Since we missed the Turkey Burn AR and there weren’t any adventure races close to us between now and the Resolution AR in January, we decided to sign up for the Round the Bay Relay and Ultra.  Stu was visiting his family in south Florida and couldn’t make it, so we ran it as a 2-person relay.  The day prior to the race, the forecast called for 100% rain with up to 1 inch per hour and temps in the low 50’s.  Let’s just say that neither Ana nor I were very excited by this.  We live in Florida so we don’t do cold weather very well and we consider anything less than 70 degrees to be cold.  We made a late night decision to run to Columbia at Silver Sands Outlet to look for rain gear that we could wear during the race.  Ana got a sweet deal on the Compounder rain jacket and I chose the Tech Attack.  There are some really nice benefits to living close to an outlet mall as the prices were much lower than retail.  We also scored some new gloves.  Paired with our Under Armour cold gear that we got before Tough Mudder, we were set.

Our start time was 6:30AM.  The race course started at Fudpucker’s on Okaloosa Island and made a giant loop around Choctawhatchee Bay for a total distance of 36.77 miles.

Luckily for us, the forecasted downpour stayed away.  While it drizzled the whole race and the temps started in the 40’s, the weather was much better than it could have been.

I thought that the relay format was a lot of fun and we look forward to doing it again next year but with a team rather than a pair.  Not because the mileage is too much, but rather because we think doing it as a team relay will make it a lot more fun.

I don’t have our official time but looking at the Runtastic GPS time, it appears that we averaged an 8:30 mile pace, which for us is pretty good.  The best part is that supposedly we burned 2550kcal each and so I feel no shame having eaten the pizza, beer and Oreos post race.