King's Academy, March 17, 2009—King's Academy student athletes finished sixth place out of 16 teams in the Dead2Red relay race for peace this weekend. The student team, composed of seven boys and three girls, won the award for fastest school team. They completed the 242 km race in a mere 18 hours, 20 minutes, just 12 minutes after the King's faculty team.

Weeks prior to the race, 10 dedicated students formed a team and began training under the guidance of cross-country coach and Spanish language teacher Carlos Abellanosa. A separate team of faculty, consisting mostly of junior fellows, also organized and began training.

On the afternoon of Thursday, March 12, the King's student and faculty teams began their foot trek at the shore of the Dead Sea. The King's students ran 500 meter sprints, rotating through all 10 runners every 30 minutes. Using this strategy, the students quickly took a lead position.

The faculty team chose to focus on endurance which ultimately proved less successful. Each member of the faculty team ran two to three km distance  spurts; however, they were continually passed by sprinters running on fresh legs. After a few rotations of running the longer distances, the faculty team adopted the students' strategy of changing runners every 500 meters and they gradually made up for lost time, passing eight teams over the course of the race.

All teams participated in the race sprint throughout the night on the Wadi Araba highway through the desert, entering Wadi Rum at daybreak on Friday and finally arriving in Aqaba midmorning. The finish line extended for an excrutiating 10 km past the city of Aqaba, finally ending at the Radisson SAS in Tala Bay.

For the rest of the afternoon, members of the student and faculty teams rested, stretched and swam. Later that evening, the King's teams joined relay participants as well as the teams of cyclists for a buffet dinner and an awards ceremony hosted at the Radisson SAS.

The King's runners returned to campus exhausted, sore and smiling.

"At one point in the middle of the night when all of the students were exhausted and in pain, five runners covered over 90 km," Abellanosa said. "We contemplated giving up, but we set small goals for ourselves like just to the 200 km mark or just to the Aqaba airport, and we pulled through as a team."

Student Team:
Faisal Al Tell '12
George Steele '10                                          
Ghayth Sandouka '11
Hasan Abu Kharma '11
Mansoor Ghoto '11
Mohammad Foda '10
Noor Masannat '12
Raja Badr-El-Din '11
Reed Ghandour '11
Sarah Muhtaseb '12

Faculty Team:
Georgia Jewett
John Aloian
Lindsey Mischner
Nancy Ann Little
Nayab Khan
Pamela Paniagua
Patrick Dean
Sam Walsh
Tiffany Norman
William Newman-Wise