The Little Chemist That Could: Ville-to-Ville Relay

The triumphant return to the Ville-to-Ville Relay occurred last weekend (4/13) as I participated for my 6th year running this event. I've participated every year since the inaugural event in 2018, including pandemically-altered event years, except for 2023 when I had this little conflicting race. This year I was excited to rejoin Team Quest in Peace (formerly the Quest Brewing team until they closed a couple of years ago). The team members have changed over the years, but a solid 3-4 of us have been at each one and we were excited to all be back together running again.

Event Basics:

Similar to other relays, this one is shorter (74 miles total) and involves 12 legs run by teams of up to 6 people (so everyone runs twice). The race starts in Asheville and runs to Greenville.

Less exciting for this year was our assigned start time of 5:00 a.m. which I'm pretty sure is the earliest we have ever started. We always drive up the morning of the event, so this meant meeting for a 3:15 a.m. departure to drive in Dave's minivan up to Asheville. We met up with no issues, piled into the van, chatted and napped on the drive up, and arrived with sufficient but not overly excessive time at the start.

Me, Isabel, Meg, Abbi, Dave, Alaina

First Run: Leg #1 - Recreation Pool Park to AC Reynolds Middle School - 5.14 Miles - Rating = Hard

Starting out in the early morning darkness was one thing, but since it was the start of the race there were plenty of others nearby so I wasn't worried about getting lost. I had the RaceJoy app navigating in my pocket and the trails were well-marked. After a brief mile on the road, we dipped onto the Mountains to Sea trail for a couple of miles. This was tons of fun - off-road running in the darkness, just trucking along through the woods. Really great! After we exited the trail, there were some hilly roads through residential areas on our way to the exchange zone at the school.

Overall was 5.19 mi @ 8:52/mi average, which varied widely from the 10:30-ish pace on the trail stairs to 7:30-ish pace on the roads.

After that, my favorite part of the day was a few legs later...

Beer and breakfast burrito 😍

The morning was full of running into other teams that I knew, chatting and enjoying the beautiful sunshine, and making our way across the state line. My next leg was the final run in North Carolina, running from Tuxedo Park up to Talisman Camp on the NC/SC border.

Second Run: Leg #7 - 3.53 miles

This run was a straight shot on a single road, mostly uphill (gaining ~100ft/mile, total 370ft). Managed to maintain an 8:00/mi pace which I was pretty happy about considering it was also getting warm. Not much interesting about this one, just a steady climb and knowing I was going to be done for the day once it was finished!

Got this one done then had time to hang out at Hotel Domestique in the sunshine while we waited for our runner to come through.

The rest of the afternoon was spent soaking up sun (probably too much) and enjoying beers and chatting with other race participants as we went from exchange to exchange.

We finished a little after 4pm and all ran as a team the final 50 feet to the finish line. So much fun to run with this team for yet another year!