- 5 Spots open! Raise $5000 for the Avon Foundations Need for Speed Against Domestic violence and your team gets one of 5 spots for Free! Sign up today and we will see you in September!

From an entry standpoint, we are up over 40% from last year and more than half of the 350 spots are already taken. If you are planning to join us please do not delay in getting your team signed up and your payment in. Last year we sold out in June, but this year we are on pace to sell out in April or May! We do have 5 spots reserved for teams that raise $5000 or more for the Avon Foundations Need for Speed so keep that in mind if you can’t get things together in time!

Runner registration is now open, so for those captains who have signed up early, you can start getting your runners registered. As part of our newly designed web-site, we have added features to the captains’ page to make managing teams much easier. Better views of the team roster and team email blast capability are just a few of the enhancements we hope will make your pre-race preparation easier.

If you missed our last update, The The Avon Foundation will be our primary charity partner for 2008-2010. We are hoping to get everyone involved in helping to reach our 2008 goal of $50,000 in donations! To make that easier for you, we have added an ‘EASY’ button at the end of the registration process. You can click to sign up, or click to make a donation. The info you enter on the RTB site will be populated on the Avon site to speed your fundraising team registration. And, to provide a little motivation for making the effort to start a fundraising team, RTB and Avon have come up with the following incentives:

1. Raise $5000 and get your 2008 entry free! (if you have already paid, RTB will send you a check or apply to 2009; otherwise you can fund-raise your way in the event that we’re sold out). Note: this is limited to the first 5 teams.
2. Raise $3000 and you get to pick your start time* and your team number (excluding the number 1 which is reserved for the 2007 winning team)!
   * start time must fall within the open and close times of the race course as determined by RTB management.
3. Raise $2000 and get a GPS Training System
4. Raise $1000 and you get to pick your start time and your team number (excluding 1 which is reserved for the 2007 winning team)!
5. Raise $500 and get a $50 gift certificate to a sports store
6. Raise $150 and get a long sleeve performance shirt
7. Raise $75 and get an RTB hat

On the merchandise front, keep an eye on our new on-line store in the early summer timeframe. We will be offering limited edition 10th Anniversary gear. In the meantime, we were able to get 30 more Flashing Vests that many of you had requested. They are now available for order: http://www.rtbrelay.com/ds/cart.php. These are the same vests that we had on sale in September. Get them while they last and train safe!

All the money raised by Avon will go to our beneficiary, The New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence. http://www.nhcadsv.org/

In an ongoing effort to improve our event and our website, RTB Relay has partnered with realbuzz.com to offer our runners a new level of interaction on line. Realbuzz.com is the UK’s most popular lifestyle and community on line networking site aimed at individuals interested in fitness and nutrition, and, especially, running, they have “jumped the pond” and have launched realbuzz.com here in the US. Our partnership with realbuzz.com provides a host of cool web tools that will increase your ability to share your passion on line:

our new event forums provide an online community for sharing information about the RTB Relay: logistics, course information, training, goal setting, fun stuff to do along the way, advice for ‘newbies’, and more!

realbuzz.com blogs are as good as blogs you find elsewhere, but they are better because they are designed for runners! Sure, you can share your own personal story, photos, communicate among friends you make on line, etc. but our realbuzz.com enhanced blogs also allow you to personalize your blog to a specific running event and goal. You can document your runs on our integrated workout log which is built right into your running blog. The workout log allows you to record the length and duration of your runs as well as other pertinent information such as weather, terrain, weight, etc. in an easy-to-use, easy-to-read format.

Realbuzz.com route planners are great in two ways:
1) you can plan out and measure your next run from the comfort of your chair (and then print it out and stick it in your pocket for your run) with our GPS based interactive maps,

2) you can also save your runs for future reference. As runners save their runs, they can also search out other runs based on zips codes and cities.