Where do I even start

This past weekend has been amazing. It was so much fun and so hard at the same time. I could not have had a better group of women to experience it with. Each one of these amazing ladies gave it their all every leg. I could not be more proud of them and us and I could not be more happy that we decided to have this adventure!

I guess you start at the beginning. Thursday, after driving several hours and picking up our awesome van driver Sarah and other teammate Mary we headed to Brevard North Carolina to load up the van with food and hit the packet pick-up at Oskar Blues Brewery. 

After some serious planning and eating some dinner from the delicious food truck the race organizers brought in we headed back to the hotel to make sure we got some good rest before we started the relay at 5:45 the next morning.

 4:30 Friday morning we packed ourselves into the 15 passenger rental van and our teammate Kelcey's SUV and headed to Pink Beds, N.C. start line. And at 5:45 a.m., after four months of planning, it was go time.

And we ran our butts off from early morning and throughout the day. Up and down the Smoky Mountains we went trying not to let the mountains get the best of us. The scenery was beautiful. The other teams were friendly. It was amazing to watch my teammates crush leg after leg of the relay. But pretty early on we learned a valuable lesson:

A hill is not a mountain!!!

Many of us had run hills in preparation for the relay. I have no doubt that the hill running helped. But running a hill is not the same as running four miles straight up a mountain climbing a couple thousand feet in elevation. Whoops. Now I personally have two more mountain relays coming up this year- Wild West Relay and Hood to Coast- I better get my butt to some mountains and run. The "a hill is not a mountain" lesson was just one of many lessons we learned over the next 36 hours...