THE TOM PHILLIPS COLLECTION

• Photo 08:  Preparation for the next photo ...
• Photo 01:  Relay team members photo, showcasing the team van poster (orange colored, of course)
• Photo 02:  Relay team members + family members
• Photo 03:  Team milling around the start.  Is anyone nervous?
• Photo 04:  Team photo underneath the start banner.
• Photo 09:  Another team photo
• Photo 10:  Stretching exercises for Tony Ruiz
• Photo 05:  Our leadoff runner is Tony Ruiz, who was under the (mistaken) belief that a downhill leg with 2000m drop in elevation would be easy.
• Photo 06:  On the road with Tom Phillips, Tony Ruiz and Alan Ruben
• Photo 07:  Peter Allen advertising bottled water on the roadside, with Alan Ruben

THE ALAN RUBEN COLLECTION

• Photo 11:  On the roadside
• Photo 12:  The speediest team member is the designated van driver Stacy Creamer
• Photo 13:  Finish line team photo

This long-distance relay race involves 12 runners each doing three different legs over 194.6 miles.  The runners travel in two vans, leapfrogging ahead of each other.  Since the race is expected to last almost 20 hours, planning and coordination are extremely important.  Before the race, the following projections were carefully drawn up so that people know when to be where.

THE PROJECTED SPLITS

THE PROJECTED TOTALS

The following two tables contain the actual splits and totals for all the runners.

THE ACTUAL SPLITS

THE ACTUAL TOTALS

READER BEWARE:  Alan Ruben wrote: "These actual splits should not be taken too literally since the advertised distances in these types of races are often inaccurate.  I don't think that I ran a 28 minute 10K (4:35 min/mile) for my first leg despite the huge downhill (1700 feet drop in elevation).   I was probably closer to 5:00 pace which makes the distance 5.7 miles."

The following race report comes from Tom Phillips:

The Central Park Track Club truly distinguished itself in the 20^th annual Hood to Coast relay race last month.  A team of nine CPTC members and three friends, plus Stacy Creamer as driver (she was gonna run, but … oh, don’t ask) flew west in late August to run the 195-mile, 36-leg overnight relay.  It was an experience that no one will forget.

The team consisted of Alayne Adams, Peter Allen, Stuart Calderwood, Noel Comess, Tim Evans, Tom Phillips, Graeme Reid, Alan Ruben and Tony Ruiz from CPTC, as well as Tom’s friend John Phillips (no relation, or is he?) and Alayne/Tim’s friends Sue and John LaChance.  All over 40, and just hitting their prime – or so we like to think.

We competed in the men’s masters division (because you need at least six women to be a mixed masters team).  We had projected our finish time pretty aggressively at 19 hours and 37 minutes.  All the logistics, including 35 runner exchanges and 5 van exchanges, as well as brief (~1 hour) throw-your-sleeping-bag-by-the-side-of-the-road catnaps, were planned to the minute.

Well, thanks to all around stellar performances, we ran the dang thing in 19 hours, 8 minutes and 43 seconds.  We finished as the second masters team.  And best of all, we finished 13^th out of a total of 1,000 teams!  In fact, the first 7 teams were all sponsored elite teams, including the only masters team to beat us (courtesy of Reebok).

Some of the highlights, in order of appearance:

• Tony Ruiz stayed focused and ran the first brutal downhill leg (descending 2,000 vertical feet in 5.5 miles, down a windy mountain road) under control.  He ran the thing in 5:10s, and put us in position to blow by our two head-to-head masters rivals.  He saved enough to come back and run very respectable second and third legs on two very wounded legs, finishing with a 5:51 overall pace.
• Alan Ruben was, predictably, our star.  But even our aggressive projections for his splits turned out to be too conservative.  Alan took the second down-the-mountain leg (dropping 1,700 feet in 6.2 miles) and blew it out, running 4:35s!!  That’s a 28:25 10k!!  Don’t try that one at home.  He then came back on battered legs to run 5:40s in the middle of the night and 5:31s the next morning, for a overall pace of 5:15s.  Absolutely amazing!
• I had built my Seattle friend John Phillips up to be a bit out of place on this team, albeit a great guy, given his lack of serious training and his 205-pound discus thrower’s build.  Plus, at 45, he’s well on the way to the next age group category.  Well, he ran a stunning 6:31 pace, 44 seconds below our projection.  Saved us over 11 minutes right there.
• I posted the most boring results of the event, running 5:44s, 5:46s and 5:46s for my three legs, hitting my projected 5:45 pace exactly.  Tony likes to say that I was just extremely focused.  Fact is, I’ve run this thing 7 of the last 8 years, and CPTC training has me running faster than I have since 1995.
• Peter Allen had the second and third toughest uphill legs (I know, I’ve run them twice before), and he put in his standard gutty performance, averaging 5:45s.  To see him storming down the backside of the Coastal mountain range on his last leg (after climbing up the frontside), you’d think he could do a fourth or fifth leg.
• Stuart Calderwood was flying in his late evening (10 pm) leg in 5:34s, and in his late morning (11 am) leg in 5:42s.  That 4 am leg was a little trouble (some people like running in the middle of the night, some don’t, and some get lost – see Graeme below), but Stuart still pulled through with a stellar 5:43 overall pace.

And, ah, the second van.  I wasn’t in it.  That always worries me.  In past years, I’ve pulled together a team of young whippersnappers who weren’t to be trusted on their own.  I always found that the van I wasn’t in surprised us in the wrong direction.  Not so with the CPTC Masters van 2.  They were uniformly excellent!

• Graeme Reid ran 6:17s, right about on projected pace, despite a very tough set of legs and some logistical problems.  Besides running generally difficult terrain, Graeme had to be the one to take the first handoff three times immediately after trying to grab a little sleep while van 1 was active.  And he lost at least two minutes after following another runner down a wrong, unmarked turn.
• Tim Evans had the single toughest leg of the race – straight uphill for almost six miles on a dirt road in the middle of the night.  In past years, I’ve been lucky to get a runner to do 8 minute pace.  Well, Tim did that leg in 6:14s!  His other two legs were also impressive, and his 6:03 overall pace gained us 9 minutes against our projections.
• Alayne’s and Tim’s friends John and Sue LaChance arrived with big reputations, and they didn’t disappoint.  They ran 5:43s and 6:15s, respectively. (Webmaster's note: Sue's reputation)
• Noel Comess had been injured a lot since Boston, but he broke through big time in this race.  Each leg got more impressive, from an opening 6:05 over 5, to an early morning 5:31 over 5.3, to a gutty 6 flat over 6.7.  Trust me, after running two races in the prior 13 hours, you don’t want to be running that third leg north of 10k.  Noel not only didn’t complain, he ate it up.
• Alayne Adams may be the most joyful runner I’ve ever seen.  Given the logistics, the two vans don’t get to watch each other run.  But all of us in van 1 got to see each of Alayne’s finishes, and they were something to behold – big stride, big smile, passing the baton like a mile relay.  And she too just got faster, from 6:14s over 6, to 6:10s over 5, to 5:54s over the final 5, for 6:07 overall.  A fittingly superlative finish for a stellar team.

We’re not sure what the next challenge is, but we think we’ve got something here.  I think everyone on this team wants another crack at one of these strange overnight relays.  And Stacy, though we loved her driving, might like a crack as well.  A whole new CPTC art form.

CRITIQUE:  ... not at all what we expected the founder and president of the famous Spy magazine to write ... where are the scandals!?

The follow report on Van #1 came from Stuart Calderwood:

Noel Comess asked, "How it was that Van 2 was so unbelievable un-stinky?  (No stones cast here.  I have no idea of what was going on olfactorily in Van 1)."  I feel obliged to report that Van 1's atmosphere was just as pleasant as that which Noel describes in Van 2  -- even despite John Phillips' assurances that he would have us hanging out the windows by midnight and Alan Ruben's making a sock-drying rack out of his seat-back.  I noticed this at the time, because several friends had warned me that a standard stress of H2C was the rank air in the vans.  One of these friends even left an e-mail here while I was at the race; it said "Are you guys starting to stink right about now?"  I had to try to convince him later that CPTC runners don't stink, or at least don't think they do.  Why would this be?  A few guesses:

• There are so many bad smells in New York City that what other people think of as a "stink" was a relief to ten of us; the four Massachusetts and Washington residents were politely suffering.

• We sucked all the air out of the vans, and odors can't travel in a vaccuum.

• One's own stink is so familiar as not to be perceivable as such, and when one stinks oneself, one can't perceive surrounding stinks of the same sort.

• We were obeying Tony and STAYING FOCUSED.  We didn't notice anything as insignificant to the race as a smell.

• In Van 1, the smell from Peter Allen's peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich-making factory canceled all others out; in Van 2, the same effect was achieved by the smell of just-baked bread that always surrounds Noel Comess.

• The stink was so bad that our noses' natural ability to shut down scent-perception in the presence of bad odors was heightened to a response-time so fast that the smell was cut off before it reached our brains.

• Forewarned about the fabled H2C stench, we paid special attention to limiting our own contributions to it.  (This was my own reaction; I made sure that I got to a bathroom--one convenience store, one gas station--as soon after I'd run as possible, and I took "showers" in the sink.) 

• There was at least one woman in each van; women seem to have a harder time achieving a true stink than do men, and men may develop a stronger desire not to stink while in their presence.

• Feeling great about your teammates and the race you're running makes you smell good.

Any more theories?