The Story
Random things to do
in a pandemic
Like many people, our year 2020 started normally enough. Being runners, we signed up for the Oakland Half Marathon. Like many people, 2020 didn't go to plan.
We needed a new challenge.
The TOGETHERelay was a "distributed race" organized by Pacific Coast Trail Runs — run all 70 segments of the Bay Area Ridge Trail, on your own time, tracked by GPS. Four hundred miles of trails and paths circling the Bay Area. Ninety-one thousand feet of climbing. Chicago to Minneapolis — only with hills.
We started at a 7-Eleven in Benicia on July 19th, wearing masks and buffs, and spent the next five months crisscrossing the Bay Area. The course runs clockwise: segment 1 heads north from the Golden Gate Bridge through the Marin Headlands, and segment 70 crosses the bridge back to the start.
Challenges
The biggest challenge was logistics. Many segments are point-to-point, requiring a two-car shuttle. Many are discontiguous. Many are far away. Basically we spent the summer driving hundreds of miles to run dozens of miles.
Segment 16 (Hood Mountain) closed to fire damage before we got to it — and still hasn't fully reopened. The Glass Fire then closed segment 18 (Oat Hill Mine Trail) in the fall, so a group of us returned in April 2021 to run it together through the fire damage, seven months after everything else was done.
Seventy segments completed. One still waiting. We live in Spain now, but one day we'll probably go climb that mountain just because. No prize — just glory.
