Texas Independence Relay Updates

At last check with Jay Hilscher, co-director of the Texas Independence Relay (TIR), there were approximately 150 teams ready to run this year's edition of the TIR. Jay was somewhat sheepish about giving a hard number of entrants, saying it had yet to be finalized. I expect there is a certain fluidity as teams struggle with last minute roster adjustments and other logistical issues. The TIR is unusual in that it allows teams which have paid their registration but then are unable to field a team to apply their registration to the next year's race.

My team, which runs as Mid-Texas Symphony, is surely wondering about their leg assignments and my mileage expectations from each runner. This will all come together as the myriad details of being the Captain are dispersed and ticked off my to-do list. Why do I do it? It really is a lot of work and delegation of authority can only go so far in spreading things around. Thank goodness for my sister Brenda, whom I affectionately refer to as the team's Wrunner Wrangler. She has made hotel reservations, van reservations and will eventually plot the movement of each of our runners and their assigned vans. Meanwhile, I continue to look for that last missing link in our 12 runner roster. At that point I will rest a bit easier and be reminded, as I always am, that my team and I do this because it is a heck of a lot of fun!

As you might expect from a team calling itself Mid-Texas Symphony, there is a musical connection. Almost everyone on the team is, or has been, a musician. It's no prerequisite, but interesting nonetheless that our core of 5 musicians who play, or have played, with the Mid-Texas Symphony have been joined by an ex-fiddler who is daughter of the orchestra's librarian, by an ex-band booster mom who just recently took up the piano, and by two chemists from Houston, husband and wife, who used to play clarinet and guitar. In fact, Alan tells me that if his wife Marie is goaded into it, she can still play a mean harmonica. Another of our band once played in the Longhorn Band at UT-Austin. I'm not sure if he can still play March Grandioso on his baritone, but he sure can "hook 'em Horns."

For this year's running of the TIR, team Mid-Texas Symphony will take the music on the road with them. Listen for our starting line music, Rimsky-Korsakov's Procession of the Nobles, at about 6:45 Saturday morning, March 6. We will then perform a couple of impromptu concerts along the way. Come listen to Moon Over Moravia and Texas, Our Texas on the main street of Flatonia. Yes, we have come to run 203 miles, but music will accompany us across miles and miles of Texas (no, that song's not in our book). Mid-Texas Symphony on the road, and the Texas Independence Relay - how much better can it get?