GT Relay

About a year ago my mom was last minute asked to join on one of the teams for the Grand Teton Relay. Well, that's really were all the madness began. After the relay she had so much fun she decided she wanted to run it again, but this time with her whole family. So a couple month's later she signed up with the team name. Mom 'n Kids. From this point forward there were two groups of people. The first being the group that really wanted to run in the relay and trained hard for it. And the second group being not so excited to run 15 miles in a 24 hour period but were awesome sports and decided to run it for mom anyways. We wont mention any names. :)

Well it's a lot of hard work putting together a relay team with your family. Much harder then Mom and myself thought. We had food to get together, vans, shirts, water, legs split up.... We decided we wanted a logo for our team and to put some kind of symbol on the back of the shirts that would let people know where that specific child fit in the family. After much discussion we came up with a numbering system that started with the first born as 1, then the next 2, the next 3 and so forth... Not to complicated. But then what about their spouses and their kids! I'll used my family as a example. Me being the 4th born child was number 4; My husband was number 4.4; meaning number 4's second part; and Jacob was number 4.4.1; The one meaning he is our firstborn. If we had a second kid, the kids number would have been 4.4.2; Get it? :) See above picture for the final result. I also took some time to put together a really awesome logo for the front of the shirts which depicts Mom running with her 9 children running behind her.

So we had this great plan and we looked around for hours trying to find the cheapest place we could find that could make the shirts we wanted and I finally found one in Idaho Falls that would do everything for 9 bucks a shirt. A great deal! I don't know why but I just didn't have the greatest feeling about getting our shirts done here, but we were in a hurry and so I brushed it off and got the shirts made. Well let's just say I wasn't surprised when I got the shirts back and they were done wrong. On each of the shirts we also wanted to put the name of the child and the word "kid" just above the number so that people would relate the number to what order in the family the kid was.

So luckily all the names and number's were on the right shirt size and everything was fine with that. The problem was you couldn't read the name and kid of the shirt because they were done so tiny! And to top it off all the number's were different sizes, different fonts and some of them were off centered. (You can see this also in the picture above) My mom and I were pretty angry at first, but then it just became comical! It was hard not to laugh at how poorly they were done. After making sure we were going to get them all re-done for free, we all laughed it off and wore the shirts anyways. (Because we wouldn't have time to get them re-done before the race). 

Finally it was time to run! It took a lot of work to figure out which leg everyone would run. For those of you who don't understand how the race works here is a description from the GT Relay home page:

"The Grand Teton Relay is a 12 or 6 person running relay covering 180 miles of beautiful and challenging terrain beginning in Ashton, ID and traveling through Island Park, Grand Targhee, and finishing in Jackson Hole, WY. Running in the shadows of the Tetons with your best friends is the ultimate road trip! Teams split into two cars so one set of six runners can rest while the other set of six takes turns running their legs of the race. Teams switch off running and resting until each runner has run three times, and then they are all standing together in a exhausted daze at the finish line."

We split up the legs depending on how much the person had trained, how much natural ability they had and how well each person got along with others in their van. All in all it ended up that 4 people actually trained. 8 people kind of didn't really train. And 1 person had recently had a baby. So it ended up being in Van #1: Leg 1-Heather; Leg 2-Shelyn & Ondrea; Leg 3-Scotty; Leg 4-Skyler; Leg 5-Derek; and Leg 6-me. Van #2: Leg 7-Caleb; Leg 8-Justin; Leg 9-Mom; Leg 10-Crystal; Leg 11-Clarissa; and Leg 12-Scott.

 Our day began early Friday morning because we needed to be to the start line at 9 am.

We began running at 9 am in Ashton.

 Heather getting ready to start the race!

From there it was just a lot of running,

 What's that Scott? Are you saying, What does the fox say? or you want water?

cheering,

hanging out in/around vans,

 Katrina's shirt! We really wish we could have been here!

tears,

 eating,

 sleeping when possible,

and just having a blast with the family!

 Crystal nervous before her race

 Geo-caching

 Jacob couldn't wear his shirt at the end for pictures because he had an explosion in it...

 Praying before his race ;)

 Night running

 Day 2

 Shelyn driving :)

 Our bathroom for 2 days

 Everyone did so great! And even though we weren't really planning on being competitive, we all have that dang Durtschi blood running through our veins and we just can't help ourselves. :) So of course we had to try to beat everyone! And for not training, I'd say we did pretty dang good! We ended up crossing the finish line at Teton Village in Jackson, WY at 1:16 pm Saturday afternoon. Putting us in 11th place overall with a total time of 28 hours 16 minutes!

These next pictures are out of order a little bit.. But that's ok :)

Sleeping after the race

 Running in at the end of the race

 Mom handing out medals

 Scott rounding the corner before we all joined him

 Everyone finishing the race strong!

 Scott, Jacob and I running in

 Our photographer :)

 Mom handing out more medals

 The team

 Team plus the driver, aka Dad :)

 Support team and Caleb!

Skyler really wanted to come in 10th place... So... I guess that means we'll just have to do it again! :) It really was so much fun doing the race with everyone! Such a great family experience! I am excited for next year! :) Mom 'N Kids will be returning! And they will be stronger then ever! Of course we can say that now that it has been a month since the run. I don't know if anyone was wanting to run anything ever again the night we finished. Let's just say after the race there were a lot of sore muscles, limping, blisters and pain.... Good thing all it took was a good night's rest in order to feel about 80% better!