But it's a good kind of pain...

This is slightly off target for I'm not a manny, but significant enough to be posted. I recently participated in a truly interesting athletic event right here in Vermont. It's called the 100on100 road race, a long distance relay that covers 100 miles on Rt. 100. I was 1/6 of a team of runners, mostly comprised of St. Lawrence University alumni. The lone dissenter was a Rochester grad, but we gladly let it slide because she was lovely company and solid runner to boot. All in all, SLU alum were part of 4 separate teams in the race, showing once again that SLU runners are in this for life and we mean business.
The weekend started out Friday night when Dwight Raby, a fellow teammate and class of '96 graduate arrived at our house for dinner. Dwight flew in from Georgia, showing his world-class commitment to our objectives of simply fielding a full team. Several more runners arrived a few hours later, with the last coming in on a delayed flight from Philadelphia, which arrived painfully at 2am in Burlington.
Saturday morning, we were off to the starting line at Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe at 7:45am. The organizers collect estimated pace times for all teams and stagger the starting times accordingly, so that the gracious volunteers who support the race are not stretched all over the course for 14 hours. Our team was to start at 10am, and finish roughly around 8:30pm. I'm not sure what I was thinking 6 weeks ago, because I gave them a 6:20 pace time/mile, which is a little exaggerated (we decided to use aggressive instead of exaggerated for the remainder the day) Our team roster and order of legs was as follows :Amy Farrell (she of top-notch speed and endurance, clearly in the "good people" category and most importantly, Ruby's mom), Peter Cutler of Norwood-Norfolk fame( he's fit, fast, funny and a college coach), Becky Dwyer (the previously mentioned UR grad and our official on-staff physician for the race), myself (nothing to add here), Dwight Raby (the georgian musician whose claim to fame is getting smoked in a song-writer contest by John Mayer) and last but not least, Chris "Sammy" Wilcox (our captain and unofficially, SLU's greatest alum).
The race kicked off from Trapp and we soon found ourselves as the last team on the course. Not necessarily the slowest mind you as I mentioned the staggered starts, but still the last. Our motto for the first cycle of runners was "don't stress the support team!" The organizers explain that if you fall significantly off your predicted pace, they will move a team up along the course with the van and adjust the total time accordingly and most importantly, said team is no longer eligible for awards. I should explain a little bit more about the structure of the race. Teams of 6, taking turns or "legs", each member running 3 separate legs over the course of 100 miles. Each leg is a different distance, the shortest being 2.5 miles, the longest being 7.3. For example, I was the 4th runner, I didn't take my 1st run until about 11:45. I then would wait until my turn came around again or in this case, started my 2nd run at around 3:45 and my last started at 7:50pm.
In between legs, we would cheer our runner at the moment, provide water along the course and knosh on whatever food we decided would supply all-important nutrition but not make us sick while running (mostly GU's, powerbars, gatorade, bagels with PB and J and twizzlers. We finally started catching teams at around the 50 mile mark and then it was on! Spotting slower runners while driving the support van, we would shout encouragement to our runner along the likes of,
"Run like you stole something!"
"Low hanging fruit coming up!"
"Don't stress the support team" (our favorite)

I took a couple of breaks after runs to soak in an icy cold stream that ran along parts of Rt100, which was very helpful once I got past the creepiness getting bumped into by fish and eels.

We finished around 9:30pm, tired, sore and happy to be done. Food was supplied (real food, not the athletic bird food we ate for 11 hours) I was able to catch a ride home with some friends and was finally taking a much-needed shower at 1:30am back home. The last 36 hours have been very achy and sleepy, but I'm getting slowly better. I mentioned to Paige yesterday morning that I couldn't carry her down the stairs because my legs were hurting. She planted a kiss on my thigh and declared that I was" all better"! Not quite, but I certainly appreciated her sweetness.
All in all, it was a completely awesome event, I recommend anyone needing to run 16-18 miles in one day to give it a try sometime. I ran 15.9 miles in a total time of 1 hour, 46 minutes and 11 seconds and it may take me 15.9 days to completely heal, but I'll be anxiously awaiting the next race once the recovery is complete.