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Apr 10th 2009, 10:50pm
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One Gear Guy posted a comment Jun 1st 2012, 12:00pm
Today was the perfect storm. A cosmic collection of circumstances, carefully calculated to coerce me to cautiously cruise a challenging course:



• My office is closed today, so I don’t have to work.

• Pam’s office is open, so I could do whatever I wanted without feeling as if I were ignoring her.

• Pam took the car, and our truck is in the shop, so my run had to start from home.

• I have a significant amount of frustration to burn off because I’ve put hundreds of dollars into said truck, and it’s still not running right.

• It’s Good Friday. If Jesus went to the cross, surely I can go to the tower. (This was the first of many examples of ridiculously faulty reasoning I would entertain throughout the morning.)

• I’ve wanted to run to the tower from my house and went on record saying I would someday.

• The Coyotes are scattered Saturday, so I could run long today instead of tomorrow without missing a group event.

• Because it’s there.

• If Chaser can run steep, slow, long, and alone on Nebo, I can do it in Booth Kelly.



So in honor of Dave, I put on the green GorTex cap he gave me years ago, and I left the house at 7:45 with two water bottles (one spiked with Zipfizz) and two mini granola bars. I was so into this last-minute idea that I was down my driveway and onto Cedar Flat Road before I realized I had put on my reflector vest (the sexy little mesh number) as if I were doing my normal Friday 5:30 a.m. run in the dark. I hung it on a fence post and shuffled down the road with plenty of motivation but a significant lack of energy.



This would not be a run. It would be an all-morning adventure.



Through Kintigh’s, onto road 43 and then 40…the clouds closed in. Maybe I’ll pop out above them? (Dream on.) I actually walked only a couple of times before topping out on Pee Hill, which made me very happy. Perhaps my slight euphoria caused my next really stupid idea.



Originally, Greehouse Road dead-ended. By staying on the main road, you actually merged onto 470 without knowing it. A few years ago, when Weyerhaeuser put in new signs, they decided to call the dead-end road 90, and Greenhouse now continues all the way to the 470/480 intersection. Once upon a time, Phil and Todd and I took the dead-end to see if it popped out on 400. It didn’t, but we bushwhacked our way through.



Knowing I was in for a long day, and seeing that the newly named road 90 looked better than before, I decided to try it as a shortcut. Before long I was soaked to the skin from the firs and salal and not at all confident I was cutting off any distance, let alone time. Soon I imagined searchers finding my cold, wet, lifeless body. “I don’t know what got him, but it sure wasn’t dehydration.”



I eventually did pop out on 400, maybe only 20 minutes after I started the “shortcut,” and life began feeling much better. I had never run from my house past the 470/480 intersection.



I decided to keep something like a jogging motion all the way up 670 in honor of Phil, who recently commented that it’s a tough haul. (I think he was confusing it with 405.) Left on 600, right on 7200 (where I met a dump truck going the other way), left on 730. The fog/clouds were too thick to see the tower from 730, which for some reason was fine with me. I called Pam from the top (did I mention I now own a cell phone?) but had to leave a message, ate a granola bar, and started back down. It was 10:00—the ascent had taken 2:15.



Calling this outing an all-morning adventure worked very nicely. I walked whenever I felt like it, which was kind of nice, thank you very much. By the time I reached 40, I realized I could make the round trip in four hours if I pushed a little. Screw that. Fortunately, the downhill flattens out within about three-quarters of a mile of my house, so I was able to jog in (I’m sort of a one-gear guy), nab the reflector vest (which was still on the fence post), and finish at 11:49—four hours and four minutes (time of day, not stopwatch). Who knows what the distance is—could be close to 20 miles. That would put me at 40 for the week (in five days), which happened once in ’08 and once in ’07. My weekly average for the year is 30 on the nose.



Hope everybody has a good Easter weekend.
 
Ginger posted a comment Jun 1st 2012, 12:00pm
OGG - What great story! I especially enjoy the wry sense of humor ("screw that", "thank you very much"). Besides being an epic day of solo adventure, you captured some of those charming voices that we quietly mutter to oursleves on a Saturday run. Way to have a Great Friday.
 
One Gear Guy posted a blog Oct 2nd 2010, 6:30pm
(Note: This is from August 1, 2005.) Trail running's mind games have always intrigued me. Not the mind games we play with ourselves as we try to run through the pain, but the mind games we play with other people as we lure them into our strange, dark...
 
One Gear Guy posted a photo Dec 11th 2009, 12:31am
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One Gear Guy posted a photo Oct 19th 2009, 12:36am
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