A hilarious development that occurred during that Chinese buffet lunch was that we discovered our Asheville Airbnb, i.e. Party House 2, had been sold out from under us with no prior notice, so we couldn't stay there anymore. My co-captain hastily rented a new place in the same general area. We'll get back to this later.
After a big pasta dinner, we divvied up the bibs and went to bed. Our bibs were marked 166, because that's where we were seeded out of 186 (or so) teams. Each person had the team number followed by a hyphen for their registered place in the runner order. I was 166-4, SVC was 166-6, DAM was 166-8, and sadville was 166-12. Our drivers were 166-13 and 166-14. You had to wear the bib for every one of your legs (mine looked like complete trash by the end, it was amazing). The bibs didn't have timing chips or anything, they were just there so the race officials at each exchange zone could write down when you came in.
At this point, Runner 11 had yet to appear. She did however text me that she expected to arrive between 4 and 4:30 am.
sadville rolled in around 7:30 pm on Thursday night and we were all hugely glad to see him, since our plans for not crashing and burning hinged on having him around. Also he was just a really upbeat, positive personality and a lot of fun to have around, so that was good too.
One of my big takeaways from doing BRR is that you really, really need to have a cheerful-spirited crew to make the adventure go well. I've used this comparison before, but it really does remind me of the part in The Terror where the British Navy is putting their expedition together and they pick Tobias Menzies because he exemplifies the chin-up, no-complaining, can-do spirit of the enterprise, and they think he'll help the crew maintain good cheer in the face of brutal conditions.
That is also the sort of person you want for an ultra relay. I am happy to report that everyone on our team absolutely crushed it on that aspect.
From this point until we reunited at the finish line, my version of the story diverges from Van 2's. You really don't see too much of your teammates in the other van while the relay is going on, except at the van swap EZs, and after the first exchange, nobody really has that much energy left to hang out in the transition zones (or at least we didn't; other teams who are better at planning their logistics might be able to hold out longer. By EZ24 it really did not look like anybody on any team had any spare energy left to do jack shit, though).
So at 3 am, Van 1 woke up. By 3:30, we loaded into the van that was going to be our home for the next two days and left the party house. We got to the start line at 4:30 and checked in. It was surreally gloomy, dark, cold, and broken up by the nervous energy of all the teams around us. Because we were starting with the first wave, we were mostly with first-timers and fellow slowpokes, who were presumably way more beset with race nerves than the veterans and faster runners in later teams, but I'm just speculating on that part.
Anyway there was one van that was just blasting '60s classics (Shirelles, Beach Boys, I don't remember the rest but SVC would). It was kind of a weird choice for pump-up music, but I chose to take it as a good omen that this one van was, inexplicably, going hard with SVC's favorite jams.
Around 4:50 everybody clustered at the start line with their safety gear on. There was a lot of pre-race prayer going on. BRR draws a ton of F3 teams -- it seems to be a big local tradition for a lot of these guys -- and they like to do prayer circles at the start. (F3 stands for "Fitness, Fellowship, Faith." It's like a men's-only Christian Crossfit thing. The apparent purpose of the organization is to help guys find friends with physically and spiritually healthy habits so that they can support each other. Based on my limited observation, a lot of them appear to be normal, but a substantial minority look like disciples of David Goggins, thousand-yard stares and eagerness to injure themselves and all. We'll get back to this again later too.)
There was not a lot of pomp or circumstance to launching the first wave. No Star-Spangled Banner, no pistol shot, literally just the race director saying "okay, in 5 seconds we're gonna start. 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... go!" and that was it, Runner 1 was off and our race officially began.
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