The Other Half

When Monika started planning our big reunion in Moab, she centered it around a half marathon event, reasoning that a lot of us, herself included, were all into running now. Back in the D Street days, there was actually a whole group of runners that did not include Monika or me: Geoff, Bryan, Curt, Tricia, Anna, Micah ... But despite the appearance of converging interests, Monika hadn't convinced anyone from the original crew besides her own husband, Paul, and another friend, Kati, to sign up for the race this weekend.

Luckily she was bringing a large contingent of her own running friends from California. And just before the race, Geoff and Bryan's girlfriends, Corle and Monica, signed up as well. Then we learned there were a few extra bibs floating around. Kati's sister forgot to train, and Paul had injured his ankle and couldn't run. After some grappling it was decided that Jamie would run with Kati's sister's bib, and I was going to be Paul. Thankfully for me and my anxieties about breaking rules, Monika had registered Paul under the name "Bubu," which I presume is a Slovakian-type spelling of the pet name "Boo-boo." Still, it was better to run as "Bubu" than "Paul."

Monika called me out of my tent in the frosty twilight of 6:05 a.m. I admittedly felt groggy and grumpy about the prospect of racing. After all, I had convinced myself I was finally going to partake in a completely lazy, sit-by-the-campfire kind of weekend, and now I was waking up before dawn, with a stiff neck and sore legs from churning through the sand with a mountain bike for 52 miles and 7,600 feet of climbing the day before, just so I could pound my poor shredded quads through another 13.1 miles on pavement. Why do I do this to myself? Even when I vow to relax, I can't.

As we huddled around the picnic table shoveling in instant oatmeal and coffee, two rather strange women — strange to the point of being creepy — walked up to us holding hands. They offered to "stretch" Corle and became insistant when she declined. When I asked if they were running with us, one replied in the most sing-song voice possible, "No, we don't like to run. We like to drink tea." Turns out they were friends of friends of friends who someone invited out to our camp late the night before, and were still up after apparently "drinking tea" all night long. Rudeness of inviting them aside given how loud they were all night and how many children there were in camp, it was reminiscent of the kinds of encounters that used to happen with humorous frequency when I was 21. I had to laugh about it.

The Other Half Marathon begins at the Dewey Bridge, north of Moab, and continues contouring the Colorado River corridor on Highway 128 for 13.1 miles to Sorrel River Ranch. Of all of the highways I've traveled, Utah Route 128 is one of the most scenic. Thirteen miles of desert scenery, combined with the silly fun of running with friends, tempered my reluctance to run so far on pavement. The more serious California runners lined up with their pacing groups, but six of us started off the back near a guy holding a 3:00 pacing sign. "Just stay in front of that guy, and you'll be fine," I said to a couple of the newer runners who were nervous about finishing. The gun went off and we started fresh at about 12 min/mile pace, still joking and giggling.

My original intent was to stay with my friends, shoot photos, and take it easy on my tired legs. But after a couple of miles I lost them in the crowd and gradually got a little more caught up in the running part of the half marathon. I picked up my pace until the mile-long climb at mile eight, and struggled a bit because quarter-filled paper cups of Gatorade every two miles do not provide that much liquid for a desert race, and I was slightly dehydrated. Near the top of the climb was the access road to our campground, and I admit I considered veering off and either heading back to camp or waiting for the others to catch up. As I approached the gravel road, I saw Kati running in a tutu, and as I pushed to catch up to her I noticed a large contingent of friends standing next to the road and cheering runners on. They were so busy cheering for Kati and her tutu that they didn't even notice me, even after I made a full stop directly in front of them and took their photo. Ah, well.

The headwind picked up speed until even the downhills felt more like climbs. The short-but-steep climbs and wind-blasted descents continued all the way to mile twelve. The final mile was downhill but directly into that fierce wind, and I was sorta done having fun with this half marathon. I'm glad it wasn't a full marathon. I rolled into the finish at 2:06, having come within a few minutes of catching up to some of the California crew. I was 501st out of 1,459 finishers, and 46 out of 83 in "my" class, which was males age 30-34. Monika also told me that this is Paul's half-marathon PR now. Since my only other half marathon was the Greifenseelauf in Switzerland one year ago, and my time there was 2:07, I think it's my PR too. Yay!

Beat, however, told me that because I'm a "runner" now, I really need to get my half marathon time under two hours. Boo. I really enjoyed myself in The Other Half, and I doubt I would have enjoyed myself as much if I made a concentrated effort to shave a half minute off of every mile. When Beat asked if I *could* have shaved at least a half minute off of some of those miles, the answer was emphatically yes (certainly in the first 8 miles, but not in the last five.) "So you're not really trying," he replied. "It doesn't count if you're not trying."

This gave me an idea for a future blog post — examining the emphasis on getting faster solely for the sake of getting faster, and why this value has to be a prerequisite to being a "runner." I'm never going to win and sometimes wonder why it's so important to pick my way up through the middle of the pack. I do understand the satisfaction of personal improvement and the competitive spirit, but I feel the need to examine just how much these increments mean to me, as an individual, before I commit to something like training specifically for a faster 50K, for example. Sometimes I wonder if I get caught up in the peer pressure of "faster is always better" without acknowledging which aspects of the running experience really mean the most to me. Or maybe, as Beat says, I'm just being lazy. :-)

Either way, I had a great time at The Other Half — excellent scenic-yet-challenging compliment to the rest of the weekend. Thanks, friends.

Strange steps take us back

I was just a hair over 19 years old when I decided I hadn’t made enough new friends during my first year in college, and opted to rectify that by joining the University of Utah’s environmentalist club, Terra Firma. Yeah, I wanted to save the environment, too, but I was working two part-time jobs to buy myself the luxury of not living at home, taking a full load of classes, and I had little time for extracurricular activities. So my primary motive was making friends, but when I walked into that first meeting full of young men with hairy faces and women in sun dresses, I had no concept of how deeply this single action would shape my future. 

Just another typical evening at the D Street House. Photo from May 2003. 

I was just a hair over 22 years old, and had been out of school for more than a year, when I moved in with them. “They” were a loosely organized household of ten students, an unwieldy group stuffed two-plus to a bedroom in a small house in the Avenues of Salt Lake City. We called ourselves the “Terra Firma House,” and later the “D Street House.” We've since speculated that more than thirty people called the place home for at least a short time. The rent payers were in constant fluctuation, but we were bound by our love of living cheaply and traveling to the desert whenever we got the chance. The drama level was about what you’d expect from a co-ed group of twenty-somethings crammed into a small living space. Flings sparked and faded, wild parties drew police crackdowns, couches were willfully destroyed, people moved in and moved out, but Terra Firma House lived on. 

I was just a hair under 24 years old when I left. Ironically, the "wild" period of my early twenties was also when I took my career as seriously as I ever have. I commuted seventy miles a day to my job at a small-town newspaper so I could spend long hours editing articles, driving out to accident sites to shoot photos, and interviewing local artists and businesspeople. Returning home every night to a different party ultimately proved to be more frustrating than fun. One day, I arrived at the D Street House after a long day at work to find several of my roommates dismantling a thrift-store-purchased arcade "Skill Crane" with a sledgehammer. I loved these people, and one in particular, but enough was enough. I told my boyfriend at the time that I was moving to Tooele to live closer to my job. For a time, I believed I’d never look back. 

But one thing I’ve learned about myself since that time is that I always look back, and the views are often cathartic and rewarding. For all of the tangents our lives have taken since the Terra Firma days, some things never change: We still laugh about the time a rat crawled into Bryan’s car and died a week before anyone discovered it; we still bond amid the flickers of orange light and sage-scented smoke; and we still love the Utah desert. 

For the last six months, my friend Monika, the “Rockin’ Slovakian” of Terra Firma days who now lives in San Francisco, has been planning a big reunion of friends in Moab. For a number of reasons I was on the fence about going, and as recently as one week before the trip wasn't planning to attend. But as the gathering reached a critical mass of old friends, including several traveling from as far away as Alaska, I decided to make it happen. I bought my plane ticket so late that I checked in at the same time, and made last-minute arrangements to join the group at a campsite next to the Colorado River. 

Friday night was a whirlwind — more than forty people had gathered at the group campsite, and we visited several others who opted to stay with their families in condos back in town. Children played barefoot in the sand while the rest of us huddled next to a small fire, trading the rapid-fire versions of our life stories and laughing at inside jokes. As an introvert, this kind of manic socialization is fun but extremely exhausting. By Saturday morning, while the group made plans, I started looking for an excuse to steal some solo time. 

Most of the California contingent planned to rent bikes in Moab and ride the Slickrock Trail. I looked into this possibility only to find that seemingly all the bikes in town were already rented out for the busy fall break weekend. Other friends were taking their children swimming, or going to town to pick up bibs for the half marathon the following day. Most plans had been made before I latched onto the trip, so I figured I'd just be the odd person out, stuck in camp. But as everyone was packing up to leave for the day, I noticed a bike that I recognized mounted to the top of one of the cars. My ex-boyfriend Geoff and I only had a few short minutes to catch up the night before, so I took the opportunity for an easy icebreaker — "So, you still have the old Karate Monkey?"

Somewhere in our conversation about old bike components, life in Colorado, running, and how few miles he's ridden since the 2008 Great Divide Race, I asked Geoff to let me borrow his bike for the day. We were camped more than thirty miles outside Moab and I had no way to transport the bike by vehicle, so the Slickrock Trail group ride was still out of my reach. Instead, I took off from camp by myself in search of a "touring" adventure, something that would take me to scenic and high places. I found the Onion Creek jeep road, and consequently access to one of the prettiest sections of the Kokopelli Trail.

Riding Geoff's Karate Monkey on the Kokopelli Trail put me in a nostalgic mood, and for long periods of time my mind left the sand-spinning present to travel to desert places in the past. I found myself in Coyote Gulch, anxiously searching for ways to scale a twenty-foot waterfall in Sketchers and jeans, with a forty-pound backpack. Then it was late at night in the San Rafael Swell, sitting in silence around an extinguished campfire as a rare display of northern lights streaked across the starry sky. Then it was a single-digit morning in Robber's Roost, hopping up to breakfast still wrapped in my sleeping bag after a shivering night that I half-believed I wouldn't survive.

Nostalgia is a powerful and double-edged emotion — at once uplifting and sobering, happy and sad. For me, nostalgia is a way of creating continuity with the past, an acknowledgement that everything I do holds a direct line to everything I’ve been through. It’s the reason I can sit down next to a campfire with people who I haven’t seen in as many as five years and pick up stories we left dangling back in 2004 as though no time has passed at all. 

But time does pass. Later that night, back at camp, my friend Jen would lament that our group "doesn't do stuff together anymore. We just talk about the stuff we used to do." It's true. Even during our reunion, we took off on our own tangents before reconvening around the campfire at night. Still, to this group of friends, my own tangent — embarking on a six-hour solo bike ride — seemed to make the least sense. With all the fun activities going on that day, why would I choose to go off by myself and burn up my quads on a long, sandy climb into the La Sal Mountains? At dinner we discussed our plans for the following day, and I jumped at an opportunity to take a friend's bib and run the half marathon in the morning. Some friends joked about my agreeing to a "short" run while others teased me about going on a fifty-mile mountain bike ride while most of the runners tapered on Saturday. My friend Tricia, who effectively hasn't seen me since the days of house parties, Sketchers and jeans on hikes, and vocal disavowals of all structured fitness training, asked me whether I could have foreseen any part of what my life is like now ten years ago.

"Not at all," I replied. "I guess it's just the strange the way life works. One thing builds onto another, so slowly that you don't even notice until you look back and realize that your perspective is dramatically different."

Perspectives keep on shifting, and it's rewarding to maintain connections to the past. These people — and places — have made me who I am, and continue to help me keep sight of where I'm going.

First (and only?) training ride

Dropping into the Big Blue

My friend Jan recently took a job at a small biotech company in Seattle, and is leaving the Bay area this Saturday (booo!) It's always a bummer to lose good riding partners, but the upside is that he wanted to squeeze in one last big ride during his last week in town. Great timing, because I needed to squeeze in a long training ride for the 25 Hours of Frog Hollow before taper time encroaches. I effectively haven't ridden a mountain bike more than a handful of times since mid-August. Training for a 25-hour solo that begins in seventeen days? No time to start like the present.

Coast View Trail

Jan mapped out a big loop of trails, fire roads, and pavement around the Marin Headlands. On paper, or original route looked ambitious — but even then I thought, "Yeah, we can knock this thing out in seven hours" and even made early dinner plans with a friend in San Francisco. Ha! I should know better by now. Of all of the regions where I've dabbled in longer distance riding, the California coastline has been, by far, the most deceptively difficult. I *think* the dirt is all smooth and the elevations are all small, but I'm wrong. Somehow, I'm always wrong. A thousand feet of altitude is a huge energy drain if you have to gain it in two miles or less, on freshly graded trails. And cow-trampled, sun-dried mud is more jarring than any rock garden I've ridden. And redwoods can roll out some surprisingly large drops with their well-camouflaged roots. The California coastline is also a place where temperatures can push into the high-80s in October, but any clear day in Marin is a beautiful day.

I think it was mile eight or so when Jan and I looked at each other and both silently wondered if we were really going to go through with this. His face was already streaked with white salt and my sit bones were sore. My sit bones haven't been sore in six years, but it isn't easy to reconcile months of relative inactivity with persistent hard pressing, while climbing, just to keep the rear wheel from spinning out. Still, it was intriguing to finally link up all of these trails I've ridden and run in shorter fragments. We started at the Golden Gate Bridge and climbed up and over the steep ridge into Rodeo Valley, then Tennessee Valley, then Muir Beach, then climbed a fire road to Mount Tam before dropping down the bone-rattling spine of Bolinas Ridge. After five and a half hours, my arms were completely numb and both Jan and I were deeply fatigued. We had traveled 38 miles, it was 4:30 p.m., there were only two hours until sunset, and were still at the furthest point on our loop.

Coyote Ridge Trail

In the interest of not riding until midnight, we decided to nix a few of the trails we were going to hit on the way back, and made a dash for home on the pavement. Marin County has a nice bike route system, but I am not a big fan of urban riding — the constant stop and go, the traffic, the knee-jarring tendency to sprint away from stop signs in the big ring, the wonderful smells emanating from all of the restaurants when I am so hungry. Still, it was nice to make good time for a change — thirty miles in 2:15 including a Gatorade stop when both Jan and I ran low on water. By the end of the ride, the restaurant smells had tempted me into eating three energy bars, my sit bones had gone numb, and I was feeling great. I could have gone out for another 67-mile lap. At least, that is what I will tell myself, so I don't feel as much dread about Frog Hollow in two weeks.

Alcatraz Island, the Bay Bridge, and San Francisco

We ended up with 66.4 miles and 8,083 feet of climbing (map here.) This likely will be my only big training ride before Frog Hollow, as I made a last-minute decision to purchase a cheap plane ticket and fly to Utah for yet another weekend. A bunch of my college friends have been planning a big reunion in Moab. I was originally not planning on going, because my fall travel schedule was already loaded, most of those trips involve Utah, and because I felt guilty about neglecting my work and spending less time with Beat, who also wanted to plan a long training ride this weekend. However, the Moab gathering really started to fill out, and now it looks like most of my good friends from college, as well as several people I haven't seen in eight-plus years, are going to be there. It should be a great reunion; it's always fun to reconnect with people who knew you when you were 20 years old.

Several of these friends are running a half marathon on Saturday, but biking isn't part of the plan. I'm sure I'll do some hiking with my friends and maybe grab a trail run or two, but yeah — here's to another weekend of not training for Frog Hollow. At least I got one good ride in.