5 Fastest Marathoners in UC

5 Fastest Marathoners in UC

The Fort Mill Pax created a 5K Relay CSAUP a couple years ago that was a rousing success.  In the inaugural year, BTW, it was won by SOB/UC men.

The Rock Hill Pax saw this, and raised it up to a marathon relay, dubbing it The Rooster (there’s probably a story in the here, but your imagination may work just as well). 26.2 miles of suck, spread over 5 Pax.

Partner 1 = Miles 1, 6, 11, 16, 21 = Jingles
Partner 2 = Miles 2, 7, 12, 17, 22 = Old MacDonald
Partner 3 = Miles 3, 8, 13, 18, 23 = Posse
Partner 4 = Miles 4, 9, 14, 19, 24 = Ranger
Partner 5 = Miles 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 = Land Shark

Wait – who does Mile 26 (& 0.2)? The whole group runs together.
So each person will run 6 miles; just not all at once. It is basically the Joe Davis 10K from 2 weeks ago, spread out over several hours.

Sounds pretty awesome, right? I know!

The Warm Up

Meet at Indian Land Elementary to clown car to Winthrop Coliseum.

Let me pause to equate clown car’ing as the secret 2nd F. YHC clown car’ed on Friday, Saturday morning, & Saturday afternoon – a total of 10 other Pax spread across 3 rides. Each conversation was rich and diverse. Not being all that much of a talker in person, I tend to shy away from the clown car. I worry about the Car Ride of Silence. It has proven itself time and again to be a false fear. The boys on Screech Owl do love them some clown car’ing; they are my shining beacon of another street. There are some other pairings out there (Longhorn & Hooch, Deflated & Foundation), but I don’t know of trips & quads like Screech Owl. If you haven’t done it (or done it in a while), time to step into that other man’s car.

Anyhoo…

The warm up continued with bringing our gear out to a pre-dawn field in Rock Hill. Then offering to help set up pop-up tents of other teams who thought about bringing fire pits or gas heaters. It was everyone’s first rodeo, but some were MUCH more experienced than others.

The Thang

Prior to the start, Rock Hill’s Popeye gave a few words. RH Popeye’s day job is Public Relations Officer for either RHPD or York County Sherriff’s. So when the 4 officers were shot last week (with the YCSD officer dying from his wounds a few days ago), it was Popeye in the public eye across all media. He had a range of emotions in those few minutes, and rightfully so.  Relief at being able to unplug from that strain for a little while as he surrounds himself with a different group of brothers. Regret at not being able to see his fallen comrade again, missing his hugs and his good works. Reaffirmation that he and all past and future law enforcement officers would literally take a bullet for you. For me. For anyone else in harm’s way. It was a humbling reminder of what kind of life and death choices others make so I can go about my day in my own little bubble.

Dawn breaks on a beautiful open field with a lake that we will be circling. The path is all paved. It is 28°. Jingles and I are ecstatic, because that makes it 20° warmer than when we ran the Joe Davis a couple weeks earlier.

Jingles runs the first mile and brings back intel that the loop isn’t actually 1 mile. It’s 1.3 miles. OM confirms this. At this point, these 2 begin Beautiful Minding / NASCAR Crew Chiefing the ramifications of such news. OM starts with taking our individual lap times and doing some kind of New Age Math on figuring out our actual mile times. Jingles figures out we won’t have to do all 5 laps apiece to get to 26.2; that we’ll get to it much sooner. This realization comes to all the teams at one point or another. I’m certain we were first in realization & calculations (hence the title).

When it was all done, we ended up doing 31 miles in a total time of 3 hours 25 minutes. I went to school in South Carolina, so if there’s any mathematical disparity in what I just wrote, I don’t want to hear about it.

Frosty Moleskin

Ranger (my 2.0) learned several things. He learned that running with someone makes everything better. On his second lap, he just happened to start with Dr. Suess. Don’t know what region he’s from, but they had a full conversation at a 7:30 pace(?!?). It was over before he knew it, but those few minutes was all it took for him to learn that life lesson. They were never able to synch up again on future laps. Ranger also didn’t see Dr. Suess when it was time to leave.  Another life lesson – tell those you meet how much they matter to you RIGHT THEN, even if it’s only for a short time.  And a bonus lesson for those of you reading – you never know how much of an impact you will make to someone. Double bonus – those moments of impact, may be just that – moments.

Ranger suffers from the same mindless eating that his father does. Ate too much between laps 2 & 3, so laps 3 on didn’t treat him well. However, when his time came, he would step up for his leg of the run. When he wanted to walk one of the later laps, he asked Land Shark if they could run together. Clearly an upgrade from what I would have done, even a year ago. I would have run during the part when my crew could see me, then walk the rest of the hidden way. Ranger chooses to #shieldlock with someone faster. Someone who will pull more out of him. If I were in his shoes, I would have run with someone much slower, so I would not have to expect so much out of myself.
I became Captain Obvious to him in the car afterwards.  “When you come up against adversity, will you choose to saddle up with someone who will push you to your full measure, or will you look for someone who will encourage you to take the easy, mediocre, least effort, least growth way?” The intellectual answer seems obvious, but making the courageous choice has been difficult for me. I do find that I am making the hard choice more often, with less friction, since joining F3.

Jingles has a lion heart. He tweaked his knee playing with his boys during Snowmageddon this week.  He didn’t say anything until the convergence on Friday. I think he only said something to explain why he may be a little slower than expected. There was never a doubt to him that he wouldn’t be out there come Saturday morning. With each lap, the pain continued to grow. Determined to do his laps, but worried about the time, he asked Old MacDonald to partner with him (see above life lessons). At the end of the event, visibly limping, he admitted that he had 2 Aleve in his pocket the whole time. But he didn’t want to take them to mask the pain, so as to not make a tweak potentially turn into something worse (hopefully I didn’t violate some HIPPA thing just now; hopefully the disclaimer about not suing me also covers medical). Sound, practical thinking. As for me, I’m allergic to pain. I would have downed whatever I could have to numb the pain. With that many days to think about the pain, I would have likely tapped out or looked for a replacement. Jingles, you continue to reveal more of your heart with each race I run with you. Thanks for sharing.

Land Shark was the first to join the team. Spurred by a desire to make the IL track team this spring, he thought this would be great conditioning / testing grounds. He will be judged by his mile time, so why not test it 5 or 6 times in a day? Find someone to chase down. Find your stride. Find your breath. Find your rhythm. He was put on the anchor leg because this would be the person who would have to run the final lap, then immediately go right back out there to run again with the whole group. And the other 4 would have a break not afforded to the 5th. He accepted it without hesitation or argument. If you’ve been in the workouts with him, he’s the epitome of “less talk, more work”. But he did speak up quite a bit during the CSAUP. And it was all positive encouragement. He’s a lifter. You want this one on your team. I’m calling dibs for the next set of partner work.

Old MacDonald. At first, he was willing to let LS run this thing as the only member of the MacDonald family. But it only took a few hours to realize that this would be a great bonding experience with his son. If you’ve never heard this before, Steven Covey talks about being an effective parent means spending time not just as a family, but spending time as one parent : one child. Have a special time / event / phrase that only the 2 of you share. Each one learns their own uniqueness, which gives them the confidence to express their uniqueness when the group needs that gift. Solid work, Mac. I also learned that he is an exceptional planner. Once we got the group together, I should have just handed off the controls to Old M. It took me to the last minute to get the info out to the group. He also is much better with names than I am. I called our group “O.G.’s & Upgrades”, but he had a string of alternates. My favorites: “3+Two.0”. “Generation Gap”, “We Thought This Was a 5K”, and my winner, “The Young & the Rest of Us”. He is also to blame for this backblast.  I had no intention of doing one (why start now?), but he slid a compliment with an assumptive close so fast, I didn’t realize I just said yes to writing this up. Not that this should have been kept secret, but it’s taken longer to write this up that it did to run the marathon. Still, you all deserve to know the kind of people you run around with. If there’s someone you should run around with more, it’s this guy.

Did I learn anything about myself? Sure.
I’m close enough to breaking the 9:00 minute mile that it makes me want to start working on that.
I’m hard on my son until I write up something like this to realize he’s making better decisions than I did at that age. It’s a harder time, yet he’s handling it better.
I’m surrounded by so many great people everywhere I go now. It’s so pervasive that my thinking is shifting away from “I don’t belong here” to “where do I fit?” It excites and scares me.
I gotta write shorter backblasts if I ever want to see my family again.