Spring Break

For many years, we had a tradition of going to Moab for spring break, to enjoy the warmer weather, sunshine, and drier trails than were available in the Denver area.  It was great: we'd get the first sunburns of the season, the first saddle sores, the first wobbly legs from pushing hard on a long bike ride.  This year, we got the chance to revive that tradition and introduce it to Cailan.

We left our house on Saturday morning, not so early that we couldn't have a nice French toast breakfast but not too late either.  We wanted to arrive in Moab with plenty of time to find a campsite, a task that we were worried could be difficult, since it was the weekend of the annual Moab Skinny Tire Festival.  Fortunately our location gives us a headstart on all those Denverites, and by 11:00 we had found a campsite by the Colorado River and were setting up our tent.  We gave Cailan and Utah strict admonitions about going too close to the river's edge - one of them listened. After a picnic lunch, we set out for the trails.

We went to a fairly new area called the Moab Brand Trails, a trail system with several loops of varying degrees of difficulty. In a very uncharacteristic move, I didn't buckle on my bike shoes and slap my helmet on my head; instead, I found myself tying on my running sneakers. I am getting ready for my first half-marathon in April, and I really needed to do a long run this weekend to stay on top of my training schedule. Chris and Cailan geared up for a ride on the big yellow tandom, and we all headed out in the same direction, heading along the EZ Trail toward the Bar M loop. Chris and Cailan soon pulled ahead of me, though they paused a couple times to give me a drink from a Camelbak and to snap a picture.

I saw them again after another mile or so. They had stopped near the junction of EZ and Bar M to look for a geocache. I grabbed another sip of water and kept moving. It was a gorgeous day: sunny and somewhere in the mid-60s, a very comfortable temperature for running. The scenery was spectacular. From the Bar M trail I could see many of the rock formations in Arches National Park, as well as the La Sal mountains. The EZ trail was narrow and windy, a soft dirt surface studded occasionally with rocks. The Bar M trail was wide and hard-packed with many sections of slickrock. Both were fun to run on, and the trail system is well marked, with signs at every trail junction and trail maps at many of the intersections.

After I'd gone about four miles, I started to wonder why I hadn't seen Chris and Cailan again. They had been planning to ride the Bar M loop also, and even though Cailan doesn't pedal very hard, they can easily outpace my running speed. But they had several geocaches to hunt for, not to mention any lizards, rocks, flowers, or sticks that caught Cailan's attention, so I wasn't too surprised. At 5.5 miles, I could have taken a cut-off trail back towards the parking area, then caught the Lazy trail to get back to the truck, but I decided to stick to the Bar M, so the boys wouldn't get worried if they didn't catch me. In retrospect, I wish I had taken that left turn, because after 6 miles, the Bar M trail stopped being quite so fun. The trail surface alternated between soft loose dirt and deep sand, and the trail went up and down a series of gullies - each up started to feel longer and steeper than the last one. Eventually the trail curved around to the left, turned into a gravel road with a long gradual climb, and was parallel to the highway; it was not nearly so scenic and at a point in the run where I really could have used some distraction to keep me going.

At 8.25 miles I was back at the parking lot, and Chris and Cailan weren't there. I called Chris and, after a couple of missed calls due to bad reception, learned that he was on the Bar M trail, at the top of one of those gullies, with a pinch flat. He'd unpacked his spare tube, only to discover that it also had been the victim of a pinch flat. He opened his patch kit, and found one lonely patch left - not enough to fix the two holes left by a pinch flat. I couldn't do anything to rescue him - I didn't have any keys to the truck. I couldn't even ride my bike to them, because my bike was locked on the roof rack, and Chris had the only keys. Fortunately, on a spring weekend in Moab, you don't usually have to wait long to meet someone else on the trail, and soon he had met a couple bikers with a well-stocked patch kit.

Cailan kept himself busy during the tire change by taking pictures with Chris's camera. I think when they finally got back to the truck, he had taken over 100 pictures, including a couple dozen shots of Utah (including a few that were in focus), countless pictures of dirt, a nice series of Chris in action with the bike pump, and some self portraits.

We all had water and snacks, then we pulled my bike down from the roof, I changed shoes and plopped my helmet on, and the four of us took a spin on the EZ Lazy loop. This was about 3.5 miles of easy but fun trail, a few bumps to go over and some nice swoopy downhill singletrack. At least, I think it would have been easy if I hadn't just finished an eight-mile trail run. My legs felt a bit like jelly. Back at the parking lot again, Chris unloaded his single bike and went to look for a little more challenging trail. Cailan and I hung out near the truck, casting spells with our magic wands (which closely resemble drumsticks) and collecting magic rocks. I'm not sure what exactly was magic about the rocks, but we sure did find a lot of them. The sun started to disappear early as it sunk behind some rock towers in the west, casting our play area into shadow and sending me to the truck to dig up long pants and a sweatshirt. When Chris returned, we loaded up and drove into town to buy a patch kit and a spare tube and enjoy dinner at Eddie McStiff's..

Then we went to our campsite along the river and started to get ready for bed. Of course, we had time to cast a few more spells in the dark, before retiring to our tent.

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.