Green Belt Relay – Round 3! – Girl Running Crazy

Last weekend was the annual Green Belt Relay, it’s one of the Chasers favourite events of the year and never fails to be an awesome weekend away.

At the start line

The Facts:

GBR is a 220 mile running relay around London’s scenic Green Belt
The race is made up of 22 stages over 2 days
Stages differ in length, terrain, elevation, and navigational difficulty to allow everyone to participate
Teams of 11 race 1 leg per day across the 2 days
A record 40 teams entered the GBR this year, Chasers made up 3 of them
Although the routes are marked, you are reliant on your own navigation to make sure you don’t get lost
The smooth running of the event relies on participation from all teams to help marshal each stage and provide water stations
It is not flat!

Marshaling duties – Chasers this way, Serpies, errr, that way…

The Highs:

Chasers took 9 stage wins in total
Bryn smashed the leg 17 course record by over 3 whole minutes!
Leg 3 and Leg 14 were lovely routes
There was a pub right next to where Graham and I were marshaling (phew)
We got to stay at the high class Miami hotel in Essex again
I got to spend the whole weekend with Gemma
I didn’t crash a minibus!
It was Nathalie’s 30th birthday so there was lots and lots of cake
We rescued 2 injured runners from leg 10 and safely got them back to their friends and relations

The Lows:

I had a bit of a breakdown on not just one, but both of my stages
My legs didn’t work
My lungs didn’t work
I was a little bit sick in a bush near the River Lea
We accidentally forgot to pick up the leg 10 runners at the end of their run – sorry 😦
Sleep. There was none
A Serpie on leg 17 rudely told our helpful marshals to ‘get out the way, I know where I’m going’ – Simon Barrett, shameful & unnecessary, you give Serpies a bad name

The Learnings:

There’s a possibility I still haven’t fully recovered from the London Marathon
It’s easier to write the route on your hand than look at a map
No matter how many times Gemma tells you how pathetic you are, it won’t make your legs move faster
No matter how pathetic you actually are, Gemma will never leave you
It’s much more fun to cartwheel and pirouette at the finish line than run sensibly
No one can beat Bryn
You can always count on Ross to run an extra leg if there’s an injury
You can also always count on Ross to wear very tight shorts
No one enjoys Ross’s very tight shorts as much as our Barry. He even has a special dance
You can’t wash your hair with a bar of soap no matter how hard you try (and Jenn really did try)
The Green Belt Relay was, as it always has been, a very well organised, fun and all-round brilliant event