Tuna Run 200 - Competitive Relay Racing
Race information
- What? Tuna Run 200
- When? October 20-21, 2017
- How far? 203.67 miles
- Where? North Carolina
- Website: Tuna Run 200
Goals
| Goal | Description |
|---|---|
| A | Win |
| B | Set New Course Record (faster than 23 hours and 50 minutes ) |
Background
So the Tuna Run is a local relay race that goes from Raleigh to Atlantic Beach in North Carolina. A bunch of folks from my local run club have done it in previous years, so I've known about it existing for a while. I did the DC Ragnar Relay back in 2012, so I'm familiar with how this style of relay race works, and I had a great time, but hadn't necessarily been eager to jump back into it. Especially since I'd made the shift over the last year and a half into becoming a competitive runner, the thought of paying a good chunk of money to run a "for fun" relay race wasn't really appealing.
So back in February, a few guys from the local running community that I sort of knew / had heard of, plus a few that I consider friends, came to me and asked if I wanted to be part of a super team for the Tuna Run. The team was being established with a bunch of fast guys with a singular goal: to win. Apparently there was a team (Pickle People) that had won the race for the last four years and had been bragging about the lack of competition. So our team was born to take them down and break their course record.
All of us were on the same page and so I figured that a competitive relay race could be a lot of fun. I got the wife's okay to go vanish for a day and a half in October and formally joined the team, honored to be part of "the fast crowd."
Some folks came and went from the team over the next several months as real life got in the way of training, conflicting plans for race weekend, etc. but by the end of it, we'd assembled a very strong team. We even added u/eabryt a little over a month before the race as another runner had to back out due to a bad hamstring.
Oh, and our team name? Just so that there was no question about our attitude: Do You Even Run, Bro?
Training
My training hasn't been the best this year. Work has been pretty hectic, real life has been chaotic, but I've done my best to hold to about 30mpw with at least one quality day. Sometimes it's been 20-25mpw, and I got up to 53 miles during super week, but my goal has been 30. And then on September 20th, I got bronchitis.
I tried to run through it. I ran six days with bronchitis, doing the minimum one mile to keep my streak alive. And it was beyond miserable. Just truly an awful experience that was making me hate running. I couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without doubling over coughing, let alone jogging a slow mile. So I quit. I broke my 484 day running streak and quit running.
After 12 days of zero exercise, I slowly started to get back into running a week and a half before the race. I managed 30 miles of training in the month leading up to the race all told. That's nowhere near enough for anyone, regardless of previous running history.
I was scared about my fitness. I was going back and forth in my head about whether or not I should call up the team leaders and ask them to replace me. I knew that I'd promised to be able to run a 6:30 pace for my segments and that I wasn't going to be able to do it. But I knew they were going to have a hard time finding someone at the last minute and I was going to be heartbroken to miss out on it. But I also didn't want to be the reason why the team lost.
I ended up having a heart to heart with one of the guys and they swapped around a bunch of legs, giving some folks harder assignments than they'd been hoping for, in order to accommodate me. I also cut back my expected pace to "sub-7" and was hoping that wouldn't screw things up too badly.
Pre-race
We got our obligatory race vans loaded up with all of our gear and drove to the start line. Teams had started going out as early as 5:30AM (staggered starts based on estimated race pace in order for all teams to hopefully finish within a few hours of each other), but we and the Pickle People teams (they had two, one open division, one mixed) were the last to start at 12:30pm.
We attempted to take a team photo at the start line and the Pickle People were photo-bombing us (we photoshopped over it later), waving a giant pickle flag around, and taunting us about getting us a second place flag so we could celebrate at the end. It only fueled our desire to win even more and we counted down to the beginning.
Race
This is going to ramble a bit, as I'll cover some of the race details as well as my own legs.
We started our fastest runner on Leg 1, as did the Pickle People. Then both teams had their second fastest runner (/u/eabryt for us) on Leg 2, then we settled into a mix of runners from there.
Things started well for us with the first leg. u/eabryt took that lead into the second leg and extended it further. By the end of the fourth leg, we were six minutes ahead. By the time I ran my first leg (Leg 9), we had a 15 minute lead established and were pulling out of exchange points as their team was arriving.
My first leg was the shortest leg of the entire course - 1.6 miles. I'd been telling myself not to get too excited and to run it at a normal pace, not to run it at the pace I'd race 1.6 miles. Welp not quite - 5:55 pace. I was just so eager to go race that I couldn't hold myself back. At one point, a local pulled up alongside me, rolling his window down and asked why there were people out running along the country roads. I tried to explain "Tuna Run ... Rlay to ... Atlantic Beach..." between breaths and he eventually drove off. The team had been shadowing me in the van and was concerned that the guy was upset / going to do something angry (there are occasionally incidents where drivers get pissed and try to hit / scare runners on the roads). Thankfully, not so in this case. I felt strong for the leg, was happy to put in a solid effort, and climbed back in the van.
We had a spreadsheet of everyone's expected legs / paces and how it would stack up against the course record. We'd set a goal to break the record by over an hour and were well on track as we went. We kept having to make adjustments as to how much faster than the spreadsheet we were running, too.
We tried to stop and sleep a little around 8 or 9PM I think, but my memory is kind of fuzzy. I remember laying down for about 30 minutes in the grass next to the van, then giving up and getting some coffee. And I'm pretty sure that was before my second leg.
I ended up running my second leg at 11:30PM, going 6.4 miles in the dark. We were finally starting to catch up to the earlier waves and so I was excited to get the chance to pass some folks. I took off and passed two people right out of the exchange point, then proceeded to pass six more as I continued through the leg - 6:42 pace. I almost got a ninth person, but couldn't quite chase them down at the finish. I felt strong throughout, but could tell that I was going to be hurting in a few hours. Running through the night was a little difficult, because I didn't have a good idea of where I was going (just the occasional "turn here" signs) and the random noises from the fields I was running next to. Thankfully, nothing bad happened.
Once our van was done for the night, we drove on and tried to find somewhere to crash for a while. We stopped at an exchange zone and tried to sleep again. This time I went in and tried to sleep on a church pew. It ended up being too uncomfortable and too noisy to sleep for long. I think I managed about 30-45 minutes of real sleep before it was time to go again.
Our van took back over around 4 AM and we kept rolling through the morning. As of Leg 27, we had officially passed all teams in the race - no matter how early they had started. So not only were we the fastest team out there, but we were also the team closest to the finish line at that point. We also started calling the race director to alert him that based on our current pace and expected finish time, we were going to arrive at the finish line two hours before he was going to have it set up to receive teams.
I was feeling massively exhausted from so little sleep plus so much running on such poor training, plus nauseous from being so tired, plus had massive cramps in both calves, and had my hardest leg coming up. At around 6:50AM, I started Leg 31 - 8.4 miles along a busy, 55mph, road with an almost non-existent shoulder. I warned the team multiple times that I wasn't going to come close to my expected pace and that at this point my goal was a sub-8 pace. At this point we weren't worried about getting beaten by the Pickle People team, but were just trying to smash the course record as hard as we could.
I did a quick warmup run with u/eabryt (while he did his cooldown) and it didn't help my legs at all. I decided I was going to need all of the help I could get and so I threw on my headphones, turned up the music, and then it was my turn to go.
My hope was that after a mile or two, my calves would warm up and I'd be able to speed up. That didn't happen. They stayed cramped the entire leg, painful every step of the way. About six miles in, I started to get a really nasty side-stitch. I kept praying that the van would drive by and they'd ask me if I was doing okay. If they had, I would have immediately begged for them to swap runners and claim I was injured. Instead, they drove by ... waving and cheering. So I just kept grinding through the leg, handing it off to the other van at the finish and struggling to stay on my feet and not just collapse. A 7:27 pace was not what I'd wanted, but it was better than the sub-8 I'd been warning about, so it was okay.
The rest of the guys continued plowing through the remaining legs, to the point where we actually had two legs where we did our exchange before the race volunteers even showed up to supervise. We ended up just taking photos and filling out the paperwork ourselves to prove we were there.
Our final runner started his 5.4 mile leg and both vans drove to the finish line to wait. Depending on his pace, we knew we were potentially able to break 22 hours for the race. The runner couldn't promise anything at that point, but gave it everything he had left. We stood around, drinking beers and waiting for him to show up.
And then he showed up and the whole team ran the last 100 yards to the finish with him. We finished in 21 hours and 59 minutes, averaging a 6:28 pace across 203 miles.
We broke the course record by almost two hours. We finished almost two hours ahead of the next team. We crushed our goals, the competition, and all expectations.
We had an amazing team that gave everything that we each had. I'm so proud of everyone on the team and what we accomplished, and I'm even reasonably happy with my own performance, despite putting in what were by far the slowest miles the team had.
Post-race
We started downing food like crazy, drinking celebratory beers, etc. One of the guys, in a very cheeky move, had gotten t-shirts printed several weeks prior that proclaimed us the winners. If we'd lost, we were going to have to burn them or ship them to a third world country like the losing Super Bowl team, but thankfully that didn't happen. So we stood around, drinking beers, eating tuna, and wearing our victory shirts while we cheered the other teams on as they finished over the next few hours.
A few of us had to head back home that evening, so we swapped some stuff around in the vans and I drove the three hours back. u/eabryt was a champ to stay awake and talk through the drive, helping keep me awake. I also gave a ride to two of the Pickle People, who gave filled us in on their side of the race. They also apologized for their behavior at the pre-race photo and said if they'd known how much they were going to lose by, they'd have been a lot more humble.
All in all, it was a very fun experience. I hadn't realized how competitive a relay race could be and I'm looking forward to doing it again next year. There have already been rumors of a few other people trying to put out feelers for assembling their own "Super Teams" to try to take us down and break our course record.
Bring it on. Do you even run, bro?
This post was generated using the new race reportr, a tool built by /u/BBQLays for making organized, easy-to-read, and beautiful race reports.
Posted Oct 23, 2017, 12:20 PM UTC · edited
Man, u/Eabryt didn't include what a bunch of jackasses the other team was in his write-up. That makes crushing the course record (and their team) even better! Interestingly, these Ragnar-type events are the only place where I hear about runners talking shit or otherwise being rude to their competitors, it really seems to bring out the worst in some people for whatever reason.
Congrats again, and that is super impressive that you were able to stick with it coming off bronchitis!
We got a chuckle out of seeing all of the vans driving around with their "Kill Count" markings on the side. Our vans were completely undecorated sketchy white passenger vans for the entirety of the race. Not a team name, not a reference to the Tuna Run, nothing.
We did realize at one point that unmarked white vans driving around trailing runners at night looked a little sketchy, but by then it was too late.
We made up for it by parking our van next to the finish line and finally doing a little decorating.
But yea -- there was a decent amount of shit-talking between different teams, which was kind of surprising considering that most people were in it for the experience and not racing competitively.
And thanks - the bronchitis made things a lot more difficult, but on the plus side it means that improving my performance next year will be a no brainer! :)
"When life gives you pickles, make relish."
Holy fuck. A+. Sexy, excellent stuff.
If every one else stays equally fit, and you don't get bronchitis next year, you can single handedly power another course record!
I hate the "kill counts".
But I'm ok with some light shit talking. Last one I did, we had magnets made with our name and used those to tag other vans (others did this as well). I'm also a fan of decorating the vans, that is just fun.
We set up a super team for my last one too, but the only two teams that hung with us for even a little bit were high schoolers. We didn't feel the need to shit talk them.
I saw a few teams that did the magnet thing - that was actually pretty cool and inventive. I like that idea for next year.
My theory is it's just tribalism. We all have this tribal drive inside of us that gets chippy towards others when we let it. We do it all the time. Something about being a part of a community can bring out both the best and worst in us. If we focus on our selves, and the betterment of our potential, then we can bring out the best in one another. If we focus on the other, on the opponent, on the different, then we bring out the worst in ourselves, given over to pettiness and blind groupthink.
Anyway, that's my two cent hack job of analysis on the issue.
I'm honestly pretty convinced a lot of our problems in society come down to unbalanced tribalism creating meaningless (but violently protected) divides.
You mean race and religion are actually pretty silly things to kill people over after all???
In all seriousness, I think you are spot on in your analysis - anything that can be made into "us" and "them" categories has the potential to power unbelievable good, but can also be used for unimaginable evil, and I do agree that the bullying at these events is an unfortunate example of that.
It is still odd to me though, because running is usually so inclusive, even in a team environment. Every really good xc team I competed against in high school or college were always humble in victory, and their runners would regularly encourage those from the other teams. So it makes it kind of odd to see it get so vicious at these events.