One of the first things Research Assistant Professor Sophie Blondel asked Virginia Quadri when Quadri arrived at the University of Tennessee in April as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Nuclear Engineering was: “Do you like running?”
Little did Quadri know what was in store.
Blondel, Quadri, and NE PhD student Caitlyn Parsons recently took part in the Blue Ridge Relay, a 208-mile run from Grayson Highlands State Park, Virginia, to Asheville, North Carolina.
The three were part of a 12-woman team from Knoxville that finished second among all-women’s teams and 59th overall out of 184 total teams. Their team, Chafing the Dream, finished in a time of 29 hours, 23 minutes, and 16.13 seconds.
The race, which took place September 5-6, traverses back and forth across the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains with a cumulative elevation gain of more than 16,000 feet. The runners rotate through 36 legs, and each runner on Chafing the Dream completed 12-25 miles in total. Each team has two vans that shuttle the runners to the exchange spots for each leg.
“I described it while it was happening as perfectly organized chaos,” Parsons said. “There were times where the vans would switch and we’d be like, ‘Oh, we’re not going to make it in time,’ and everything worked perfectly. You could tell our captains were perfectly organized and it was just an amazing experience.”
The runners were all members of different running clubs in the Knoxville area. A large portion of the team trained together for the Knoxville Marathon.
“It was kind of like, ‘okay, what do we want to do next now that we’ve ran a marathon,” said Blondel, one of the team captains. “I think it was actually Professor (Khalid) Hattar in our department who told me about this race, and it sounded pretty fun to drive around and run.”
Finding Their Community
Blondel, 38, started running during grad school. Once she moved back to Knoxville to continue doing research at UT, she joined the Old City Run Club. During her legs of the relay, Blondel averaged under 7:30 per mile.
“I thought it went very well,” Blondel said. “I did another relay before this one just to prepare to run at night, because I had never done a relay before. I learned a lot during that, and I was able to bring it to our team, which was helpful.”
Parsons, 25, began running in 2023 because some of her roommates, who were also NE students, were runners. She ran by herself at first before deciding to run with a group. She now runs with six different clubs weekly.
“I just love the community,” Parsons said. “The cool thing about this relay race is that I don’t think there was a single person on our team that knew every other single person on the team. But by the end, we all felt like we were best friends.”
The running also provides a good outlet for everyone to relieve stress after being at school all day.
“I think the releasing of endorphins helps me,” Parsons said. “I don’t run with headphones or bring my phone, and it gives me time to just think and be away from computers. We work on computers, and I’m on my phone 90% of the day and it’s a great way to just disconnect.”
Doing Hard Things
Although she had run for workouts before, Quadri had never competed in an actual race before joining the team for the relay. The former volleyball player felt good physically and gained a huge mental boost from the experience.
“Because each leg you do, you feel like you can do hard things. I can run 20 kilometers in a day; I can run in the forest in the night alone without a phone,” said Quadri, a native of Italy. “It was something that pushed me very far away of my comfort zone and my limits, because if I think about me 10 years ago, I was afraid of everything. Now I’m here on the other side of the world working in the field I studied for and doing things that I never did before.”
Blondel, Parsons, and Quadri hope to run more races together in the future and possibly recruit more students and faculty from NE to join them.
“Everyone came to me at the end and said they were having so much fun,” Blondel said. “A lot of people were really interested in doing it again next year, so I think we might try to have multiple teams.”
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (rpotkey@utk.edu)