Ilanarama!

The White Rim Trail is a well-known 4WD road approximately 100 miles long which loops between the Colorado and Green Rivers through Canyonlands National Park near Moab, Utah: it descends from the 'Island In The Sky' mesa top down to the level of the White Rim sandstone, which was formed during the Permian period 245 to 286 million years ago. Blah blah blah, a picture's worth a thousand words:



(Okay, I'm cheating here, because I'm not riding on the actual trail but on the sandstone rim. Most of the ride is really not as scary as this makes it look!)

( More about our trip, with [occasionally scary] photos )

Friday afternoon Britt and I drove out to Moab with the bikes in the truck; we had a pleasant dinner at Miguel's with our friends Kevin and Nora (as per tradition) and I drank a margarita (also as per tradition), then went back to the motel (the Gonzo Inn, where Karah and I usually stay) and took a soak in the hot tub (you guessed it). It was a lot more fun to have Britt along, which was not not as per tradition, but I hope it becomes one.

In the morning we got up and had coffee and breakfast cookies with Kevin and Nora (yep), then caught our respective buses for our respective starts. I was running the Canyonlands Half for my fourth time, and Britt would be running the five-miler; he's not really into racing, but he runs four miles with me a couple of times a week, so I figured he'd be fine.

It was a relatively warm but cloudy day, with only a light breeze - welcome weather after the ferocious headwinds of 2011 and 2012. After a quick porta-potty stop, I found Karah and the rest of the Grand Junction girls, and we chatted, resting among the red rocks while waiting to be allowed to move up the canyon to the start.

I lined up a bit in front of the 1:40 pacer; based on my last few tempo runs of around 7:32 pace, and my average mileage of around 44mpw, I figured 1:38-ish would be a good goal. Maybe I had a shot at a PR, under 1:37. My plan was to go no faster than 7:20 for the first mile (it's sharply downhill and oh-so-easy to go too fast - last year I ran 7:20 that mile, and the year before, 7:18) and no faster than 7:24 (1:37 pace) for the next three miles, then play by ear.

( The race )

( And then we went mountain biking. And eating. And biking again. )

Anyway, it was a fabulous weekend, A+ would run (and bike) again!

It's been pretty hot here in SW Colorado, so Britt and I decided that if we were going to go mountain biking (which we wanted to do) we'd have to gain some altitude to do it. So we drove up to Molas Pass to ride the Colorado Trail. Which was awesome.



( You know the drill... )

I left for Moab around 10am Saturday morning with my mountain bike strapped into the bed of my pickup truck. Ordinarily the day before a half marathon is a day for rest, maybe a couple easy miles with strides at most, but I knew I wasn't in shape for a PR, and Britt was off in the mountains hunting elk, so I had the whole weekend to myself, and I wanted to have fun.

( And so I had fun! )

Race report next! I promise!

Biking: in addition to the Log Chutes ride last Saturday, Britt and I drove out to near Pagosa Springs, about 45 minutes from here, and rode up Devil Mountain, which has a rough and rocky road leading to a cleared summit that used to have a fire lookout tower. Not quite 12 miles up and 3500 vertical feet, woohoo! A few photos are here.

Running: I can run again! Sort of! My PT has given me clearance to alternate 5 minutes of slow running with 5 minutes of walking, after a walking warm-up. I did this 3x on Thursday and 4x this morning, and it's not causing the tendinitis to flare up, hooray! It's still going to be a long road to where I was as a runner, though.

Argh: I am annoyed more than I should be by people who email me - at an address that includes my name - and then misspell my name in the body of the email. ARGH. Also I am annoyed by people who are told that the deadline for the political newsletter I send out is Thursday noon, who then email me on Thursday at 2:30 pm with their news release prefaced by, "Thank you for holding the newsletter for this information." (It should not surprise anyone that someone has committed both these annoyances simultaneously. Also that I did not, in fact, hold the newsletter for that information.)

Fun: The newsletter deadline was Thursday noon because Thursday afternoon we drove out to Montezuma Creek, Utah to start a river trip on the San Juan. An exciting and scenic weekend that was not ruined by the roughly fifty bazillion gnats that each took a bite of my tender flesh. More details when I get the photos off the camera.

Administrivia: If you have a Dreamwidth journal and a LJ, I preferentially will read you at DW and will subtly filter you out at LJ. I also filter out those I read through another journal. If I read you at DW and you read me at DW you are welcome to defriend me at LJ. I don't do the subscribe-and-filter thing at Dreamwidth since there are separate access and subscription filters, but if the asymmetry bothers you, let me know, and I will cheerfully subscribe to you and then ignore you. Okay, not really, but you know what I mean.

And now I am off to a political thingy that didn't get into the newsletter. I will try to be polite to the campaign manager who annoyed me, see above.

The park where I've been doing most of my mountain biking lately is called Horse Gulch - it's a big hunk of city and private land on the southeast side of town. (Incidentally, this is also where I do my trail running - when I can run trails!) It's a very high desert-y climate, rocks and sand and scrub, but it's particularly nice in the spring because of the wildflowers.



I think this is bluebonnet, a kind of lupine. ( Phlox and paintbrush... )

Britt and I had been planning on going backpacking in Utah this weekend, but early in the week he came down with a cold, and he was miserable enough by Thursday, our planned departure day, that it was clearly a no-go. So instead yesterday I did yard work, and today I went mountain biking.

I have been riding my mountain bike (not the one in the icon; I have a fancier newer one, that was part of the deal when we bought our Sportsmobile, as the seller owned a bike store and was more willing to throw in a couple of bikes than lower the price) a lot lately as I am taking a break from running to let my peroneal tendinitis heal. The tendinitis seems mostly unaffected by cycling, probably because my foot is locked into place by the clipless pedal (which, of course, my shoe clips into - weird terminology!) and my PT said any exercise is good as it increases the blood flow.

I started out a couple of weeks ago doing the shortest, easiest loop in the Horse Gulch system (where I used to trail run, and hopefully will again soon) and have been gradually extending my rides and increasing their difficulty. I've been trying to apply my lessons from last summer's MTB clinic, in particular trying to attack technical and/or steep sections rather than just assuming I can't ride them and bailing ahead of time. This has resulted in my riding over things that I never would have thought I could do - plus a few fall-down-go-booms and new bruises on my legs.

Today I wanted to do something a bit longer, so I rode up Junction Creek to the Log Chutes trail, about 5 miles of pavement and 2 miles of gravel/dirt road to get there, pretty much all uphill with a few quite steep spots. I'd never ridden this trail and knew only that there were a couple of "intermediate" loops, 4 and 7 miles. When I got there, I found no signage at all, and no people to ask, just two parked vehicles, so I took a guess and rode out the dirt road at the back of the parking lot, which had a barrier for vehicles but which bikes clearly had ridden around.

It turned out to be my favorite kind of mountain biking - a narrow, bumpy rock-and-dirt closed Forest Service road, a little uphill and then a little down. Using the best maze-solving philosophy I turned left at the first intersection, where it became narrower and more steeply uphill, and then left again when a singletrack trail (marked by tree blazes, and a post with a green circle for difficulty, but no map or name) veered off into the woods. (I was wearing my wrist GPS which I use for after-the-fact mapping and for mileage and speed tracking, and theoretically I think I could have used it to figure out how to get back to known territory, but I have never actually used the GPS functions so I'm not really sure how.) The trail was a little trickier but perfectly rideable, even for a wimp like me, although someone needs to go through with a pair of pruning shears and lop off the encroaching willows. I did have a few nervous moments on some of the rockier sections, and I walked across one boggy bit, and I fell at a creek crossing followed by a steep and loose uphill I couldn't quite negotiate. But otherwise, it was an awesome ride, and right at 4 miles I spotted the Junction Creek road ahead of me.

Total of 19 miles at a blazing 8mph average, although that hides the variance; on the paved part of the downhill I zoomed at 16-20mph, and my average over the actual Log Chutes trail was 5mph, or about trail running speed. I'm looking forward to riding it again (and trying the right fork, which I think leads to the longer loop; and bringing a camera, 'cause it's pretty!) with Britt once he gets over his ick.

Then I came home, took a shower, and went to the Taste of Durango street fair where I stuffed my face on tapas and mini-plates from our finest restaurants, washed down with a beer and a margarita. A perfect Sunday!

Oh, I did, by the way, blow off the Wednesday afternoon sessions and go mountain biking. Took the Peaks Trail to Frisco, 8 miles of singletrack, and yes, I was by myself, and so I very much erred on the side of caution. Still, I rode bits that I am pretty sure I got off and walked before (I rode about 1/3 of it with a group last year; we turned around at a nasty river crossing which is now bridged) and did not actually fall off the bike at any time, although I possibly came close. Then I rode back on the paved path directly into the howling wind, which was extremely not fun. A total of just under 20 miles of riding, averaging the same average speed at which I ran the Baltimore Marathon. :-)

I also ran 7 miles on Tuesday morning, and about 4 this morning. I pretend that living at 6600 feet makes me impervious to altitude, but all it takes is a tiny uphill here at 9600 feet and I am gasping and miserable. Clearly I need to get more altitude training before the Imogene Pass Run in September. I wanted to go biking again tonight, or running tomorrow morning before driving home, but I'm running the Steamworks Half Marathon on Saturday and must conserve glycogen. To that end I am carboloading a bomber of Switchback Amber from the Backcountry Brewery in Frisco, and have polished off most of a bag of Rold Gold Honey Wheat Braided Twist pretzels. La la la.

I did make it back for the Wednesday evening special session, which was James Balog of the Extreme Ice Survey showing all sorts of nifty time-lapse photography of glacier faces falling into the ocean. As soon as I got back to my room I put his NOVA/PBS documentary on Netflix. REALLY COOL, folks. After his presentation he made a heartfelt plea for scientists interested in using his images to extract land-ice data to help him get funding, because he really needs $600,000 to keep going, and all I could think of was, wow, in the world of scientific projects that is such a tiny little amount. I actually don't know how useful his stuff is in the world of glaciology - we are just starting to fold glaciology into our models, so it's a kind of climate science I'm only barely conversant with - but wow, it's science in action!

Tomorrow morning I shall drive home. Whee.