Banff Ekiden Relay

My friend Angie found out about a relay race held in Banff. Its called the Ekiden relay. You might be asking yourself what "Ekiden" means, well, I will tell you.

It is the ancient Japanese system of mail delivery. Couriers would run from station to station a task called Ekiden.

That was then, these days Ekiden is one of the most popular relay races in the world spreading out from Japan to Australia, Korea, New Zealand, Spain, Netherlands, China, Germany, France and Canada. Distances for each Ekiden are different ranging from 5km to 200km, and team obviously varies accordingly. One thing that is the same at every Ekiden though is the unforgettable feeling of community.
(yes i did just copie and paste that from the website)

So anyway we rounded up 3 other girls, and got a team entered. Each leg in the race is a different distance, and totals the distance of a marathon. I ran leg 5, which was 11.7km (7.2miles). I'm not going to lie, that is the farthest Ive ever ran before, so i was a little nervous about it.

Here's a picture of our team just before the first leg started. Notice the ear warmers, and tukes(sp?), it was soo cold outside, I'm sure it was below zero. But we bundled up and kept (mostly) warm.

We were not entering this race to win, just for fun, but I was sure intimidated when I saw the other teams. There were a lot of SERIOUS runners. The first leg of the race was 7km, and the second leg was 13.5km. About 20 min after our second runner left, the first place team was starting their third leg. and when our 2nd runner got back, the first place team was starting runner 5... (make sense?) really we didn't stand a chance, but we weren't doing it to get first place.

Like I said I was the last to run, so I had to stand around for 3 hours while I waited for everyone else to come in. Luckily it did warm up a bit by the time I ran. My goal was to finish under an hour and 10 min. I was worried about getting that time after about 5 min of running. My course was up hill for the first half. I'm not exaggerating. I was huffing and puffing. Eventually it did level out, and i was able to make up a bit of the time I lost on those hills. The last half km was also up hill. Kadie and her friend Jade met me at the bottom of the hill to run to the top with me. As we were running together Jade said to Kadie, "your mom is a slow runner". Trust me that made me laugh. I was going slow, cuz by then I had lost every last bit of steam that I had.

Here's me coming to the finish line with Jade and Kadie. I may have been slow, but it looks like I'm beating them up that hill.

My final time was 1 hour and 12 minutes. So i took 2 min longer than I wanted to, but I was still really happy with that time, because I thought those hills would slow me down more than that.

So, everyone reading this, start training now, and you can join me for next years race. I promise it really is a ton of fun.