Hey, remember me?

Apparently it takes a Frankenstorm for me to actually write a blog post!

Just an FYI, this is not a real picture…yet.  BLC and I are working from home today – mainly because NYC decided to shut down all of their public transportation.  It would be super difficult to get to work without my beloved subway.  So now we are watching a Sons of Anarachy marathon, eating ice cream and I’m FINALLY recapping my Reach the Beach experience.

In one word, the experience was

AMAZING.

But I’m sure you all want to know all of the ridiculous details.  All 32 plus hours of it.

If you didn’t know already, in the month leading up to RTB: NJ I was working insane hours.  Like 15 hour days, 6 days a week.  Money was good but I literally had no life at all…and that included my training (or lack thereof).  But lucky for me, I got a new job and the Thursday before RTB was my last day of craziness.

Since I still had to work until 9:30p, my amazing husband, BLC picked up the van that I rented from Long Island on Thursday at rush hour.  Did I mention that he is amazing?

When I got home, I still had to run down the BQE to Megan’s place to pick up some Cheribundi boxes for the relay.

Cheribundi was one of our sponsors and they totally hooked us up with a serious amount of tart cherry juice for our team.  I wasn’t sure how much until I got to Megan’s…

Yea.  Each of those boxes contained 12 bottles.  Just imagine me in Brooklyn loading all of that juice into my little Versa.  Comical.

BUT I’m pretty sure everyone on our team was obsessed with Cheribundi by the end of the relay.  & felt much better because of it!  Thanks, Cheribundi!

Anyway, after my trek to pick up massive amounts of juice – I still had to go home and pack.

Packing for a relay is much different than packing for anything else.  I basically stuffed three running outfits into three separate ziploc bags.  Definitely a smart move because looking for clothes to run in is the last thing I would have wanted to do during my breaks.

So when we were finally done packing, BLC and I headed to bed because we had to wake up at 5:00a so that we could be on the road by 6:00a.

& that alarm came way too quick.  One of our other teammates, Isaac (who was wayyyy too excited for having driven 10 hours overnight with a half hour of sleep! but awesome and super speedy so it was okay!) met us at our place and we headed through Manhattan to pick up another teammate in Hoboken.

Dave (a friend from college) overslept a tad but we ended up heading out of Hoboken and up to Vernon, NJ around 7:00a.  It should have taken about an hour and a half to get to Vernon but we made a wrong turn that cost us about 30 minutes due to traffic that we got stuck in.  BLC was a trooper driving that giant van through the city and up to the starting line, though.  We ended up making it to the start around 8:45a.  Being late was definitely not the first impression I wanted to make on the rest of the team but what can ya do!

When we got there, we parked and headed to the mandatory Orientation.

We briefly got to meet the rest of the team but it was very quick since we had to sign our waivers, check in our mandatory vests/lights/headlamps (none of which I brought but I did make BLC buy me a 10$ reflective vest that i never even opened…so prepared) and then we sat down for our orientation.

Fun Facts.

After our orientation, we went to get our team picture taken very quickly because it was about time for our first runner to start!  Stephanie made us some awesome shirts to wear and Colleen bought some Jersey Shore-esque sunglasses for our picture.

and so it began…

I’m such a jerk but this has already been too long of a post and I haven’t even gotten to the good stuff

To be continued…