Exercise and Fitness Blog

The Boise Turkey Trot relay is the first relay race I had ever run, and it was a lot of fun.  There’s a bit of a story about how I got invited to run in the relay race, so I wanted to post it.

I was sitting at my desk yesterday when my phone rang and a familiar voice (albeit one I had not heard in a while) announced himself. After the typical small talk he told me about the Boise Turkey Trot relay race he and three friends had registered to run the next day. Apparently one of his friends had injured his back and he wondered if I could fill in. I said I would.

The race involved a two mile course around the beautiful Ann Morrison park near down town Boise. Each team member would run the same two mile course and would predict his finishing time before the race began. Awards were given in a unique way. Rather than giving the prize (four large turkeys) to the team with the fastest time, the team that came closest to their predicted total time was the winner.

We drove to the park in the rain and found a group huddled under portable heaters with hot chocolate and coffee being served. Everyone was dressed up warm while waiting to run. The rain drizzled down throughout the race, but the temperature wasn’t too cold (about 50F). I found my friend and met the other two runners in our team. I also got a cup of hot chocolate for my daughter.

Based on my what my treadmill has been telling me I figured I would run the two miles that would be my part of the Turkey Trot Relay in about 19 minutes. As it turns out I ran at a comfortable pace and finished in 16:24 (so much for treadmill readouts). We apparently ran in a different order than what we told them and so the results website shows them assigned to the wrong person (I ran the second leg). Not bad for having less than 24 hours to plan for it.

I got a great pair of socks with turkeys on them and had a fun activity with my family. Our overall time was only off by 2:19 from our estimate and the fastest runner on our team finished in 14:38. It was a fun race, one that I’ll probably do again.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Exercise Stories, Fitness Motivation, Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.