Brew to Brew 2011

We were hanging out with our college friends last winter and we had this hare-brained idea to enter a team in the Brew to Brew this year. The B2B is a road race that stretches from the Boulevard Brewery in Kansas City to the Free State Brewery in Lawrence. On the highway. Running. 44 miles. Some of our initial crew bailed on us, but we pulled a team together and gave it a go.

Did I mention that this race was the day after Asher's birthday party? So Chris and I jumped in the van (our official team vehicle!...yeah, it's still not cool) and drove to Kansas City right after the party. We pull up at our friend's house around 11:15pm and all of a sudden, Chris is yelling expletives. "WHAT?!?," I ask him. He forgot his running shoes. Yes, we came all the way to Kansas City specifically to run a race and he forgot the shoes that he'd finally bought after shopping around for months. Just wear another pair, you might suggest. Well, Chris only brought flip flops with him. Not gonna do much good for a road race. And of course he wears a size 13...not exactly a universal size that we can scrape up from a random friend. All we could do was laugh (and possibly make fun of him a LOT). So that night (actually it's creeping into the morning by now), we're scouring the internet, searching for any department store that may be open on a Sunday morning so that he could go find some shoes. We found some hot little all-black or all-white velcro numbers on the Walmart website, but we knew our odds of finding them in a size 13 may not be too great. We finally determined that after we dropped off our first runner, Chris would take a vehicle to Kohls, grab any pair of size 13 shoe he could find, and meet us back on the race course.

Fast forward to 7:15am Sunday morning. We made our way to downtown Kansas City, and let me tell ya, the party was already rockin'. Thousands of people were covering the streets, a beer tent was set up and teams were chuggin' away bright and early. Lots of team dressed up in crazy outfits and we had a blast just watching all the costumes pass us by.

Tiff helping Jacque get her bib pinned on. Jacque ran the first leg for our team. Jodi and Chris grabbing a brew.

Part of our team under the beer tent.

Back row l.-r.: Stephanie, Tammy, Chris and Mike.

Front row l.-r.: Jacque, Sarah, Jodi, Tiff and Mindy.

This team was all dressed up like Elvis.

The nerds.

The 8:00 start time came and all the first leg runners took off...be sure to note the guy towards the middle wearing spandex and a cape...that was entertaining.

Risky Business team.

These guys really ran the whole race in these thick, hot brown costumes...CRAZY!

Which one of these is not like the others?

Poor guy...he took it well.

So after Jacque took off on the first leg and Chris took off to go shopping, the rest of just kind of hung around the starting line chatting and people watching. We casually mentioned that we should head to the second leg, but heck, it was only four miles away, we had PLENTY of time before Jacque would show up there. So we finally mosey back to our van, head out to the next exchange point and guess what? We're lost. In our defense, the directions and maps that were provided totally sucked, but we drove about 25 miles (remember, it was only FOUR miles away) before we finally ended up in the right place and Jacque ended up having to wait on us. I seriously can't make this stuff up.

We decided that we didn't really want to start off so far behind the other teams, so we decided to skip the second leg and two of us would run the third leg (we were totally not in it to win it, so we made up our own rules on more than one occasion). So they dropped Sarah and I off at the next exchange point and off we went to complete our 5.7 mile leg.

Now, I didn't train a ton for this race, but I did run 13.1 miles just a few months back, so how hard could 5.7 be? No worries. Well, I kinda underestimated the weather. The temps were in the mid 80's that day and the wind was gusting upwards of 35 mph. That's tough stuff when you're running out on the open highway with little windbreak. We plugged through it, but we did have to call for our car to bring us some water because the wind was just sucking the life out of us. I would definitely say this was harder than the half marathon. But it was great having a fun friend by my side to share in the "fun."Somewhere along the way, Chris made it back with his shiny new running shoes...and he was so proud to tell me that after relaying his story to the salesman at Kohls, they even gave him 15% off...I hated to burst his bubble, but they give everyone 15% off, but still, he got a great deal, and they even had his size!

Chris and Stephanie doubled up on the next leg as well. Tiff faced some brutal hills on her leg, but she kept smilin' the whole way!

Chris was feeling energized since his first leg was pretty short, so he jumped out and ran part of another leg toward the end of the day.

The oompa loompah team. Our hot, stinky, nasty team at the end of the race. I think we finished with a time of 7 hours, 5 minutes. But remember, we tweaked a few rules ;). Enjoying the meal and beer afterwards...we were all so filthy.

What an experience...it was really tough, but so.much.fun. We met some great new friends, got some sun and had LOTS of laughs. We hope to do it again!