A week ago Saturday was the 23rd Annual Fred Brown Relay, an eight-person 65-mile stage race around Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire.
My club often competes at this race, and this year we entered a men's over-40 team. One challenge of a stage relay is to find runners who consider it fun to drive for hours, race solo over hilly terrain, perhaps without ever encountering another runner, and then drive for even more hours following their teammates as they slowly advance the baton around the Lake. Our team this year had great enthusiasm for this task, and spirits were high as we all headed for our appointed rendezvous points on the course.
These days, large corporate-sponsored stage relays are becoming a fixture on the New England Road Racing Calendar. Events like "Reach the Beach," the "Green Mountain Relay," and the "Ragnar Relay," are well-organized two-day races that cover up to 200 miles and charge entry fees of over $1000 per team. In spite of this, the races regularly reach their limit of teams.
Unlike these newer events, the Fred Brown Relay is hosted by a local running club (the North Medford Club), charges a modest entry fee ($250 per team this year), and uses actual volunteers to hand time the legs. Traffic control is minimal and runners are mostly on their own.
Not surprisingly, faced with increased competition from the professionally-organized and more heavily-marketed Relays with their spiffy web sites, the Fred Brown Relay has been shrinking in recent years. This year, only 75 teams completed the race around the Lake. Only a week later, 434 teams would finish "Reach the Beach."
If it perishes, many old-timers like me will mourn the Fred Brown Relay and its storied history. That history began not in New Hampshire, but on Cape Cod when the legendary Fred Brown -- a beloved figure in New England Road Racing and a tireless champion of small, local, inexpensive races -- organized an annual relay from Plymouth Rock to Provincetown in the early 1970's. The P-to-P relay, as it was called, was quite an event, and attracted the top club teams in New England, including the BAA, Central Mass Striders, and many others.
Despite its popularity with runners, the P-to-P relay was never embraced by residents of Cape Cod who resented the influx of cars and runners every fall. In the late 80's the race moved to New Hampshire. The relatively flat point-to-point journey to the end of the Cape has become a relentlessly hilly loop that starts and finishes at "Funspot," a roadside attraction and tourist diversion located near the top of a long hill not too far from Weir's Beach. This was the course we were about to tackle.
Mike and Kevin had the early legs, and both set out from Boston before dawn to reach Fun Spot in time for the 8:00 a.m. start. Meanwhile, Terry and I had left Boston later and were headed to Alton Bay and the second exchange point. From there it would get a little complicated. Kevin, running second, would hand-off to me, running third, and then drive with Terry, running fifth, to the start of Terry's leg. Kevin would then backtrack to the end of the third leg, deliver a race number and pins to our fourth runner, Paul, and wait for me to finish. Kevin and I would then drive to the start of the sixth leg, deliver more numbers to Al (running seventh) and Andy (running eighth). We would then backtrack, meet Terry at the end of the fifth leg, and follow the race together after that all the way to the end.
But back to Mike -- Mike would start it all off by running the 10.5-mile first leg, a rolling course that begins with a long downhill into the village of Weir's Beach before climbing nearly 600 feet up to the entrance of the Gunstock Ski Area.
I had run this leg in 2010, and I knew that the final climb -- three miles of relatively steady uphill would be tough. Michael had predicted a time of 67 minutes, based on the distance but not the hills. I thought he did well to finish in 70 minutes, handing off to Kevin at ten past 9:00. Kevin's leg began with two and a half miles of downhill, and I had told him that his stride was perfectly suited for the terrain. It was, but I had somehow failed to mention that after those early downhill miles, there were another 8 more miles to run, including some tough uphill stretches. Kevin ran really well (68 minutes for the 11-mile leg), but had the look of someone on whom a trick has been played as he handed off the baton to me in Alton Bay.
I had told Kevin that I didn't care how fast he ran as long as we had a proper hand-off. It drives me crazy to see receiving runners standing flat-footed as their teammates come barreling into an exchange zone. In such cases, the incoming runner hands off the baton and then runs PAST the outgoing runner, who finally decides to start moving after receiving the baton. I swore this would not happen to us.
Bad: Incoming runner passes outgoing runner... and laughs about it! Do you see think hand-offs are a joke?As Kevin approached, I extended my hand and started running. The baton never stopped moving, and one respectable hand-off later I was on my way for the dreaded 3rd leg.
Kevin and Jon demonstrate a proper hand-off, gaining precious tenths of a second in this seven-hour race.
The third leg begins in Alton Bay, next to the water and is exceedingly pleasant for about 600 meters. It then heads straight up Bay Hill Road, a steep half mile climb that ends on a barren stretch of highway that has no scenery of any kind for seven miles. I had never run the third leg, but I felt it would be good for me. It wasn't.
I actually felt ok at the start and ran the hill with restraint so that the first several miles on the highway were steady. I managed to catch two runners who had started before me, bringing our team into 4th place overall. We didn't know it at the time, but that's where we would stay for the next 40 miles of racing and that's where we would finish four and a half hours later.
By the last few miles, the constant rolling hills had taken their toll on my legs, and I plodded into the village of Wolfeboro a humbled man.
After handing off to Paul, I walked around a bit drinking water and Gatorade. After 10-15 minutes it was back into the car for the drive to Moultenborough. It was a brilliant late summer day, and after leaving Wolfeboro we found ourselves driving along beautiful back roads with occasional views of the lake to our left and mountains to our right.
While Terry ran the fifth leg, we drove ahead to the start of Leg 7, met Andy and Al, and found out that we had missed Jonathan who had taken the shuttle bus to start of Leg 6 numberless. So it was back in the car, and back to the previous exchange zone to find Jonathan and wait for Terry.
At this point, nearly 5 hours into the race, our team was in fourth and the runners were so spread out that there was essentially no traffic or congestion. As we waited for Terry to arrive at the exchange, we noted the first, second, and third place teams, separated by several minutes each. It was another fifteen minutes before Terry hove into view and passed the baton to Jonathan. There was no chance we would catch any of the teams in front of us, but could we be caught? We stuck around long enough to time the gap to the fifth-place team at just over five minutes. With 19.4 miles to go that was close!
Jonathan took the baton for the sixth leg and looked to be running well. With Terry in the car, we were now in a position to provide support to Jonathan at various points along the road.
We chose a spot a couple of miles into his leg, and I grabbed a water bottle to hand to him. Remember, I had run nine and a half very hill miles a couple of hours ago and had been cooling off ever since. As Jonathan ran towards me, I tried to run alongside and hand him the water, but my legs were shot. I managed to hold out the bottle, and Jonathan grabbed it form me. As he took a swig, I tried to accelerate to get the bottle back from him, but he was past me and pulling away like a train pulling out of a station. Eventually he realized there was no hope for me and tossed the bottle backwards over his head and continued down the road. I retrieved the bottle and limped back to the car where Kevin and Terry were laughing at me.
We saw Jonathan several more times, and he continued to run well. Even so, the team behind us (we would find out later that their team name was "Tunnel of Pain") had sliced almost a minute and a half from our lead. As Al began the 8.8 mile 7th leg, we had a lead of under four minutes.
The 7th leg is a long, soulless slog from Moultenborough to Meredith along a busy highway facing oncoming traffic. Its final miles feature several "false summits" that fool the runner into thinking he or she is almost done. When the runner finally gives up guessing, there is a final sharp downhill to the exchange zone.
Our runner for the seventh leg was Al Paine, probably the least intimidating human being on the planet. Soft spoken and slight of stature, wearing long shorts that make him look like a high school freshman, Al is, nevertheless, an impressive runner. From time-to-time, Al takes a notion to train for some marathon other. He trains by running and running and running -- twenty mile runs, thirty mile runs, seemingly oblivious to the normal limits of fatigue and attention span. Al seems to have a very high tolerance for discomfort of all sorts, including heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and... traffic.
The runner from "Tunnel of Pain," on the other hand was tall and athletic-looking, sporting short shorts and a singlet that actually fit him (Al's singlet was about three sizes too big). He looked like a ringer, and we were nervous.
Fearing the worst, we drove ahead to offer Al encouragement and time the gap as the race proceeded. In the first few miles, our fears were realized as the athletic-looking guy began to close the gap. At around three miles, our lead was down under three minutes. But we also noticed that athletic-looking guy was straining, fighting, his eyes downcast to the pavement as he encountered each new hill. Al, on the other hand, looked impassive, unperturbed as he shuffled along the highway oblivious to the pickups roaring past. At four miles, Al's lead was still three minutes. Then -- a miracle -- at five and a half, it had grown to 3:15. Al's tortoise was putting time into Tunnel of Pain's hare. By the exchange, Al had regained all of the lost time and hand-off to Andy with a lead of 3:49.
The final leg is only 4.4 miles, but is all hills, the longest one a steady climb of 1.1 miles. We had chosen Andy for this leg because in his youth he had been a "fell runner" in England, that is, a runner who competes in races that consist of running up and down "fells" all day. He embraced the role, and ran a very solid final leg to bring us home in 7:06:19. I took this picture as he crossed the line...
We hung around for a while, watching "Tunnel of Pain" finish a few minutes after us, then a top women's team, and then... no other teams for another half hour. We chatted with the teams who had finished ahead of us, compared notes, ate the cookies and other refreshments provided by the race organizers, saw a few teams finishing at about eight hours, and then got in our cars and headed South.
The early morning drive seemed like it had happened a long time ago. Not much had changed since then, although I was going home with a handsome beer glass -- one of the eight that we had acquired by virtue of our finish as the second master's team. It would have a place of honor alongside the half a dozen similar glasses in my kitchen, the reminders of previous years at the Lake.
