Superfood For The Mind and Soul

Every year for the past ten years, eleven crazy friends and I (and over 400 other teams) have run a relay race up in New Hampshire called Reach the Beach. It's my favorite weekend of the year.

The route is roughly 200 miles, split up into 36 legs, starting at Cannon Mountain and ending at Hampton Beach. It's marketed as 200 miles in 24 hours, but for the more normal (us), it takes roughly 30. Each runner logs a total of between 15 and 23 miles depending on which legs they've been assigned, or up to 3ish hours, depending on how fast they are.

The other roughly 27 hours are spent sitting in one of two progressively smellier vans, getting progressively more sore from sitting still after pushing our bodies up and pounding them down massive hills, becoming more and more slap-happily delirious, and eating the only kind of food that can possibly survive in a magically disgusting environment like this one: processed crap... with the occasional banana or apple. (My kids were beside themselves with confusion and excitement when I brought the leftovers home this year - Life Cereal and Oreos!? What happened to Momma!?)

And after each of our vans completes a round of legs, we always find a fabulous restaurant along the route to reward ourselves. If it's after 11am-ish, we don't shy away from the drinks menu. Nope, we dig right in to everything, letting nothing dampen our debaucherous spirits... as if our next legs are days away, rather than hours. Because this race is all about the moment.

Our stomachs always pay the price on subsequent legs - but nevertheless, each of us somehow manages to run them faster than we possibly could on any normal day. Because adrenaline is on our side. So are the 50 random angry cows we meet on the side of the dirt country road, the moon and the stars that guide us at night, the driving rain that makes us feel four years old again, the end-of-the-random-driveway-cocktail-party-goers who toast our grit, and the cool sand between our blistered toes as eleven of us gather around Big Booty Hoh (team name = don't ask) runner number 12 to hobble across the finish line - throat lumps and all.

Big Booty Hohs 2013

It may seem odd for anyone, let alone a health coach, to argue that sleep deprivation, alcohol, Twizzlers and pushing your body way beyond its limits is a healthy combination. In fact, I'm fully aware that to most people this weekend sounds like the definition of hell. But except for duds along the way, most anyone I've recruited to run for the Big Booty Hohs over the past ten years has fallen in love with the experience. And we've all kind of fallen in love with each other too: BO, farts and all.

We even have a theme song, this small excerpt of which doesn't do its brilliance justice:
"... Big. Big Hohs. Big Booty Hohs. 
Sometimes a Hoh just gotta make through the night. 
Perseverance is my pimp. The road is my crack pipe..." 

Bad for the body? Inarguably. But this race is like superfood for my mind and soul, which more than makes up for it. Five days have passed since we "reached the beach" and I'm still riding high.