We took the baton Home…

Friday, July 18, 2014

I was never really a fan of waking up in the morning, Sleep and I have that twilight kinda love relationship. I am still not a morning person but race organizers do not care about this. They want us behind the start line at 7am. 

The idea of Kaya fm 67km Relay for Mandela Day is to have 10 runners each running 6.7 kilometres and two people from a team run at once but they do not have to run at the same pace. This is a corporate race so teams from different companies enter, I like this race because it gets people to be active which is the motivation idea behind this blog. One factor I do not like about highly publicised races is the amount of people who don’t really run that enter. I support people pushing themselves to get fit but not when I have to stand behind a metre of people who are going to affect my pace. 

The route was a constant uphill for the first three kilometres, I did not enjoy weaving my way through people for twenty minutes. As if that was not enough to make me start walking, there was no coke. I think that the best coke in the world is the coke that they serve out at the races while I am running and the sun is just burning me and I am sweating like I am in a sauna and the sweat is creeping into my eyes blinding me and I wipe the sweat off my face with my race tee and I flash the people around me with my stretch marks and I reach out for that cup of coke and it glides down my throat giving me brain freeze and also almost choking me at the same time while quenching my thirst. But I don’t think I have ever finished all the coke in the cup because I still have not mastered the art of running and drinking at the same time.

The worst thing about this race was wasting time in the exchange chute looking for your team mate, like they say time waits for no man. I do not know how this can be improved but next year there must be a solution to this problem. Nothing is discouraging as pushing yourself hard, while burning in the sun only to waste another 10,15 minutes searching through a sea of people to hand over your baton. Apparently some teams quit because of this, I think I also would if I could not see my team member.

I have always loved watching athletics on tv, one of my favourite events is the relay because it exposes your teams group dynamic and how well you work as a team. What I have learnt from relay races is that the most important thing is getting the baton over the finish line. We had a rather smooth race up until we got to the fourth leg where runner no. 7 was faster that runner no. 8, so obviously runner no. 7 finished quicker than runner no. 8 and runner no. 7 told runner no. 9 & no. 10 to go off together because apparently they cannot run separately. So runner 9 & 10 go off running with 1 baton, when runner 8 arrives there is nobody to run with the second baton. 

Who is at fault? I don’t think it really mattered by this point I was too cold, tired and hungry to give a damn. I just thought to myself I ran and it is okay. We only got 1 baton's result and it was not my baton, so I did not get my time. It is like I was not even there the only difference is that my Nike+ says I have added 6.7 kilometres to the Nike+ community.

And that is how we took the baton home...


Something that should never happen when you are running a relay race, at least I took my medal home as well...


This tale as told by Atlegang (IG: butatliruns)


In the Video below are thoughts about the race from members of the Braamfie Runners Crew.



You Might Also Like

0 comments