The Pick Your Poison Relay is unique when it comes to relays because you aren’t traveling around in a van, trying to chase or get ahead of your runner. Instead, your whole team gets to literally camp in one spot for the entire race. Runners take turns running around the lake, either on the trail or the road course.
One lap on the road course is 10.7 miles and the trail course is 14.5 miles. If you’re a not up for running that far, don’t worry, runners can either complete a full lap, or hand off to a teammate at an optional exchange point. This year a third exchange point is available, making the legs shorter.
With the one main exchange and the two optional exchange points, runners can run either 2.8, 3.4, 4.5 or 10.7 miles on the road or 4.4, 5.0, 5.1 or 14.5 on the trail.
Road Course
Trail Course
Team members can run as many legs or laps as they want. If someone wants to run two laps in a row, they can. If someone wants to run one full lap and then hand off at the Dam exchange on their second lap, they can.
With this addition of a second optional exchange point, partial laps will count in determining winners. In previous years, only full laps would count. Now, getting to an exchange point before the time cutoff will matter. For example, Team “Between a Walk and a Hard Pace” completes 6 full laps and makes it to the Dam exchange by the 24-hour mark. Team “Find Your Happy Pace” also completes 6 full laps and makes it to the Tanner exchange by the 24-hour mark. Team “Find Your Happy Pace” would win since they completed more miles on the course. The relay is chip-timed so you don’t have to keep track of your exchanges on a clipboard – just go run!
Registration is open and especially affordable when you consider all that is included.