We dawdled a bit too much in the morning and were running rather late by the time we drove in to Whistler. We still had to pick up the timing chips and the bibs and poor Jen was becoming increasingly nervous since her run was about to start and... well, we didn't quite have our shit together. I didn't care. I was leg 7.Figured it out, get to the start line and off they went: leg 1 of the relay.
Sherry had us all pick out these feathered masks that we were supposed to wear on our hats. It worked out really wonderfully because I could always pick out the runners on our teams because we were the brilliantly plumed ones. Plus it helped us to identify incoming runners to better prepare for the all important hand off.
So now it's 8am and I have had about five hours sleep, have a mild hangover and am absolutely freezing my nuts off. It was so cold that I couldn't stand it. And yes, I know compared Calgary and other uninhabitable parts of Canada it was actually a balmy -1 or whatever, but I don't have a tremendous amount of body fat and we weren't really moving very fast and it was chilly.
We spent the majority of the day wandering between the two exchange points to cheer people on as they finished their legs. Bumped into scads of people (including two women that we went to Chicago with) from the running clinic who were doing relay legs or who were even running the entire 80 kilometres on their own.
Shortly after noon a gaggle of us went for lunch and it was rather surreal sitting there in sixteen layers of clothing, eating eggs benedict and drinking coffee with a feathered mask on over my running cap, feeling mildly exhausted and knowing that I still had another couple of hours before I would even run my leg.
But the time did past quickly and one minute I'm standing around talking to some people and then next minute I see Parm's brightly coloured plumage coming up the way and we're doing the trade off and I'm off for my 12k on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Whistler.
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