**SJAC REACHES THE BEACH**

The SJAC team completed the Reach The Beach Relay in New Hampshire from Sept 16 - 17, 2005. This was a 212 mile relay race that we ran in 29 hours, 58 minutes and 45 seconds. Each team member ran 3 relay legs. The lengths of each of the 36 legs varied from 3.1 to 8.8 miles in length. The total distance each person ran varied from 15.2 miles to 21.2 miles. We began at 11:00AM on Friday Sept. 16 at the Bretton Woods ski area in Twin Mountain, NH and finished just before 5:00PM on Saturday Sept. 17 in Hampton Beach State Park. Everyone got to run at least once at night in complete darkness. Elaine and Steve got to do this twice!

An undertaking such as this required a great deal of team planning. We held four team meetings from May through August, for some reason typically on the 28th of the month! These meetings helped us get our act together and became fun team social get togethers once we moved from the stuffy library meeting room location someone picked for our first meeting.
Reach The Beach Team meeting photos: ***May 28, 2005 Meeting*** - ***June 28, 2005 Meeting***

This link shows the three relay legs each team member choose (well, most of us choose) to run:
Course Relay Leg Assignments

We flew from Philadelphia to Manchester, NH on Thursday morning. The Transportation Security Administration folks had an issue with the "retractable utility knife" Bill forgot was in his Little League first aid kit which was comming along as a carry-on bag. Imagine that! While they proceeded to do a full background investigation on Bill, we began reconfiguring relay leg assignments for an 11 person team instead of 12. Fortunately they determined Bill was not a threat and let him board the plane...sans the utility knife. Once on board, we waited on the runway for 2 hours while "weather in the Northeast corridor" cleared...maybe they were still investigating Bill? Not a good omen to begin a trip to a race run during a hurricane in 2004! Fortunately, that was the only real problem we encountered.

After arriving in Manchester later than planned, we enjoyed a late lunch at the local Friendly's

We promised our Friendly's server, that we would post her picture on our website.
Hi Heather!

After lunch we stocked up on food at the local Hanniford supermarket. We then had our second "security issue" of the day. The Hanniford store manager apparently thought it was suspicious for a group of adults to take pictures while shopping! We'll post Maria's supermarket pictures later. Eventually we got on the road for the remaining 100 miles to Attitash Mountain Village where we were to spend Thursday night. Driving along the interstate, the vehicle for "Team Motherhaus" crusied by and they flashed their T shirts from last year's Relay at us. We figure they were excited about running the relay again...either that or something was going on inside their vehicle that they didn't want us to see! Team Motherhaus continued up the interstate at an accelerated rate of speed. Apparently a bit too fast for the New Hampshire state police! That ended our first encounter with a competing relay team. More on Team Motherhaus later.

Thursday night pasta dinner at Bretton Woods	Friday morning - teams milling about the start chute
Team SJAC in line for our official team photo	An "unofficial" version of the official team photo
One more photo opportunity while the entire team is together	Ken, making sure he's well rested for the event
Brandon is in the chute...really, he's back there somewhere!	..and the race begins for SJAC
Brandon's in this group heading up the double black diamond ski slope	..and he comes flying down to the finish!
Sue completes leg 2 and passes the wrist band to Jim	Jim heads down the road on leg 3
Van #2 leaves Jim with his Van #1 support and heads for lunch	The leg 6 - 7 transition area at Echo Lake State Park
Anxiously awaiting Dave to finish leg 6	Bill completes the first tough hill on leg 8
Bill finishing leg 8, approaching the transition to hand off to Maria	Maria bringing it home on leg 9
Ken finishes leg 10 as darkness approaches	Bill observes Ken's handoff to Elaine
Elaine heads out on leg 11 as darkness sets in	Even the transition areas were DARK!
Bill removes the wrist strap after flying thru 4.2 miles on leg 32 in 28:41	Maria completes the 4.9 miles of leg 33 in 32:53 and Ken takes off
Midway thru 4.9 miles, Ken gets some water from Bill	Part of the Van #2 crew awaits Ken's arrival at transition 34
Ken completes his 3rd and last relay leg. Yeah!	Elaine gets some water as she heads along the ocean
Elaine mid-way thru leg 35	One of many cheerful course volunteers. Thank you!
The beach approaches!	Elaine brings it home on leg 35. One more short 5 mile leg to go!
We've Reached the Beach!	Van #2 - home to Elaine, Ken, Faith, Bill, Maria, Steve and Ed for over 30 hours
What Van #2 might have looked like if the Jersey Fresh decals were not left behind	Post-relay dinner at a Hampton Beach restaurant. That's Team Motherhaus seated at the next table and their captain explaining the use of a rubber chicken as their relay baton. BTW, the New Hampshire State Police let them off with a warning.
Jim explains the finer points of group photography to his daughter Karen	The team that runs together also shares an iPod

SJAC relay team members were: Maria Carrington, Steve Carrington, Elaine Coccia, Frank Dominguez, Jim Flanagan, Brandon Hamilton, Sue Hamilton, Bill Lemon, Michael Levad, Ed Maher, Dave Moyer and Ken Sheil. Dr. Faith Nathan accompanied us and was fully prepared to cover any medical emergency.

This was an awesome experience, almost like a first marathon except everyone immediately said they would definitely do it again!

More pictures may be posted as they are are received from other team members so visit this page again.

Full results of the relay and other information can be found on the: Reach The Beach web site

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