Silicon Relay

I took a bye week from my Saturday long run, but my headache has finally receded to a dull ache and I woke up this morning ready for the silicon relay race - always a fun morning of running and socializing.

Nancy's dad has been driving me insane with his constant demands and complaints that we aren't keeping him entertained or satisfying his every whim fast enough, so I was looking forward to getting out of the house for a while.

And I had a good day - I ran a very comfortable 45 minute 10k (almost exactly the same time I ran last year) on what was a cooler but still very humid morning. Have to be happy with that.

And I got a chance to catch up with a lot of friends I haven't seen since I stopped leading the Monday night trail run and backed out of Round Rock Fit. It was great to see everyone.

As for retaining our trophy, I'm almost certain our team ran the fastest time in our division but it never got recorded so we have no idea.

You see, they'd changed the timing chip setup this year. We had one disposable chip per team which we were supposed to loop around a rubber bracelet which was then worn around the wrist and passed between each runner on the team.

The problem was that it didn't work very well. What with all the pulling and rubbing and passing between 5 sweaty guys, it seems to have stopped functioning after the first two (of five) legs.

And it appears that this problem affected a lot of teams (the results page show 252 of the 404 teams are listed as not completing all 5 legs). I have no idea how they're going to sort out that mess.

So the cup was awarded to another team who finished about 10 minutes after us. I'm good friends with the captain of that team, and had actually given him a lift down to the race. To his credit, he told them he couldn't take the trophy because he knew they hadn't won.

I didn't care too much either way - I already have two of them - but I did want our team to show in the official results, so I went over to the timing van and had a chat with the guys there. They were really good about it, and updated their database to include the missing legs.

So in the end nobody claimed the trophy - we all went to the beer garden instead and had a good laugh about it.

And that's exactly as it should be.


PS. all morning I was seeing Stephanie's team. Everywhere I turned, there were those red "Bear Wrestler" t-shirts. So glad I got a chance to cheer for her on her 5k leg.