The Bourbon Chase 2010

It's that time of year again. Time for the running adventure. Time for the 24 hour relay. After running Reach the Beach five times, it was time to try a new relay: Bourbon Chase. The Bourbon Chase is a 200+ mile, 12 person relay that travels from Louisville to Lexington, KY traveling along the Bourbon Trail. My previous teams for Reach the Beach expanded and created two teams: 3 Old Crows, 9 Spring Chickens and our master's team, The Flying Anvils. With a week of rearranging people and vans, we somehow only wound up with 11 on our team and thus we set out to beat our master's team.

The race began at Jim Bean and would basically travel from distillery to distillery, including Maker's Mark, Heavenly Hill, Four Roses, Woodford Reserve, and Wild Turkey. Waves started early in the morning, 8:00am, with the slower teams and the last wave left at 6:30pm with the fastest teams. Both our teams started at 3:00pm. Here's a picture of our two teams together:


I was the second person to run for our team and this may have been the last time our team was in front of our master's team (thankyouverymuch!).

There I go....

Each person ran somewhere between 12-20+ miles on this journey. I personally ran just under 15 miles. Because our team only had 11 participants I was runner 2, 13, and 24. My first leg was 6.2 miles which ran mostly on a freeway. Talk about scary! The second leg was 4.2 miles and I finished exactly at midnight. The first two legs I ran felt great. I was cruising along, had a great pace, and felt good. My third leg started around 7:00am and was also 4.2 miles. I said to my legs, "get moving." And they said back, "Um, no." My first 4.2 miles was 33:46 and my second 4.2 miles was 36:14. Yeah, I was toast. That's what happens when you don't run for like two months. :)

We didn't get a whole lot of rest on this trip, not that you ever do on these relays. I was in a van with 6 people, but the other half of our team only had 5 people and was the fastest of our 5 people (including one who recently qualified for the Olympic Marathon Trials). So our van might have taken 4 hours to run our legs but the other van probably only took 3 hours. I might have gotten about an hour and a half of real sleep during the entire 26 hours.

So, we lost to our master's team. They're pretty fast. They beat us by an hour or so. Of course, my dad was on that team so I've heard nothing but gloating for days. Our master's team came in 13th overall and third in the men's masters division. The team I was on came in at 25:52:04 (7:46 pace), finishing 20th overall, and 10th in the men's open division (we only had 3 women--you need 6 for a mixed team).

Now the good stuff...

• I did a bourbon tasting at Wild Turkey where I had some American Honey, which coincidently is my favorite song by Lady Antebellum. Yummy! My second tasting was at Woodford Reserve. That sucker burnt all the way down!
• I finally got to meet super blogger, Amy, from Twenty Six Point Two. She has the cutest accent. Being that I was so tired I forgot to get a picture of us. Next time, Amy.
• I wore my finisher's shirt from Rev3 Knoxville for a majority of the race. Man, I got asked from tons of people about the race and lots of people said they were going to do it next year. Rev3 is totally going to blow up (especially after this crazy news)!
• And the weirdest thing of all...while wearing my Rev3 finisher's shirt I had a gentleman say to me, "I ran that race." He then really looked at me and said, "I ran that race with you." Turns out it was Chuck, who did run many miles with me during the 10K running portion of the race.

I had fun. I met new people. It was fun to be reunited with some of my old running buddies. It was good to see Andrea again. We haven't seen each other since Boston 2009. I think I ran decently. Maybe next time I'll do a little more training...