t suggest that. Our team captain asked us for our half marathon time and I gave him the best time I had. He then used a complex series of formulas based on our supplied half marathon times and the supposed length and difficulty of the leg to predict how long it would take us to run it.
My first leg was 7.8 miles and my first predicted time was 1:03. I didn’t know how hilly the leg would be but that seemed about right. Steve said to run at 90% capacity so after the first mile I turned it on. I came in about half a minute late feeling like I’d run faster.
My second leg was where I thought I could make up some time. It was only 3.8 miles, in the dark, in the rain–optimum running conditions. I felt like I was flying over the dark, wet asphalt. Lights flashed around me–from my headlamp and safety vest, from the vests and lamps of other runners, from police cars monitoring the route–and were broken into prisms by glistening rain drops. It was a quiet leg through deserted town streets. My head was down the whole way. I was sure I’d come in faster than the 30 minutes Bill had predicted, but I was more than a minute slow. Panting, grumbling, and steaming from sweat-and-rain soaked clothes, I stumbled back to the van plotting my last leg.
Not only was my last leg the longest of the three at 9.3 miles, it was also the one described as “hard” by the organizers. We were learning that the descriptions seemed to have more to do with the length (short = easy, long = hard) than the terrain, but there was some comparison within legs of the same length and my first leg had only been a moderate. I wasn’t feeling tired, despite having run hard earlier that day (or was it the day before?). Nevertheless, I doubted I could run nine hard miles at full tilt.
I decided to strategize by walking any particularly steep hills. That’s Steve’s strategy in longer races (though he didn’t walk any in a race as “short” as this one) and I’d found in training that I could turn in just as fast a time by walking hills as by running them and maintain a more positive attitude while I did it.
The hill section started less than a mile into the leg. I felt like an idiot dropping down to a walk and being passed by people I’d just passed. I’m sure they thought I was done for (and such a short way into the leg). But at the top of the first hill I felt redeemed as I sped back past them. From then on, I didn’t worry about it, even when someone running past me said “come on” in an encouraging voice. I stuck to my strategy and ultimately left all the people who’d been running the hills while I walked them behind. After a particularly long, steep hill, the course flattened out. The rest of the leg was either flat or downhill and I was full of energy.
Coming in to the transition area, I was sure I’d beaten my target this time, and I had. By ten whole seconds! Over almost 21 miles, our captain was only a minute and a half off in predicting my times and only 22 minutes off for the entire 200 mile race. I guess his formulas work.
Oops, there goes gravity
Once everyone in our van had run their third leg we had nothing to do but drive to the finish line and await our teammates. Since the finish line was at a beach and it was a lovely day, this wasn’t a hard task.
Me and Steve, having “reached the beach”
We stopped on the boardwalk for ice cream and french fries and a return to reality. Suddenly people were fat again. There were children and dogs and senior citizens who weren’t in the best shape of their lives. No one lived in a white van or was changing in the back seat of one. People didn’t travel in packs with their five new best friends. When a runner passed by, no one cheered. We had spent two days in a very strange world where everyone was just as strange as we were, thus normal. The real world was a little bit flat.
Fortunately, “normality” was restored when we parked in a field whose only crop was white vans and followed a stream of toned, tired people in desperate need of a shower to the finish line. Our runner appeared right on schedule and we got to join him in the last dash. Our team captain gave us our shirts and medals in a lovely ceremony on the beach and we posed for a last photo together. I don’t know if I’ll ever get a chance to be a Red Eye Runner again, but I enjoyed this one.
The Red Eye Runners at the finish line
Steve’s account of the race
