Big Weekend, Part I

Waaay back at the end of summer, my friend from work told me about a 10K run she was thinking of entering in December, and would I like to join her? Hmmm, I thought, I've done a couple of 5Ks and they seemed pretty long. Can I run twice that far? I told her I'd think about it. By the end of the day I was googling "10K training plans." By the end of the week, I had printed one out, hung it on the refrigerator, and started crossing off the days I had finished.

Most of the training seemed pretty easy. At the end of September, the weather had cooled off enough that running was comfortable. When my runs got past 3 miles, I started venturing beyond the neighborhood park, where 4 laps equals 3 miles but running that many circles made me bored. And dizzy. Fortunately, we have some nice paths alongside the Colorado River, where Utah and I gradually worked our way from 4 miles to 6.4 at a time. I've been running two mornings a week before work, and one longer run on the weekend. Those morning runs have been before dawn for several weeks, and since mid-November most of them have been darn cold. It's been an interesting exercise to learn what layers work when it's 20 degrees out, and what I need to add when it gets down to 10.

I did a 5K Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning. It was 12 degrees, and after waiting around for the race to start, my toes were painfully cold once I finally got moving. So I was relieved when the forecast for the 10K showed highs in the mid-40s.

The race was the Winter Sun 10K in Moab, Utah. When we saw that the weather looked reasonably nice for December, we decided to make a day of it - I would run in the morning, we'd get some lunch and then take Cailan for his first off-road ride on the yellow tandem (more about that in another post). The run started at 10:00, but shuttles were leaving from the race finish to the starting point at 9:00 a.m., so we needed to get an early start. We hit the road at 5 till 7 and arrived in Moab a bit after 8:30.

It was overcast and quite chilly at the start of the run, so I jogged a little and did sun salutations trying to stay warm. Every runner was given a bag marked with our bib number so we could peel off our outermost layers just before the start, toss them in our bags, and pile them on a truck, which hauled them down to the finish line. They had supplied big containers of hot chocolate, but the thought of that sloshing around in my belly during the run didn't sound appealing.

The starting line had markers so the runners could sort themselves out by their anticipated pace. There were markers for 6, 7, 8 and 9 minute miles. I got in line well behind the 9. This proved to be kind of tedious, as I was stuck in a clump for nearly the first mile; it was probably also a good thing, in that I didn't wear myself out in that first mile.

Even though it was cloudy, the scenery during the run was beautiful. I think that was one reason I didn't really feel tired; I was constantly getting refreshed looking at the red sandstone towers, the brown rolling domes, and the La Sal mountains spattered with just enough snow to highlight all their crags and crevices. The course had one big hill between mile 2 and 3 but otherwise it was flat or sloping downhill. I was surprised when I got to the mile 4 marker - "Already?", I thought. I talked to the runners near me a few times, and I always had my eye on this guy in front of me wearing a neon green vest, trying to keep that vest in sight. I started the run with an earband and gloves on, but within 3 miles they were crammed into the back pocket of my shirt.

Right around mile 5, we left the road we'd been running on and turned onto a bike path. Okay, obviously it's a multi-use path, but those are 'bike paths' in my vocabulary. It felt like the home stretch, and was a nice change of pace, having more curves and a few bridges to navigate. The path passed a couple of parks that I'd never seen before (more on those later also).

And then we took a sharp right turn and the high school, the end point of the run, came into view. We followed the path through an underpass, came up on the other side of the road, and turned into the high school parking lot. Some of the people around me started running faster at this point, so I did too and was a little surprised to find that I was able to. Chris and Cailan were there, waiting for me, waving and taking pictures. I tried to run slowly enough that Cailan could get a picture of me, but I would have had to be as motionless as a toy dinosaur for him to manage it.

We were funneled into a chute at mile 6 and then on to the high school track to finish the run. When I could first see the clock at the finish line it said 57:48 and I tried to go fast enough to get there under 58:00. My official time was 58:16.

There was a man who finished just in front of me, who I had been pretty close to throughout the race. I thought I recognized him, so when we were both in line for the post-race snacks I asked him if he was from Grand Junction, and he was! I had seen him on a couple of Saturdays running on the river path. His wife also runs but hadn't been able to do this event because she broke her foot. Very fun to meet them there.

I was happy - the run went well, I finished without ever having to stop, I felt pretty good, and it was fun.

Almost forgotten how.....

It's been a while:  a while since I've been home at night, a while since blogging, a while since we rode our single bikes.

Due to Billy Blythe (the opera in Little Rock, AR) and other mayhem it has been over 20 days since I've ridden one of our bikes.  I really can't remember the last time I rode my Chumba.  Heather has only been out about once on her Blur since breaking her finger late in the Summer.  Yesterday we fixed that.  We loaded up the bikes and the Dog and went to Loma.  While we ride this area frequently, we are usually on tandem and there are some trails that we don't do because of the lack of tandem fun involved.  Most notably is a trail called "Moore Fun"  which is very technical and full of large rocks that would render the ride incredibly un-fun on a tandem.

Here is our standard load up for the quick run to Loma: note the critical dog-transport-unit in the back.  Temperature was about 35-40 degrees and sunny, which was nice since it has been hovering at or below freezing for a week.

We headed up Mary's...

Then cut across to Steve's Loop - a nice canyon edge trail with great views.

Finally over to Moore Fun.  After about 1.5 miles of hike-a-bike nonsense followed by lots of climbing, we started down!

Still some white stuff on the North-facing sections.

And lots and lots of rocks.

A very good day followed by plenty of pizza.

Cailan's Story

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Odds and Ends

There have been many little things going on lately, none of which was long enough for a full post.  Now that they have completely cluttered our mental desk, it's time to dump them here.

Cailan has started to role-play family values and has learned to make a respectable-looking hunk of flesh out of silly putty.  Here we see a parent lovingly providing for it's child.

Heather rode a bike bigger than her.  We actually had the chance to ride full suspension 29er's.  A couple that work at a local bike shop are very interested in buying an off-road tandem and we offered ours for a test.  They reciprocated by letting heather ride this Niner and letting me use one of the shops $6000 demo Niners.

Honestly there was so much difference in body position between our trusty old bikes and these new-fangled machines that we couldn't honestly evaluate the performance advantages of a 29" wheel.  Heather was able to clear a few uphill obstacles that had confounded her before.  But neither of us had to charge up a new bike - probably for the best as we are getting ready to paint our house.  It will no longer be our "new grey house" but rather our "new green house"  (pics as it happens.)  Our bids ranged from $7000 to $2100 -guess which on we took...

In the world of music something quite interesting has come up.  In the normal, unpredictable manner, I got a gig!  I will be performing in the workshop production of a new American opera in Little Rock Arkansas right before thanksgiving.  The show is called Billy Blythe, and is the coming-of-age story of Bill Clinton.  The irony is that after years of looking too young for opera roles, I am now being cast as a 14 year-old Bill Clinton...

Fall camping

Summer has lingered here, long past the equinox. Although the nights are cooling off more now than they were in August, the days have still been sunny and hot. Perfect weather for camping, so over the weekend we headed up to the Uncompahgre Plateau. Just 45 miles from our house, we found ourselves on a dusty dirt road surrounded by ponderosa pines and golden aspen and brilliant blue sky.


Once we found a good campsite, we set up our tent and then ate lunch. Then we took a short bike ride, Chris pulling Cailan on the trail-a-bike, to the end of the road. The view from here was immense and yet intricate: layers on layers of canyons, cliffs, towers, and broad flat mesas, all leading up to the peaks of the La Sal mountains in Utah.


Cailan was unimpressed by the scenery but found the texture of the dirt to be extremely well suited to finger painting.


On the way back down to the campsite, we stopped at a pond where we discovered some “wild” life. Utah’s herding instincts seemed to rise up from some hidden corner of his brain, spurring him to bound away and give these cows what for.


I’m trying to get ready to run a 10K in December, and today was a “run day” on my training plan, so once we got back to the truck I swapped bike shoes for sneakers and headed back up the road. At 4500 feet higher than Grand Junction, and going steadily uphill, it might be more accurately described as a crawl instead of a run, but I survived my scheduled miles. After that it was Chris’s turn to take a more challenging bike ride. Cailan played in the tent with dinosaurs while I recovered, and then we went on a “colorful leaf hunt”.


If you asked me to find the most beautiful aspen leaf, I would look on the ground for a leaf with the classic heart shape, with a deep golden color unblemished from edge to edge. Cailan had a different take on what makes a leaf beautiful. He was drawn to leaves with patterns, that were brown along the edges or yellow spotted with brown. He named them for their patterns: Cheetah, Ocelot Ray, Tiger, Swallowtail, Edges, Half-n-half. Leaves that were all brown he described as looking like pictures from an I Spy book. If he found a twig on the ground with a few leaves still clinging to it, he called it a balloon stick. He picked up each leaf that caught his eye and handed it to me, saying “Look at this beautiful leaf!”

We were still on our leaf hunt when Utah and Chris returned, bouncing and sweaty, respectively. My hands were stuffed with beautiful leaves and balloon sticks, and Cailan kept bringing me more and more. He apparently didn’t need to hang on to them long term; I set them down in a careful pile near our tent so we could find them again if we needed to, but he didn’t ask for the ones he had gathered before – he was all catch and release that day.


Chris and Utah had a nice, 11-mile ride on rocky dirt road and singletrack trail. The trail had been mostly downhill, with a return on road, including a mile-long section that was unmercifully steep and strewn with rocks:


Other sections of the road were smoother and easier to travel, leaving a bit of energy to enjoy the scenery.


We made a quick dinner (angel hair pasta with olive oil, herbs and cheese) and then scrambled through the aspen towards the west, to get a good view of the sunset. It wasn’t quite as magnificent as the view at the end of the road, but it was pretty good.




We crawled into the tent with the last bit of light fading from the sky and introduced Cailan to the grand camping tradition of playing cards in the tent until bedtime. It was Cailan’s first time playing Crazy Eights and he found it tremendous fun – I think he would have played until midnight if we hadn’t cut him off and tucked him into his sleeping bag.

Crested Butte - Day 4

Not many pictures from today. Shaun, Cindy, and Amos took off for a big adventure and the rest of us played at the cabin for a while (lots of dinosaurs and dancing) then went back to the Rainbow Park which is where the kids had been yesterday. I have to admit, it's a pretty cool park. Heather, Cailan, and I had been there earlier this year to watch fireworks. It has some great playground equipment as well as a good bouldering rock.


Cailan loved the music toys there (two small sets of levers that made chimes ring). He even started playing some of the music that was printed above the keys, slowly matching the letters in the notes to those on the keys. Another favorite was the thing Cailan named the "Yuf". It is kind of a hybrid of a spider's web and a climbing wall. Quinn and Abbey had great fun crawling around on it while Cailan liked to lay in the web part.


We had plans for an afternoon ride to a lake, but got rained out. This left us a bit cold, wet, and frustrated (except for Abbey, Quinn, and Cailan who just considered it extra playtime in the cabin). So we prepared for the next day.

Crested Butte - Day 3

Day 3 - Heather and I took off early to go ride the famous "Trail 401". We had ridden it years before on a previous visit and our memories were filled with stunning views, waist high wildflowers, and endless downhill singletrack. Heather knew that broken finger or no, she was going to ride it again. So as SCAQ and Cailan went to a playground in Crested Butte, we started up the beautiful alpine road to the trail. The trail starts several miles past Crested Butte near a town called Gothic. An interesting place known mostly as the base for the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (There was lots of flannel walking around there). We pulled into a parking area and were the second vehicle there. It was time to unload the bike and dog and hit the road!

As we slowly pedaled up the road, we were reminded of two things:
1) We were ever so much higher in elevation than our home in Junction, and
2) This really is one of the most visually stunning places we have ever been.


We had missed the official "Wildflower Festival", but there were still plenty of lupines left to look at.



Nearing the top of the road, we came to a small glacier (no pic, sorry) and a rather pretty lake. Unfortunately, the road turned uphill notably to go around it, so Utah didn't get to drink it and we had to work harder.





Once you leave the road the singletrack trail goes up - I mean really up for a while. It was steep enough that we were often reduced to either riding about 30 feet at a time (stopping to breathe) or else we just walked. Eventually it tops out in a lovely alpine meadow where we could snack and recover a bit.



It really has a top-of-the-world feel.



Then comes some big fun: we rolled the big red bike down a 18" wide path that clung to the side of the slope. Screaming through wildflowers and switchbacks for miles and miles.



Here's a view that shows the slope and Mt Crested Butte in the distance.


That is where the story should end, but it doesn't. The trail then levels off about halfway along. That was followed by lots of difficult muddy climbing and a bit of frustration. Fortunately, I didn't get pictures of either.

Heather, Utah, and I were all pretty tired from the end of 401. We returned to the cabin looking forward to a bit of food and a rest. Instead we found a whole pack of people ready to go out and hit another trail. Fine - twist our arms... We all ate some lunch and loaded up for one of our favorite group rides, Lower Lower and Upper Lower. As this was everyone's second look at the trail, confidence was high. Here are the Roarks crossing a group of roots. First Abbey (who was frequently in the front of the pack!)


Next Shaun.


Then with a bit more concentration, and excellent form, Cindy.


Followed by Quinn, who is showing the family concentration trait that comes from Cindy.


The great thing about taking Cailan biking is that with snack breaks you often get snuggles as well.

Crested Butte - Day 2

We started the day by going to Strand Hill, where a set of trails takes off from a dirt road. Shaun, Chris, Utah and Amos took off on bikes and paws on the Strand Hill trail, while Cindy, Abbey, Quinn, Cailan and I went for a hike on the Canal Trail. The trails here are not real hard, but they present one big challenge: the irrigation canal that lies between the dirt road and the trails. There are two options - you can slog through a muddy bog, wade through the knee-deep water of the canal and pick up the trail right on the other side of the canal, or you can go further up the dirt road, cross over the canal where it runs through a culvert, and bushwhack up a steep, sage-covered hill to get to the trail at the top of a ridge. At the beginning, we all bushwhacked.

Cailan entertained us on the hike by telling us about the Woolly Wiley Wulls, large, green, humanivorous monsters that so closely resemble trees it is hard to tell, when you're looking at a forest, which are the actual trees and which are the Woolly Wiley Wulls. I could never guess correctly, but fortunately Cailan was always able to tell which ones were the monsters so we could steer clear of them. We composed a song about them as we walked. The chorus went like this:

I'm a Woolly Wiley Wull
and I like to eat people
First I bite off all their heads
and then chew on their bones.

The verses told how Woolly Wiley Wulls use chicken for gum and fish for medicine and all sorts of digestive details that were fascinating to the 4- and 7-year-old boys among us but are probably not fit to be recorded in writing. Other highlights of the hike were the wildflowers (some of which could be used as spyglasses for spotting Woolly Wiley Wulls), the M&Ms in my bag of trail mix, and the time when Quinn was walking backwards and tripped over a mushroom.

After we had turned around and headed back to the start, our hiking party encountered the bikers and the dogs where our trails intersected. Everyone was muddy:


We returned to the cabin for lunch, then set out again for a big group ride. This time we were going to do the Upper Loop trail. Not the Lower Loop or the Upper Lower Loop we had ridden the day before, and certainly not the Upper Upper Loop. (I'm not making these trail names up!) We parked in town, near the visitor's center, and rode through some neighborhoods, past Rainbow Park where Chris, Cailan, and I watched fireworks on the 4th of July, till we got to the paved bike path which runs from the town of Crested Butte uphill to the ski resort at Mt Crested Butte. It's much nicer to bike this route instead of on the road, with cars seeming to fly by while you crawl along slowly feeling that your lungs might burst.

Our tandem train met with some difficulties on this hill. The pedals on Cailan's trail-a-bike were very cheap, flimsy plastic ones that tended to come unscrewed from the crankarms. Cailan's preference for pedaling backwards makes this problem even worse, and since we had rigged up straps to secure his feet to the pedals, when the pedals come unscrewed they remain attached to his foot. We had to stop several times to screw the pedals back on, but these stops also gave us opportunity to breathe. Quinn also had some trouble with this climb, because it is so steep and goes on for ever so long. Finally we arrived at the top, and we stopped for a snack. We ignored the gathering thunderclouds.



The Upper Loop trail was very fun, a narrow path running along the side of a ridge, almost hidden by wildflowers. There were some sections where we darted through aspens, and one of these was a very rocky, rooty, steep descent. Most of us walked that part.



We left Upper Loop where it intersected with Tony's Trail, giving us a shorter route back to town. There were some huge boulders we stopped to play on. Shaun rode over the boulder in this picture - alas, we didn't get a photo of that!


Tony's Trail was an easy descent through a meadow on gently curving switchbacks, leading us to a dirt road we took back to town. As we left the dirt road, we had to ride over a cattle guard and under a gate that blocks cars from the road. Quinn went under the gate with ease; our tandem train had to dismount.

We went into town to look for a new set of less-flimsy pedals for the trail-a-bike, which we managed to find even though they are an odd size. We had talked about getting some ice cream but the storm suddenly broke on us so we rushed back to the cars to load up the bikes. Back at the cabin, we all dried off, showered, and dried off again. Then we returned to Crested Butte to fill our bellies at Donita's Cantina. We also walked around and looked at some of the shops, including the rock shop where we saw fossilized teeth of Carcharadon megalodon, an enormous prehistoric shark.

The evening wouldn't have been complete for the kids without a splash in the hot tub, so that's what happened when we got back to the cabin!