Palmetto200: The Review

First of all, the official results for the inaugural Palmetto200 are posted and I am more than happy to announce the following:

Team Do Not Resuscitate All Stars
Time: 30 hours 24 minutes
Pace: 9:03 minutes per mile
Overall Rank: 15/37 finisher
Pace Division Rank: 3/22 in the 9 minute/mile division (Thanks Alex for pointing out this valuable information!)

WAHOOOOOOOOO!

Now let's move on to a little review of the relay in case you are planning do a relay sometime in April of 2011 and find South Carolina most interesting or close to home or both.

THE GOOD

• you just can't beat a finish line at the beach
• nice transition areas, a lot of gas station and restaurants, that means every now and then you got a break from the porta jons and access to tap water
• plenty of access to food, gas etc
• access to the showers at Santee
• beautiful scenery
• everything went off without a hitch (at least I didn't notice a problem), especially knowing that this was the first year
• the course was marked EXTREMELY good
• that it isn't against the rules to shadow your runner with a bike at night... we didn't have bikes with us, but we thought that was a neat idea
• the race shirts are really nice
• they handed out finisher medals (nice ones)
• race directors and wives of the race directors were SUPER NICE as well as all the other volunteers

THE BAD

• a lot of the roads were high in traffic and a lot of them didn't have a shoulder
• when there was a grass strip on a road with no shoulder, they sometimes haven't been mowed and the grass was knee high
• because the relay was in it's first year, there were just 39 teams on the course and that felt very lonely at times even until the very end... this will go away once they have more entries
• registration was still old school with filling out papers and mailing in a check... it's the first year, I am sure they will change that soon

THE UGLY

• the BBQ... well, that was our own fault
• the crazy drivers... the organizers can't change that, unless they find a way to utilize less traveled roads and even there can be crazy motorists

Overall, I think this was a great race and I would definitely recommend doing it.

If  the D.N.R. All Stars will be back next year is not decided yet, but I think it's a possibility.

So long! ;-)