“Bib number 143,” was called out by the exchange official. “143!”Oh shit, that’s me as I walked into the exchange zone expecting to be a fewminutes early. Scott Abrams was standing there looking around. I jumped intothe exchange zone and took the snap band and asked how long he was waiting. “Oneor two minutes” said Scott. That was our introduction. I had no time to apologize.
I burned rubber from the boathouse on the Merrimack Riverfor the start of leg 4, the long one (9.4 miles) of the five legs within theMill Cities Relay. Thomas Bok, Brian Lavallee, and Scott Abrams ran the firstthree legs and were a minute or two ahead of schedule. All I had to worry aboutwas to run down Rt. 113 via Lowell, Dracut, to Methuen to hand off to MichaelQuinn who would anchor the SRR masters team into Lawrence.
A guy I did not know was immediately next to me after the boathouse.He commented on the personality of the exchange zone official. We introducedourselves after determining that we were both looking to run low six minutemile pace. Corey Girard was running for the Greater Manchester Running Club(formerly Athletic Alliance). Two guys passed us within the first 600m. Theywould be the only two to pass along our leg. We ran through the drizzle andaround as many puddles as possible. Krissy and I had the same leg. It caught up to here on the trail along the river.
I yelled out splits each mile as Corey and I were feeding off it for confirmation that we were hitting pace. He was holding his own andwe seemed to be matching pretty well as the miles went by. We both seemed content with the pace. I did push the sixth mile for the fastest of all with a 6:05.
It was cool to see Dave Dunham who snapped a few photos. Hewas around six miles (shared that Dan Verrington was just up ahead where ittook me a few miles to catch him) and then after 9 miles. Corey took off as weapproached our exchange zone hand off catching one of the guys that passed us 9miles earlier. It was pretty cool to randomly run with and have company from arunner for 99% of the leg sharing the work along the way.
I thanked Corey after we handed off to our respectiveteammates. My guy, Michael Quinn would finish up for our team who was 33rdoverall and the 7th men’s masters team for the day. My time was58:45 (6:12 per mile pace) for 9.45 miles.
Splits: 6:20, 6:13, 6:08, 6:15, 6:09, 6:05, 6:13, 6:16, 6:13,6:09 for the last .4
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