Sky High at Lake Tahoe Relay

This is why I am watching a lot less spectator sports–running and track is much more entertaining as well as being immersive!

For the second year in a row, the MVXC/MVTF boys organized a team to compete at the Lake Tahoe Relay race.  The Lake Tahoe Relay is a 72 mile, 7 person relay race around Lake Tahoe–so an average of more than 10 miles per runner, at altitude, and most of those miles are hilly (when the organizers call a leg ‘flat and fast’ that is a cruel joke).   This year, the boys kindly invited their coach up for the race–I’m glad I got the invitation because this was a very, very fun day.

Jason and Kyle’s parents arranged a cabin for all the boys, parents and coach.  Jason had put together the team and a meet sheet.   All coach had to do was show up and cheer!  That would have been good enough but the day got better…

After Peter ran the first 9.4 mile leg, the race began to string out a lot.  With less than 100 teams taking on the challenge of a 70 mile relay at altitude, and the teams of different ability levels, after a while a spectator might only see one or two competitors at a time.  When supporting your team, your van is moving around to drop off and pick up relay runners and support your runners with water stops (the race is basically anarchy; the race organizers monitor the exchange zones and otherwise everyone is on their own, self-supporting).  So while you know how your team is doing, it’s easy to lose track of how your team is doing relative to other teams–there is no Live Results site.  However…after a while I began to see the same teams hovering around the exchange zones about the same time.  This meant that these were the teams that were in our general area of competition.

There were several teams of high school runners; in addition to the team that the Monta Vista kids put together, there were teams that were composed from McFarland, Fresno and South Lake Tahoe.  The McFarland team was long gone–I’d heard that they were a high mileage program and this seems to be the case as these long relay legs seemed to be no problem for them.  But at some point I realized that the Fresno support vehicle was around a lot and seemed to be there longer.  I got out my stop watch to figure out where the MV boys were relative to the Fresno team.  We were just over a mile behind, with 30 miles to go.

Game on!

(Game on for a big relay like this is very different from a 5km race.  Striking distance for a 70 mile race is a very different kind of thing…we were 10 minutes behind, and that seems like a lot, more than a mile!  But there were also 30 miles to go.  The Lake Tahoe Relay is not like a track meet…you need to wrap your head around the distances!  So fun.)

At water stops and exchanges the last few legs we started to tell the boys how far back they were from Fresno.  Aravind took two minutes back from Fresno, and Rohun picked another minute and a half on the challenging ‘freshman leg’.  Jeffrey took the hand off with a five and a half minute deficit…and made almost all of it back, gaining more than four minutes!  In the end, our boys finished on the podium in 3rd, only 1:23 back of Fresno!  Only 1 minute behind on a race that took 8 hours and 40 minutes…that’s .03 in one of Evelyn How’s 100m races.  I couldn’t help thinking about how close Jeffrey and the Fresno Leg 7 runner came to having a full on sprint to the finish of a 72 mile relay race!  Jeffrey really destroyed that leg, Jeffrey was the fastest high school runner and he logged the 7th fastest time on leg 7 including all divisions and age groups.  Overall, the team took 12th place among all teams, all divisions, all ages, with 68 teams finishing the race.

This was a very exciting day to be a spectator–at least from your coach’s view!  I’d much rather take ten hours to support these boys and this race and have all that fun rather than watch a baseball game.  It’s great fun and incredibly entertaining to be a part of this race.  The boys were killing it, supporting each other and I could tell they felt a lot of satisfaction at the end.  For runners, being in the middle of a race like this with your friends–I can’t think of anything better.  I hope the boys keep this tradition, and maybe grow this to include alumni too.  And it would be fun to see the girls find a race or some other activity they could make their own.

I put together a table below with McFarland, Fresno and MV legs so you can see the way the race evolved over the course of the day.

Distance relays are so great!

Thank you Tsujimotos for arranging all the travel, and thanks to Jason and all the participants.  What a fun day!

McFarland, Fresno A and MV Results by Leg