There are ten legs in the race, so ideally, you want a team of ten. I was on a team from Sitka originally, but it ended up not working out for everyone and it sorta fell apart. It seems a large number of teams have trouble keeping all the numbers that signed up in the first place so there are quite a few teams scrambling to find last-minute runners. A few members from the team I was on dispersed and joined other teams. I joined a Juneau team called the UAS Road Scholars at the last minute.
I was worried that I was going to slow down the team since I had not been training as much as I would've liked. I felt like I was not in as good of shape as I had been when I ran the half-marathon in Boise three years ago. I predicted I would run 11-minute miles.
The race started at 7:30 PM PST on Friday evening. The first four members of our team shared a vehicle and followed the race. Meanwhile, the runners following the first four, myself included, tried to get a little sleep before leaving around midnight to get to checkpoint 5.
I maybe slept an hour and then we were off. We got to checkpoint 5 and I was the next runner so I was pretty nervous. We got there about an hour before when we predicted the switch would be. I couldn't rest in the car though, I was too nervous! So, I got out and just stood by and watched all the runners.
It was about 2:30 in the morning when I started running. It felt so crazy running in the middle of the night. It was dark. Every runner was required to wear reflective gear for the cars that passed on the road. Some runners wore head lamps to see where they were going. I didn't wear a head lamp. It was sort of a thrill to run when it was pitch black and not know for sure where my feet were landing. I ran along Tutshi Lake and I crossed the border from British Columbia to the Yukon Territory. It was about a 14-mile run and I made it to checkpoint 6 at 4:36 AM. I ran 9-minute miles! My team called me a sandbagger. Hahaha.
The last picture is Tutshi Lake.
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