Rocky Neck Relay: Drenched and Muddy

East Lyme, CT

Sunday, April 23, 2023

1st race of 4 in the USATF-CT MUT (Mountain/Ultra/Trail) Grand Prix series.  Hosted by Hartford Marathon Foundation.  Was asked if I would join a Striders masters mens' team, and I did.  

This race is a little different format in that 1) it's a 3-person relay only*, and 2) there are two components:  a 5K road course and a 5K trail course (each relay participant runs both).

*There were individual (i.e., non-relay) options as well, in both an open 5K road as well as running all of the legs of the relay for a 30K individual race.  I don't think that I would have been interested in either of those unless they were part of the Grand Prix series, and they weren't.

Sleep disruption:  No matter which race or leg(s) you were running, you had to be inside Rocky Neck State Park by 7:45am at the latest, as the park roads were also the race roads, of which the first start was 8am.  Went to bed early the night before to get a good night's sleep, until I was awoken by a phone call at 1:57am.  I woke up to thunder and a torrential downpour, and I figured the call was to let us participants know that the race was cancelled due to weather.  It wasn't (obviously at this point), and instead the call, accompanied by a text, was a National Weather Service Code Red alert on a severe thunderstorm warning.  Thanks, but did I need to know that at 1:57am?

Race morning:  Got to the park in an absolute downpour, which would be par for the course most of the race.  My two teammates (relay-mates?), Kevin and Steve, were texting me asking if we should bother to put up the tent in this weather, as we could just escape back to our vehicles between our own individual legs.  I convinced them we should as we'd have somewhere relatively dry to stand under when finishing our leg and more importantly waiting to start the next leg. 

We set up the tent pretty quickly.  Race officials came over and said we could only set it up if we had stakes to hold it down in the wind, which fortunately we did.

Watched the race start (I was in legs 3 and 6), and then I went to the car to get changed into my race attire.  It was nice then to wait in the tent and have a place to put dry clothes and hang up my rain jacket.  I went out for a warm-up, and initially had thoughts of running the 5K road leg as a warm-up, but it was just pouring so hard that I cut it short to a mile and went back to change into dry socks and racing flats and await my teammate to finish leg #2.

Rainy race start - leg #1

Leg #3 (road 5K):  Kevin showed up and handed the "baton" (a soaking wet race belt with our team bib and chip hanging on by one pin) to me.  I took off with the race belt in my hand, wrapped it around my waist, only for it to slide down.  I tried hard to tighten the belt repeatedly awkwardly while running, but failed.  I ended up unbuckling the belt and tying the ends together.  Splish-splash, splish-splash, this is a deluge we are running in and it's difficult to see in places with the rain coming down so hard.

Fiddling with the race belt,
while I splash through the flooded road

Splish ... splash

I counted off the runners as I passed them, more than 30 in total, but it was impossible to tell which were in the relay and which were laggards in the 5K.  Not a single runner passed me, so that didn't really help me as I had no one to chase and it made me artificially look like I was going fast.  It was a drenching downpour the entire leg, and the road was always soaked, but there were places where the road was just completely flooded in ankle deep water.

Once I sensed we were close to the exchange zone, I went to take off the belt to be ready to hand it off.  Uh-oh, I tied it, not buckled it and I'm having trouble to untie the soaked and drenched knot I created.  I'm running into the exchange zone with my two hands furiously trying to untie the knot, and I fortunately get it undone just in the nick of time for Steve to take it.

Got to the tent and Rob Buttermore asked me what my time was.  I told him just under 20 minutes (my watch showed 19:59, but actual time ended up being 20:05.  He rightly asked me what happened with that kind of time.  Combination of weather, tinkering with the wardrobe malfunction (race belt issue), and I guess just didn't run well running out there as an island.

Road results:  20:05, 1st of 83 in my leg, 1st master.

In between:  Got some granola snacks from the food tent, came back to our tent, went into the portable changing room, stripped off, toweled down, and changed into completely dry everything, including socks and trail shoes.  The one wet article of clothing I'd have to put back on would be my team singlet, which I only had one of.  Went back to the car, hung up my singlet from the rear view mirror over the vent, and blasted heat on highest fan setting for about 20 minutes, occasionally shifting the position of the singlet around.  I was conscious of the time and after 20 minutes, the singlet wasn't bone dry but rather just a little damp in places.

It turns out I had a lot more time to spare, but I didn't know that and waited for what seemed like a long time for my teammate to finish leg #5 and hand off to me.

Waiting for the handoff

Leg #6 (trail 5K):  I didn't have any of the angst with the race belt this time, and I quickly realized I wouldn't need to worry about untying it before the exchange as I was the one carrying the race bib and chip through the finish line.  Didn't bother with buckle or adjusting, just tied it hard in a knot and went off.

Through the puddle, under the railroad bridge onto
the beach, and then to the trails

Within just a few minutes of me starting, the rain came to a complete stop, but this course was flooded.  At least it would help with visibility that I trouble with in the downpour road section.  We were on sand and then a dirt road for just under 1/2 mile and then rest was single-track.  I passed runner after runner, some because I was just simply running faster than them, but many others because they were pussy-footing around the wet and muddy section by awkwardly staying to the extreme sides of the trail, whereas I just plowed forward through whatever mud, muck, and stream there was running through the middle of the trail.  There was one section of trail where the mud was ankle deep and it was ripe for sucking the shoes right off runners' feet, but I plodded on unscathed.

At the northern halfway mark we were ever so briefly on a paved path that I bombed downhill past a couple more runners, and then re-entering single-track I didn't seen runners again for a good half mile.  This section was pretty tight and fortunately every runner (except one) that I came upon already heard and gave me room to pass.  The one runner who didn't give me room didn't hear because he HAD HEADPHONES ON!  Argh.  One of my pet peeves.  I yelled three times with increasing volume, "ON YOUR LEFT!".  No response.  He still didn't even notice me.  There just wasn't much room and I bumped into his shoulder as I passed him on the left.  I guess he noticed me this time!

Runners who had already completed the trail 5K were telling me about the swollen river that awaited.  With about 1/2 mile to go, I came up on a stream that was swollen.  It looks like there might be rocks on the left that I could just jump on to get over the stream, but instead I just took a beeline through the ankle-deep stream hoping there was nothing underwater that I would twist my ankle on.  There wasn't.

I sauntered on, thinking this was what people were talking about?  Then I saw it.   Ahead of me was a river that when visiting here recently I crossed on boards, but the boards were washed out of the river, and it was probably 20' across.  There was one narrow board and series of logs that still went across, but there was a woman runner on the board trying to balance herself while walking across.  Well, I'm not waiting for her to cross, so here goes.  Jumped into the knee-deep river and got myself through it as quickly as possible.  That was actually pretty fun!  Exited the river, and the trail came to an end.  Short distance on the road, turned the corner, and crossed the finish line.  Done!

Very end of the trail section.
Wished I could have gotten the swollen river section.

Trail results:  24:20, 3rd of 77 in my leg, 1st master.  Full results here.

Since there 83 in leg 3 (road), and those same people should have run leg 6 (trail), there were 6 that didn't finish or maybe didn't bother starting the trail section.

Rejoined my teammates to get breakfast at the food tent.  It wasn't bad, actually, as they had hot scrambled eggs, breakfast potatoes, and other items.  But by now it had started to rain steadily.  Again.  And I was getting cold.  Finished quickly and headed out.  

Would I run this race again?  I'm not sure.  Probably not fair to consider thus in my downpour experience, but it took up much of the day with a lot of sitting around.  To be fair, it was well organized and everything was well marked and executed.