We ran throughout the beautiful Texas countryside… town to town…

I only managed to get two legs in before my IT band said no more. I’m pretty sure this injury was a result of the Austin marathon and over-training… I plan to switch to the bicycle for the next few weeks while I recover. Thankfully, my awesome team managed to pick up the rest of my legs. We eventually made it to the Houston downtown area…

In the end, we managed to get to the San Jacinto Monument in 24:59:10!

I believe we placed in the top 5, but I’m not sure. I’ll know when the final results are posted from the race. On the whole, I highly recommend anyone who wants to do a relay race to do the TIR, there’s no better way to explore the Texas country side.

203.20 miles and 40 relay legs of running goodness…

This time I have the honor of being team captain and organizing the logistics of the race. After calculating our current leg times, I’m predicting that we will finish under 24 hours which is my goal. Last year the team finished just about 24 hours and we received 3rd place in the open mixed division.

My goal is to best that time from last year and hopefully finish in the top three again. I will take pictures and document the journey as much as I can!

It was an early morning… the race started at 7am and was delayed slightly since the sun wasn’t up yet! On the bright side, there was a nice view of the Long Center in Austin while the sun was coming up.

Once the sun came out, things picked up and people started running!

I had the honor of running the first leg of the race which was a 12K that weaved around downtown Austin. It started out great, I crossed the first mile marker at about a 6:30 pace and then things went bad as I came around the Texas Capitol building. My stomach wasn’t cooperating and was on its way to give me the runner’s version of Montezuma’s Revenge. I had to make a quick pit stop and picked things up to finish just under a weak 52 minutes. Overall, the team did well, no injuries and lots of fun!

Lap   1      51:58.8     6:58/M    7.456
Lap   2      50:57.7     8:12/M   13.670
Lap   3      56:50.4     9:09/M   19.884
Lap   4      25:51.5     8:19/M   22.991
Lap   5      23:20.2     7:31/M   26.098

To numb the pain of what I viewed as a terrible time for my 12K, I headed for the beer tent!

The only downside of the beer tent was like in hell, it only served Heineken Light.

But hey, it’s free beer!

Next up on the schedule is the Run Austin Run half marathon!

I usually wait for pictures to show up before I blog about race results, but it seems the pictures are never showing up (I’m looking at you Kreutz Photography). Here are the results:

Lap   1     15:27.13     6:20/M    2.440
Lap   2     16:55.39     6:56/M    4.880
Lap   3     17:09.67     7:02/M    7.320
Lap   4     15:34.66     6:23/M    9.760

I had the honor of running Lap 1 which I ran at a decent clip. I was shooting for sub 6 miles but I’m not there yet at a consistent level. I need to concentrate on more speed work in my running workouts. I hoping to improve my time a bit at the Austin Marathon Relay this weekend albeit I’m running a 12K leg distance instead of the nice 2.5mi distance

My team finished 197 injury-free miles in 26:58:54!

I had the honor of doing the following legs:

• Leg 6
• Leg 18
• Leg 30

I ran an average of about a 6:30 mile for each of the legs with no injuries so I’m happy!

I highly recommend the race to anyone who hasn’t done it before… it’s beautiful!

This weekend it’s the Zilker Relays!