David's LGO Adventures: Reach the Beach!

LGO is all about teamwork and how to create, develop, and lead high-performing teams. What better way to test this skill than to run a 205-mile overnight relay race with 9 of your classmates? Well, that's exactly what we did this weekend!

It all started a few months ago when I got the crazy idea to to a Ragnar Relay in upstate New York. I figured that this would be a great chance to find a team of 11 other co-conspirators who would join me. Unfortunately, after assembling most of the team we discovered that there were some logistical issues with getting to the Adirondacks without missing some serious class time. Luckily for us, there was a much-closer but equally-challenging relay: Reach the Beach.

Reach the Beach Course Map: Cannon Mountain to Hampton Beach

Here's how it works:

Assemble a team of 12 runners and come up with a team name
Rent 2 vans and pack them full of people, running gear, and lots of food
Run 205 miles by alternating runners through 36 legs (3 each) over the course of about 30 hours

In practice, it turned out to be a little more complicated than that.

One of the scarcest resources during LGO is time, so it's always a challenge to find people willing to sacrifice two days to do anything and even harder when that anything involves running double-digit distances in the middle of the night and sitting in a van for about 24 hours in a 34-hour period. But then again, this is also an amazing group of students who are always willing to try something new. So after a bit of recruiting, we were able to assemble a team of 12 to tackle the race. Our team name started as the "LGO Bandits" aiming for a cops-and-robbers theme, but it morphed into the "Beaver Bandits" in honor of our MIT Mascot. Unfortunately, some unforeseen circumstances came up last week and took our roster down to 9. With some last-minute recruiting we got the count up to 10, but ended up having to head to the race down 2 runners. Oh, and Weng Hong ended up crashing his bike 5 days before the race and may have bruised/broken a rib. That man is an beast!
The van logistics turned out to be fairly simple (other than the fact that one of the runners we lost at the last minute was renting one of the vans). After some last-minute shuffling we ended up with 2 stylish Dodge Caravans for our journey.
Then it was time to run. We headed up to Cannon Mountain early on Friday morning, arriving with plenty of time to check-in before our 12:00 noon start. It had rained hard the night before, but as we approached Cannon the clouds began to part to sunny skies. That was short-lived though, and soon we were all soaked to the bone while waiting for the race to start.

The runners were divided into the two vans, with the first 5 in one van and the remaining 5 in the other. That meant that each van had a 3 - 4 hour break between each running set. So after the first van started, those of us in the second van headed to the town of Lincoln to have some lunch (questionable Chinese food) and do what any 5 guys stuck in a minivan would do: go shopping! It turns out that there's a Bass shoe outlet in Lincoln and what better way to replace soaked shoes than to get some stylish boat shoes for less than $20!
After our break, it was our turn to run at about 4:00pm. The first van had a series of awesome runs and by the time it got to us our team was 30 minutes ahead of what we had predicted. We kept the trend going with great first legs of everyone. It took us a little time to figure out the logistics of transitions but before long we were transition masters. Once I started running, I discovered that one of the key motivations was to pass other teams (called a "kill" in relay-speak). Catching up to and passing people became my focus, and I ended up covering the 7.2 miles at a 7:20 pace with 12 kills. We handed off to the first van again just before 9:00pm and had a little time to eat and nap.

The second leg for us was the night shift; starting at 12:30am and going till 5:30am, covering 35 miles between the 5 of us. My leg started at 1:30am and covered 9 miles of rolling hills. I was actually pleasantly surprised that I didn't feel sore from the first run and was able to push the pace and get more kills. It didn't take long before I remembered how much I like running hills (something that Boston is missing for the most part), and before long I was racking up the kills. Final stats were 8.98 miles, 7:34 pace, and 18 kills. After everyone in our van had finished, we attempted to get some sleep but it was hard to come by.

Our third leg picked up at 10:00am and went through 2:00pm, covering 28 miles. I was again surprised that my legs weren't feeling the previous runs but I was starting to run out of energy. I was somehow able to rack up a record number of kills with 24 over the course of 8.6 miles at a 7:35 pace, but by the time I crossed the transition line I was completely spent.

Since we were covering the race with 10 runners instead of 12, 6 people had to run a 4th leg. This drove the average distance to 20.5 miles but everyone did a spectacular job on their legs and we ended up heading into the finish almost two hours ahead of schedule. Sunny took on the last leg and we all joined him for the final 100 yards of running on the sand. In the end, we finished in 29 hours and 29 minutes, placing 200th out of 468 teams. Not bad for a bunch of nerds from MIT :-).

But that's enough writing. This race was all about the fun times that we had as a team, and the many adventures that we had along the way. Thanks Cynthia, David, Adam, Sunny, Guadalupe, Ariel, Karl, Sean, and Weng Hong for an amazing experience!

Here are some shots that capture the fun...