American Odyssey Relay Run Adventure

May 8th 2011, Mechanicsburg PA — Two CSA teams, twenty-five runners, four vehicles, three volunteers, two days and one sleepless night and 200 miles between the battlefields of Gettysburg Pennsylvania and the picturesque monuments of Washington DC. This may summarize the logistics involved in CSA’s latest Adventure Challenge but it just touches on the amount of hard work and preparation that went into getting two teams across the finish line. The overall team was known as Team CSA Swole Patrol and was broken down into two sub-teams which were known as “The Swoleness” and “The Pittedness”. The Team CSA members that took on this challenge ranged from athletes that have run century marathons and completed Ironman Triathlons all the way down to athletes in training that until they signed up for the race had never run more than a 5K in their life. The age range ran from a stately 60 to a spry 16 (Alex Arroyo, age 16 was a last minute fill in for a runner that came down with a cold) with the majority of the runners sitting firmly in their 40s. The race which kicked off at 10:45 AM on April 29th was completed in the afternoon of April 30th as both teams crossed the finish line on a beautiful spring day. Team Pittedness finished 43rd overall out of 116 Teams with a total time of 28 hours and 41 minutes (8:36/mile) while Team Swoleness finished 102nd overall with a total time of 31 hours and 28 minutes (9:26/mile). The American Odyssey challenge represents the second relay run that CSA has sponsored and the first time CSA has fielded enough runners to support two teams.

CSA would like to extend a sincere thank you to Rachel Bottone, Amy Williams and Alex Oliveira who volunteered on our behalf and provided needed encouragement while manning transition point 34. We would also like to thank Tom Kish, Jeff Smithers and Deb Wittich for taking on the brunt of the planning for this event. We couldn’t have done it without you. Finally, we would like to thank our sponsors for supporting this crazy running habit. (DRASH, Kathy Loper Events, Viscounte Financial and of course CSA).

Team CSA has already begun scouting the next adventure with possible candidates including the Bourbon Trail run in October 2011 and the Ragnar Relay (Miami to Key West) in January 2012.