My friend Zach convinced me to join his Fremont Briefcase Relay team this year. For those of you who aren’t from Seattle, the Fremont 5k is a popular Friday evening 5k with a beer garden. But the unique part of the event is the 5-person “briefcase relay,” where you each run 1k while wearing work attire and carrying a briefcase. The briefcase must contain five cans of food that you’ll donate to Solid Ground’s Hunger Action Center after the race.
It didn’t take much convincing to get me to jump in, especially since Zach’s team won last year.
We assembled a solid line-up two weeks ahead of time, but the competitive juices didn’t really start flowing until Zach ran into Carl Winter from Club Northwest at the Wednesday night track workout and Carl started talking smack about his team! For the next 48 hours everybody got psyched!!
The race was very close, with two lead changes and less than five seconds separating the top two teams for nearly the entire race. Zach handed me the briefcase with a decent-but-not-comfortable lead and I dug deep to bring us home.
Our official time was 15:24 and the CNW guys were second in 15:31. Both times were faster than the previous course record of 15:38, set by Zach’s team last year.
Three of us attempted to run the 5k race after the relay. We were all rather thrashed from the relay, but I still managed to find decent enough legs to run a 16:22. I passed two guys in the final 100m. I never thought of myself as much of a sprinter/kicker, so that part was pretty cool!
The winning relay team gets to take home the coveted “Slug Cup.” Click/zoom on the picture below and you can see the ceramic slugs crawling up the base of the trophy. Slug Cup plus Beer Garden equals learning how much beer a Slug Cup can hold!
If you didn’t get to join us in the beer garden or at any of Seattle’s finer bars after the race – keep your eyes peeled, as the Slug Cup will likely be making a few appearances over the course of the next year.
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