41. Beitrag - Relay for life

My second 24-hour run, 5 years after the one in Alzey (time flies so quickly)

The whole thing was a fundraising run for cancer patients and we put together two teams with the university.

On Saturday we left for the site at 1pm and set up our sleeping quarters. We were on a kind of old fairground for animals, so we slept in an empty stable :D But it was actually really pleasant and better than I had imagined.

At 2 p.m. a speech was given and we had a little procession through the town with all the teams, there were about 170 in total. However, I don't know how many people took part in total, as there was no limit on the number of people per team. There were 24 of us in total for two teams, but not everyone was there the whole time.

The race officially started at 3 p.m. and we ran in pairs (each with a baton for the two teams) as many laps of 600m as we wanted and then passed on to the next runners. Everything was still relaxed :D

But then we made the mistake of looking at the rankings and noticing that we were in 14th and 21st place. We quickly became ambitious and changed our strategy: the baton in 21st place was "given up" and we just walked the laps with it and sometimes even left it lying there completely. The baton in 14th place was now moved by everyone as quickly as possible. In concrete terms, that means that we sprinted one lap at a time, then passed it on and on. This of course made us much faster, but it was also abnormally exhausting, because that meant 3-4 600m sprints per hour for 24 hours :D

Luckily, the run was interrupted at 6 p.m. for the "Ceremony of Light" and we were able to relax a little. During this ceremony, candles were placed in the shape of a heart and lit, while notes written by the sick or their relatives were read out. It was really very moving :)

At 7pm we were back on the slopes. The pizza arrived at the same time, which was great on the one hand because no one had eaten lunch, but on the other hand it was also disastrous because after that I felt like I was going to throw up with every step - that's not helpful when sprinting :D

From 10pm onwards we split into two-hour shifts, so I ran from 10pm to midnight, then slept for four hours, ran again from 4am to 6am and slept for another two hours. All I can say is that it's a really crappy feeling to wake up after four hours of sleep, only to immediately start sprinting 600m every 10 minutes :D

Overall, the tactic worked, because after endless back and forth between 9th and 10th place, we fought our way to 8th place, where we stayed for many hours. I was completely dead, I could hardly breathe without pain and my legs were weak because I simply couldn't eat anything without immediately feeling sick. So I let the others run for the last hour, and by some miracle we got closer and closer to 7th place, which was actually 10 laps ahead. They were probably exhausted too :D But then the unbelievable happened: In the very last 5 seconds (no lie) we overtook 7th place by 30m. So we came 7th out of 170!!! Of course we were extremely happy ;)

After the award ceremony and a final meal together, we cleaned up our sleeping quarters and drove home tired and proud at around 2:30 p.m. In total, our two teams had raised around €150.

I am grateful to have been able to take part in this experience and to have had such a great team with a great atmosphere around me - it was really just fun, no matter how hard it got!