DHL Stafetten 2011 - sometime things work out at work!

Arriving in the Danish town of Aarhus for a week of meetings, the omens for at least getting some good running in for a change were positive when I spotted this tower block displaying the Calderglen Oyster Catcher. The fact that the hotel our hosts had arranged for us was on a beautiful sandy beach on the entrance to a coastal, forest park with miles of very hilly trails was even better and even prompted me to get up for a pre-breakfast run on 3 of the days.

The biggest surprise was yet to come when our hosts mentioned that there was an annual running festival taking place over 3 evenings that week and it was based only 500m from the hotel. The running festival consisted of nightly 5 x 5km relays (Stafett in Danish) on a different course each night around the country park and it was spread over 3 nights because there were literally thousands of teams entered. I jumped at the chance when the company hosting the meetings mentioned that they had spaces available in one of their teams if any of us wanted a run.

On the evening of my race the meetings had over-run and I was stuck in rush hour traffic. However, I had been told that I was doing a last leg, so I would still have plenty of time. I finally made it to the race about 15 minutes before the first leg kicked off and found our host who had the numbers. It now turned out that another person had dropped out of the team and if I wanted I could run 2 x 5km legs. Cometh the Hour Cometh the Harrier, so no problem, I chose legs 3 and 5. It then transpired that we were in the second start wave of about 2000 teams running that night so the 5km loop was very congested by the time lap 3 approached. We had to carry a baton and the changeover was like that in a 4x400m relay with everyone standing on the line shuffling for position (except there were 2000 runners standing on the line and in my case looking for someone that I barely knew what they looked like). Anyway, I was soon off and running and had been warned that the course was hilly and included a constant 1km climb from 3k to 4k, so pace judgement was critical. Being very far down the field and running two legs, I decided it was just going to be a 2 x 5km rep session (25 minute recovery as it transpired) for me and I was going to run at 10km effort and not really go for it. This proved a sensible approach as the course was so congested that even at that pace I was an accident waiting to happen slaloming between the crowds. The course was beautiful being a mixture of sea front esplanade, country park and forest trails, with about 2/3 on tarmac. But it was hilly, especially for Denmark.

Anyway, the nett result was that I ran both legs in identical times of 18:06, set the fastest 2 legs in our team (Team Loads and Aerodynamics Group, very catchy) by a long shot (the others were 22 to 25 minutes) and we finished a totally surprising 13th out of 450 male teams! The team kind of thought it would have been better for the team if I had run all 5 legs but I am glad I didn't. Plenty of pictures here, not sure if I am in any of them but there are many much more photogenic runners there instead!

Alan