The Baltimore Team Relay Marathon: I Did It!

If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you know that I’ve been running almost every weekend since May in order to train for the Baltimore Team Relay Marathon (#joulesruns). For those of you unfamiliar with the label of Team Marathon, it means that a marathon was split into four pieces so that it can be run by a team of four people.

So much better than running a whole marathon by yourself…

Well, there are four of us Harman kids, so we thought it would be a great race for us to do together!

Here we are before the race with our fabulous Team Harman capes:

I started with the marathon runners by doing the first leg, which ended up being just under 6 miles. It was the shortest, but also the hilliest of the legs with the first three miles being mostly uphill. Luckily, once I entered the zoo it was flat and downhill for the next three miles until I passed off my baton (aka timing sensor) to my sister, Kelsey, who did leg #2. Kelsey ran 7 miles, passed the sensor to Katie (6.3 miles), and then Jason brought us to the finish line with the last 7 miles.

I was really happy with my time and was doing so well that I was totally okay with stopping for a photo with an adoring fan… Here I am at mile 4 in the zoo with an adorable penguin!

I was obviously the slowest on my team (averaging a 12:30 mile for each of the 6 miles), but my brother and sisters are all super fast. In fact, out of 804 teams, we finished 116th!

I never thought I’d be the type of person to say this, but I LOVED the race! As soon as we were done, I was already thinking that we definitely have to do it again as a team next year.

So there you go, each year I’d dismiss the idea of doing the Team Relay because I didn’t think I could possibly run 6 miles, but I did. And it was AWESOME!