Notes
Get Lost Relays is no joke. This leg of running is up there with some of the most difficult experiences I've had in running. The mistake I had made on the earlier leg was in my mind going into this. I ended up running on the road about .5-2/3 of a mile longer than I should have and blew by the entrance to the trail. I saved some woman from repeating my mistake on the way back and we entered the trail together. The trail itself - to call it a trail would be stretching the word trail to its limits. I'd say for 95% of this, if you looked down everything looked the same. Ferns were waist high majority of the time, ankle busters everywhere (rolled my ankle really bad three times!), a couple swamps for good measure that nearly took me out of my shoes. Oh, and the heat - this leg was BRUTAL! Realistically, I was probably running 8:30-9:00 pace for most of this (when I was running), but most of this was stopping, assessing my location, walking a moment, etc.
I had 20 minutes up on Evan going into this leg and he caught me not even halfway through the actual course. There were four other people in our little "lost" group and we kept up some quality accordion-style running. Thankfully, there were people at a water stop at the third mile - they scolded me for not carrying water and I had no energy to respond. I just trudged for the remaining miles.
One of the guys I was running with who was much faster than me, but had even worse navigating skills I ended up running into after the leg. It turned out I ended up beating him because he got lost once more and said he ended up delirious, so that's wild.
While this leg sucked so much, I think it was the reason the rest of my weekend was pretty successful.