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The Gait Keepers

My racing team from last summer got together to run the Utah Marathon Relay again this year. The Utah Marathon Relay takes place in South Jordan every September and, as the name suggests, it’s the length of a marathon, 26.2 miles. Fortunately, the course is split into 5 loops so each team member only has to run 5.2 miles, which makes the race completely doable even for the non-nutsy. Although our team hit some unexpected snags this year, we still managed to beat our previous time. Yeah us!

That look on Jeremy
That look on Jeremy's face is the look of a man that knows he may lose bowel control at any moment.

Jason, Fran, and I were all very prepared for this race since we had run a half marathon just a month before. Nothing makes five miles look like a walk in the park like running thirteen. Jason’s brother Jeremy seemed reasonably ready for the event as well, though he didn’t train as much for it as last year. I think running five miles didn’t scare him this year since he knew he could do it so the fear of being the humiliated downfall of our team didn’t inspire him as it had previously. My brother Drew, after he barely survived last year’s race, intended on thoroughly training for his run this year but somehow those good intentions never resulted in actual exercise. The race got closer yet his plans to prepare remained in the indefinite future so he only got in a few pathetic runs before the relay.

The first runners waited valiantly in the cold for the race to start.
The first runners waited valiantly in the cold for the race to start. I'm there somewhere in their midst freezing my tukus off.
Drew looks surpsingly peppy here as he pases the 4 mile mark.
Drew looks surprisingly peppy here as he passes the 4 mile mark.

But, ready or not, our race day came and that’s when things got a little messy. The day before the relay I was showing signs of catching a cold: headache, sore throat, stuffiness…the usual. Although a cold wouldn’t stop me from racing I was concerned that it would hinder me from doing my best. Then Jeremy came down with something in the wee hours of the morning on the day of the race that, unlike my cold, was a showstopper. He got a bout of food poisoning and warmed up for the relay by running to the toilet over and over again during the night. While he still showed up bright and early at the starting point ready to run there was no telling if the large quantities of Pepto-Bismol he had downed would be enough to keep all his fluids in their proper places inside of him. We had him do a little trial run across the parking lot to see how his stomach held up and that didn’t go over well so Jason and I collectively decided that he needed to abort. Running and the runs may sound like things that go together but they really aren’t. With Jeremy off to be buddies with his bathroom we had to hurry and find another runner. Luckily, we know an abnormal number of active people so Fran was able to find a friend willing to be a last minute addition to our team.

I came zipping through the finish line at 50 minutes and 35 seconds
I came zipping through the finish line at 50 minutes and 35 seconds. I'm pretty proud of that; my short legs had to work hard for it.

So after all that how did we do? Being a little under the weather had no ill-effects on my performance; in fact the opposite surprisingly seemed to be true. I shaved about a minute and half off my time from last year and crossed the finish line in just over 50 minutes. This trend continued for my teammates who all bettered their runs from last year, even Drew was about a minute faster than the year before. (I’m sure not getting lost helped.) Jason’s time was the most impressive though. He was almost five minutes quicker this year than the preceding at 41:38. Way to go Jas!

Team Name
Team name? The Gait Keepers. Average Team Speed? 9:15/mile.
With about an 8 minute
With about an 8 minute/mile average, Jas was flying! This picture makes it look like I might mean that literally.

All our slightly quicker paces paid off. We finished at 4 hours and 2 minutes, which was 11 minutes faster than our previous time of 4 hours and 13 minutes. This put us in 82nd place out of 124 teams. Not too shabby considering Andrew was in our group. LOL. Just kidding Drew…mostly.

Here
Here's my dramatic handoff to Fran. Cue the Chariots of Fire music.

Good job everyone! May we rock even more awesome next year!

Rachel September 22, 2010 No Comments

Rock and Bone

Jason and I are extreme sports enthusiasts. We gladly put ourselves in potentially painful situations again and again for the thrill of speeding through the trees or the challenge of a beautifully chaotic gravelly slope. However, we didn’t expect our first experience with a new extreme hobby, rock climbing, to be quite as wild as it turned out.

Jason was a good monkey boy
Jason was a good monkey boy. Those long legs and arms came in handy as he searched for crevices to aid his ascent.

Jason’s grandparents spent many of their retirement years repelling down cliffs and setting up ropes courses so when they passed away they left behind a lot of climbing gear. Jason and I ended up inheriting this equipment; I think mostly because everyone in the family thought we were the only ones that might actually use the stuff. They were probably right. We supplemented our inheritance with some new gear and we were ready for our first outdoor climbing adventure.

You might recognize that rope from pictures of Nana and Gramps
You might recognize that rope from pictures of Nana and Gramps repelling. Yup, it's the same one.

One of my good friends, David, is an avid climber so we were happy that he agreed to take us climbing with him. For our first climbs we went up American Fork Canyon to the south face of Hard Rock. There are two great walls for beginners in this cluster of cliffs: Rockapella (5.7) and Stoic Calculus (5.8).

Don
Jason and David may look like goofs but when it came to climbing they were all business. David made it up Stoic Calculus in under 2 minutes. Yup, he's a crazy spider monkey.

That morning David also brought his brother, Danny, and a buddy, Hamilton, with him so we had a good climbing group and we had a great time scaling 80 feet up those two sheer faces until our arms and legs could take no more. Compared to climbing in indoor facilities, which we have done before, it was pretty exciting to clamber up real rocks. I’m mildly afraid of heights so I thought that phobia might decrease my enjoyment of this sport but I didn’t find those elevations nearly as terrifying as I thought I would. Sure, looking down from 80 feet up was a little intimidating but looking around you at 80 feet up was amazing.

Rockapella is only a 5.7 so it was
Rockapella is only a 5.7 so it was a relatively easy climb even for a beginner like me but the view from the top was still spectacular.

On my second climb, which was on Stoic Calculus, my rope got caught on a ledge when I was about 50 feet up and I couldn’t free it. A few minutes later, while it was still jammed, I slipped. (Yeah, it figures that the only time I lost my footing while we were climbing happened to be when my rope was stuck.) When I slipped the caught rope made me swing down and around and slam into the wall. I won’t lie, it didn’t feel awesome but I just got a few cuts, scrapes, and bruises from the affair so my injuries weren’t anything out of the ordinary for me.

Stoic Calculus was a little trickier than Rockapella but it was still completely doable, even for the wholly unskilled.

When we were ready for a new challenge we decided that an adjacent wall, Eight to Eleven, looked pretty sweet for the climbing. Danny began to lead the rope for this climb but when he was about 30 feet up, and trying to reach the next bolt, he slipped and fell roughly 10 feet onto a small outcropping. Although this wasn’t a big fall, he landed funny and immediately started yelling in a panic that he had broken his ankle. (Yeah, that’s the edited version of what he said. For the sake of the children I will leave it at that.) No one questioned whether he actually had or hadn’t, we simply got beneath him and helped lower him to the ground. It was instantly apparent, upon inspection, that his ankle was already swelling and did require medical attention so our next task became getting him back down the narrow mountain trail we had traveled to reach Hard Rock. We hadn’t hiked too long to get to these cliffs but still, getting Danny back to the parking lot was not a simple or easy task. Jason and Hamilton both took a side and supported him, David held his injured foot up as much as possible, and I brought up the rear carrying as much gear as I could. Our strange group slowly made its way downhill and where the pathway tapered here and there we became odder still. When the trail narrowed too much to allow our makeshift man-crutches to squeeze through Danny had no choice but to slide on his bum while David continued to walk backwards in front of him struggling to elevate his jacked-up appendage. Finally, after a very laborious descent, we got Danny back to his car and off to the hospital.

Danny was showing off his Tom Cruise moves
Danny was showing off his Tom Cruise moves just minutes before he fell.

It turned out that he had done more than just broken his ankle bone-he had shattered it and severed his ligament almost all the way down to his big toe. He had to undergo emergency surgery the next day to screw his bone back together. Poor guy.

Both Jason and I
Both Jason and I had a blast climbing but, sadly, he was faster than me. Sigh.

While all of this made our first outdoor climbing experience a very eventful and memorable one, I hope our next time will be a little less exciting. But this accident didn’t frighten me and Jason into giving up our newfound hobby, as it might have with lesser noobs. We plan on going climbing again as soon as David will take us. After all, the beautiful things in life are worth a broken bone now and then…but I do think I’ll get a climbing helmet. I’d prefer to have my cranium remain in its unbroken state.

Rachel August 21, 2010 No Comments

Two Years and a Half Marathon

In a couple weeks it will be two years since I had my peroneal tendon repair surgery. I decided that running the Provo River Half Marathon, which is 13.1 miles, would be an excellent way to celebrate this anniversary. I ran this baby years ago, before I hurt my ankle, but since my injury made running more than about half an hour too painful to stomach, I haven’t even considered running it since. It therefore seemed like a very fitting way to commemorate my ankle being back in the big time.

I have been training for the last few months with Jason for this race. We started our training by jogging our usual 3 mile runs and then upped the distance we traveled each run by about a mile roughly every week. This strategy seemed to work very well though I did get a few complaints from Jason when we progressed to 9 and 10 mile runs; he had never attempted to run anything that long before. Although a half marathon is a somewhat daunting undertaking, surprisingly we were able to find a few crazies interested in running this long race with us: my dad, his friend Steve, and my friend Fran.

Looking down from the hills above
Looking down from the hills above the runners were a beautiful stream of color.

The Provo River Half Marathon was last Saturday. We had to meet at the finish line at 5 AM to catch a bus up the canyon to the starting point. Man that was early! The bus drop-off, which was at the top of South Fork, was already crawling with many of the 2,000 race participants by the time we got there.

I saw a couple of unusual things while we were waiting for the race to start. First, a deer that wasn’t afraid of the masses of people at all was wandering around and actually trying to get people to pet it. Never seen that before. I also saw a man turn around in a field that was just off a section of a road where over 1,000 waiting runners were clumped together; he pulled up his shorts on one side and urinated. Sure, I don’t think anyone got a good view of his parts but come on! There were trees everywhere so all he had to do is go a few more feet into the trees and no one would have been able to see him. Seriously dude, no one wants to see you taking a whiz. Have some dignity man!

The race started at 7:00 and the first 10 miles down the canyon were lovely. There was a nice cool breeze and the sun was still hiding behind the mountains so it was very pleasant running weather. The last few miles things got a lot more challenging. At that point the sun started blazing down, the wind stopped, and it became very hot. The increasing temperatures combined with the strenuous ten miles I already had behind me resulted in some serious dehydration that last stretch so when I finished the race I wanted nothing more than a tall glass of water. I have been a runner for many years, certainly long enough to know from experience not to drink a whole bunch of liquid after a tough and dehydrating run like that. Unfortunately, my thirst won over my common sense and I pounded down a bottle of Gatorade a few minutes after I finished the race even though I thought it would probably make my stomach hurt. To my surprise I felt fine after chugging it…until I got home about half an hour later. Then, all of a sudden, my stomach started severely protesting its lot in life. This wasn’t the first time I’ve felt sick after a run though so I thought it would pass. I guess in a way I was right because it did eventually pass but only after I had thrown up almost all of the Gatorade I had stupidly drunk.

Besides the last few miles being a crap fest and my post-run vomiting episode, which was a first for me, the race was an enjoyable experience and I don’t think I would be opposed to doing it again. I was about 10 minutes slower completing it this time than I was the first time I ran it but I was a lot less sore afterward this go around. I may be older and slower now but I guess my muscles are tougher.

All the determined
All the determined people I ran with did excellent! Jason was the fastest. With his long legs he came in at 2 hours and 6 minutes. Everyone else finished within 10 minutes of him, except for me. I completed the race at 2 and a half hours almost exactly.

How did my moody ankle hold up? It handled the race pretty superbly. I had very little issues with it while I was training and during the race itself it didn’t complain at all. After the event it started swelling a bit and it is still a tad more swollen than normal even now, days later. The overexertion also made it achy for a couple days after I put it through that race madness but all in all I’m happy with its performance. This race reminded me just how much my ankle has improved. It is much more resilient and content than it was last summer when I was training for just a 5 mile run. Now, a year later, I’m able to run 13 miles with no pain and just a few days of swelling and tenderness afterward. That may seem like a hollow victory to those of you who have two fully functioning ankles but from where I’m coming from it seems like a pretty sweet success.

So final ankle analysis at the 2 year mark? The doctor told me all the swelling in my ankle should go away after a year or two. Here I am two years out and it is still swollen, though less so than it used to be. My ankle also doesn’t have its full range of motion back yet; it continues to get that rubber band feeling when I stretch it from side to side. But I’m playing soccer again with very little discomfort and running longer than I have been able to in a decade. So, although I wish my repaired ankle performed and felt like my other one, I am so grateful to not have any restrictions on my activities anymore that I don’t mind a little aching or inflammation now and then so much.

Rachel August 14, 2010 7 Comments
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