We have two more Tuesday night workouts at Stewart Park before moving to the Cornell Arboretum for cross-country training. This week we’ll do a Ridiculous Relay and next week will be an Equalizer workout with staggered starts. But more important is that next week—July 29—will also be a potluck picnic at the small pavilion after the workout. @laurenmilano and @Dave_K will be buying and grilling items, respectively, and we’ll all bring and share everything else. Please RSVP by Sunday night, July 27 so we know how much food to get.
For those who haven’t had the pleasure of a Ridiculous Relay before, here’s how it works. After our warmup, everyone lines up in order of speed so I can match up the fastest and slowest runner, the next-fastest and next-slowest, and so on, and then assemble pairs of people into four-person teams.
Then, one set of people from each team will start. Here’s the twist. Within each set, the runners run in opposite directions around the roughly 400m grass loop until they meet, exchange a baton, and then turn around and run back the way they came to the start. That way, the faster runners run farther, and the slower runners run shorter, but everyone runs for about the same amount of time. The pace should be quick—roughly mile race pace but not all out. Pace yourself because it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and run too fast early on.
Once the first set of runners both make it back to the start, they hand off the baton to their team’s second set of runners, and the first set gets to rest and cheer for everyone else. While all this is happening, the other teams’ runners are doing the same thing. Laps are run! Leads change! Batons are dropped! Chaos ensues! The winning team will get all their runners back first after all sets of runners have completed 8 reps.
Resources
- Administration: You must be an FLRC member and sign the FLRC Training Programs waiver once for 2025.
- Location: Stewart Park in downtown Ithaca, which has lots of free parking
- Warmup: Lunge Matrix and Leg Swings, then 10 minutes of jogging
- Cooldown: A few minutes of jogging, then Strength and Mobility
- Pace Calculator: Jack Daniels’ VDOT Running Calculator
