While the trials and tribulations of a 150 mile all-night relay race from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea resort city of Aqaba may be too voluminous to summarize in a blog post, here's a short capsule of the madness and joy of the February 21 weekend.
With twelve teams of runners gathered at the start of an at-least 15 hour ordeal, the start line of 11th annual Dead to Red had a relatively party-like atmosphere. Personally, the Red Bull sponsor's inflatable arch happened to remind me of some other party-like night runs in Charlottesville, also involving the energy drink (and possibly other beverages...). My team, a hodge--podge of embassy employees, ex-pats, and young Jordanians--was certainly in good spirits. The weather was a nice, comfortable mid-60s at 3pm; which was extra nice considering a snowstorm had postponed the race 3 weeks prior.
Splitting up the ~250km distance was up to team strategy. I led off the first leg before we settled into a system where each of our two team vans of 5 members traded off 5ks (each person races a kilometer before the exchange zone, as specified by the odometers). The first good bit of the race hugs the glistening Dead Sea on a slightly-hilly coarse before flattening out and heading through some sparsely-populated towns and past a few Bedouin camps. By the time the sun sets, the road stretches through wide desert flats and by midnight we were running through surreal expanses of white sand illuminated by the full moon.
To enable more rest time for each van, we switched to 10 and even 15 K intervals of each group. This enabled enough time during rest stops to get in good stretch, a quick nap, and a decent amount of gatorade, Red Bull (a la the cute girls in the two Red Bull Mini Coopers trailing the teams all night), power gels, crackers, granola bars, pasta, cheese, olives, etc. Aside from the beginning of the race, the only teams we encountered were the semi-pro Aramex sponsored group, a crew running for a local drug store chain, and the Hadideens--original participants from the race's origins and a perennially-strong group of competitors. But by sun up, the Hadideens (with whom we had traded 3rd place a couple of times during the long night), were within sight and we caught up to them along a long, straight uphill that led to the Aqaba city limits. Grouping both vans together into 10-person continuous relays of 200m sprints, we started closing the gap. By the time we had entered the streets of Aqaba with just a couple Ks to go, they were within reach. I led our final charge with a 400 or 600m all out sprint to get us within striking distance before I joined up with our other top runners to put together 100-200m sprints and eclipse the Hadideens less than 200m from the finish, with a margin of only 5 seconds in the end after over 16 hours of racing. Our final time of 16:23.00 comes out to just under a 4 min/K average. Not too shabby, and it was a heck of a lot of fun.
Needless to say, there was much rejoicing among our team at having been on the winning end of the final photo finish. The Aramex team guys and the second place crew (who edged us by only 2 minutes) were also on hand to offer congratulations. I knew several members of each from days of training at Sports City, and we could share in the relief of ordeal finally being over. Later on we picked up some hardware (some metals and a dinky trophy) and much respect from the Jordanians at the after-race dinner.
And then a day and a half of jacuzzis, beers, and beach time (and much soreness) followed.
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