Pettit Indoor Marathon Relay Race Recap

I’ve run a lot of races. Lots of different distances. Lots of different locations.

But the race I did last weekend was definitely a first. It was a marathon relay, so 4 people were covering 26.2 miles. That doesn’t sound too unusual, but the kicker for this race was it was indoors…on a track…surrounding an ice rink.

It was at the Pettit National Ice Center in Milwaukee, WI.  This race was a meet up for a lot of area Oiselle Volee runners. I recently joined the Volee team, so I was excited for my first race as an official member. There were 10 Oiselle teams doing the marathon relay–40 ladies total. My team was made up of three other Minnesota Volee members.

For the relay, you can split up the distance however you want, but most teams do 12 x 800’s. Meaning, you do two laps around the track (800 meters) and then change runners. Each person does 12 two-lap sets.

You wear an ankle bracelet to keep track of your official time, so you have to hand off the bracelet each time you change runners–just like passing the baton in a relay. Our on-deck runner was the person in charge of moving the bracelet from one runner to the next.

Since we were running shorter distances with each leg, we all tried to push our pace a bit. It was like an intense interval workout. The concrete under the track and the fact that you were running in circles in the same direction took a little bit of a toll on your body. I could feel it a bit in my left calf and my right hip.

I didn’t have a watch to keep track of my personal pace/time for each leg, but I was able to sneak a peak at the main race clock and get an idea of how fast I was going around the track. I think I was hanging somewhere around 2:15 – 2:20 per lap. No matter what the pace, I felt like I was pushing myself to run as fast as I could with each leg.

Everyone on our team was doing awesome and flying around the track! Very fitting since our team name was The Flying V!

We finished the marathon relay in 3 hrs 39 min 37 sec! I don’t think I’ll ever be able to achieve a marathon time like that on my own, so it was amazing to do it on a team with three other stellar runners. And with the support of all the other Volee teammates cheering each other on. We kept it light and fun all weekend with lots of laughs and a fair amount of inside jokes when the weekend was over. 🙂

Certainly an interesting running experience! If I do this race again, I’d probably train a little bit differently to prepare for the speed and interval aspects, but overall I felt good throughout the race. Getting my running groove back slowly but surely.

Next up is training for a spring half marathon with a 10 mile and 10K race thrown in. Looking forward to getting back into a regular training routine!

Have you ever run an indoor race? What’s on your spring race schedule?