Canyonlands Half Marathon Weekend (March 8 - March 9, 2008)

Roanne and I have been tentatively training to run the Salt Lake City marathon this spring, and we both signed up for the Canyonlands Half Marathon as an intermediate step.  My training had been going well up until about 2 weeks prior to this race, when I started having problems with shin pain, probably due to either switching shoes or doing a hard run all on concrete.  In any case, this was a bit of a bummer since I had been running pretty regularly 2-3 times per week since the beginning of January.  I took about a week and a half off prior to this race, and decided that since I was already registered I would at least start and then just drop out if my shins were too painful.  I had also been eating a lot of baklava during the week leading up to this since my Egyptian graduate student (Ahmed) had a friend bring a bunch back from Egypt, so I was feeling a little heavy and not on top form.  Roanne's training had been a bit sporadic, as her athletic pursuits tend to get pre-empted by other things like: work, sewing wedding dresses, and reading books.

After packing the truck with all the ingredients for a good weekend (see above), we left Salt Lake to drive down on Friday afternoon, and made to Moab around 8:30pm, in time to pick up our registration packets.  I was amazed at how many people were there, it turns out that there were over 4800 people registered to race.  We went back to our hotel and I did some final icing and stretching in a last ditch effort to prepare my shins for what lay ahead the next day.  We woke up early the next morning and had some breakfast before walking about a mile to the finish line, where shuttle buses picked up the runners to drop them off at the starting point.  The course ran along the Colorado river before turning South to finish in Moab.  It happened to also run right by the Big Bend bouldering area, so I knew that I would be hard pressed not to ditch the race and go bouldering at mile 2.  The weather was not quite what we were expecting, overcast and cool.  We tried doing some stretching at the start line, but it is hard to stretch when your legs are shaking from all the shivering that you are doing.  It didn't help that the sweats vehicle (that carries people's warm up clothes from the start to the finish line) left 30 minutes before the race, so we were left to shiver in running shorts and t-shirts for half an hour.

At 10:00am the gun went off, and we slowly started to go as the huge mass of people moved forwards.  I decided to run the first mile easy and see how my shins felt, so Roanne and I ran together which was nice.  We did the first mile in 7:38 and I wasn't feeling my shins at all, so I decided to turn on the jets and see if they still felt good.  They continued to feel fine, so I kept gradually working my way through people.  At around the halfway mark I noticed that another guy in a yellow shirt was always near me and we were holding almost the same pace, so we started running together.  I was feeling really good, and split times for each mile was just under 7:00.  At first I was thinking there is no way I could hold that pace, and this fast initial pace was like money in the bank that I could withdraw closer to the finish when I started slowing down, but after a point it was like "why not just keep going this speed?".  It helped having yellowshirt there, as we were able to push each other a bit.  I went through a rough patch around mile 10 after he picked up the pace a bit and I was fighted to stay with him, but then I started to feel better and I was able to unleash my much feared finishing kick to leave him behind down the finishing straight.  I ended up finishing in 1:31.02, which was good enough for 17th in my age group of 330 entrants.  My average pace was 6:56/mile which I was really happy with, since I had been expecting to something more like 7:20/mile.  Here is a mile by mile breakdown of my split times (more for my own interest, feel free to ignore).  The reason they don't add up to my total time is that a half marathon is 13.1 miles, so the last 0.1 miles is not included in the splits.

Here are some photos of me coming down the finishing straight.  This was a pretty cool feeling, as it was fenced off with a lot of people watching, so I felt like I was finishing a stage of the tour de france.

At the finish line I was delighted to find chocolate milk, so I passed the time waiting for Roanne to come in by drinking chocolate milk and eating cookies.  Roanne did a great time also, coming in at 1:49.02 with an average pace of 8:21/mile, good enough for 51st place in her field of over 500 runners.  Here are some photos of Roanne coming down the final straight away:

It turns out that there are many more female runners than male runners, which I was a bit surprised to find out.  After finishing, we lay in the sun in the park for about 2 hours, which was a great feeling, being really sore and tired.  We then had some free massages, and walked back to our hotel.  We spent a bit of time reading while I iced my shin (below), and then it was time to go bouldering!

We were both really sore, but I couldn't justify being 10 minutes away from great sandstone bouldering and not actually doing any.  So we drove back to the Big Bend boulders that we had passed during the race, and I did some climbing while Roanne monopolized one of the crash pads for some reading/sleeping:

I just did a bunch of problems in the V0-V2 range, as I am weak right now, I was tired from the race, and I didn't want to fall and land on my sore shin.  Here are some photo sequences from the various problems that I did (at least the ones that were close enough for Roanne to take photos without leaving the comfort of her crashpad).  First up was a V2 called "Slots of Fun":

Here is another V2 that had a little bit of funk in it, called "Mr. Trujillo's Big Day".  It started under the roof, and then did some interesting moves to pull out and finish:

And finally, here is another V2 called "Middle Man".  This was  tall man's delight, as it started low on some huecos and you then did a big move up to a big hold (I am doing this move in the first photo), which if you couldn't reach you had to then use a terrible crimper that probably made it more like a V6.

Once the sun dropped it started getting colder, and as the volume of the complaints issuing forth from the green crashpad increased, I eventually conceded to pack it in and we went back to Moab to meet some of Roanne's friends for dinner.  We ate at the Moab Brewery which had nice decor but the food was a bit of a let down.  It was certainly no Squamish Brew Pub, let's just leave it at that.  We then headed back for an early bed time.

The next morning dawned bright and sunny, and even though I was super sore I was really excited to go do some mountain biking.  In particular, I wanted to ride the Slickrock trail, for which Moab is famous.  It is a trail that is entirely on sandstone formations that have incredible traction so you can ride up and down some really steep stuff.  The trail is painted with white dots on the sandstone, so you just follow the painted dots around the sandstone plateau.  I was embarrassed by the fact that I had lived in Utah for over 3 years and had never gone mountain biking in Moab, so it was time to rectify that sorry situation.  At first I had convinced Roanne to join me, but at some point prior to this I had let it slip that the guidebook mentioned not to bring your novice girlfriend (or in this case, wife) on this trail unless you wanted to lose her for good.  After that admission I was forced to read the Difficulty Rating from the guidebook for Roanne, which read: "Technically very difficult to extremely dangerous.  You shouldn't be out here unless you are an advanced rider.  Physically very difficult to abusive."  I told Roanne that they were almost certainly exaggerating the gravity of the situation, but she still elected to read her book in a park while I went off do the ride.

The trail is only a few miles out of town, so I just rode there and found it with no problems.  The trail is super fun, it is only about 12.5 miles long, but there is so much really steep up and down that you spend almost the entire time in your small chain ring so it took about an hour and a half to ride.  The scenery was amazing, as you are up on a plateau and can look down to different valleys and rivers, and also see the La Sal mountains (covered in snow) off in the distance.  Here is a photo of me at the start of the ride, grinning in anticipation:

Here is a photo of the route, notice the white paint marks on the sandstone.  They are worn off in some spots, making the trail a bit hard to follow at times.  I would advocate a fresh coat of paint.  The rock formation in the distance is called shrimp rock, but I couldn't quite figure out the resemblance.

The bike trail intersects with a 4wd trail at certain points, so you get the double pleasure of riding your bike in a beautiful setting while observing red necks destroying their expensive trucks.  They go in packs and drive super slow, I have no idea where fun factors into that situation.  I guess it would be moderately interesting for the person driving as you keep wondering whether you will ruin your truck, but it would be super boring for anyone along for the ride.  I'll never understand that, but I guess they must wonder why the heck anyone would want to be cruising around on the slick rock without the aid of a gas guzzling V8 engine.  The photo on the right shows the 4wd trail seen from afar.  They also have a route painted on the rock, but it isn't as necessary in their case, since the gasoline powered version of "Leave no Trace" ends up being a little different than the human powered one.

At one point I could look down to the Colorado river along which we had run the day prior.  Over the butte on the left of the photo is the town of Moab.

As I was riding around the loop, I thought it was a bit strange that I was only passing people going in the opposite direction.  Either the people going my direction were all riding the exact same speed that I was, or everyone was going the other direction.  When I got back to the start of the loop I took a closer look at the paint markings that I had ignored when I first got there:

I had gone right without even thinking about it, which according to the yellow paint was the hard version of the trail (because of the obstacles that you had to ride up versus the ones that you had to ride down).  At this moment I was very thankful that Roanne had not accompanied me on this outing, as this is the kind of route finding decision that lands me in a lot of hot water on our mutual adventures.  All in all the trail was super fun, and I will definitely go back to ride it again at some point (hopefully sooner rather than later) and also sample the other Moab classics that I wasn't able to do on this trip, like the Porcupine Rim.  The difficulty/dangerous warning was definitely overcooked, as I never felt like I was in danger and I saw a lot of people out there who were most certainly not advanced mountain bikers.  I even saw a couple doing it on a tandem, which I think is crazy.  Upon getting back to the park where Roanne was relaxing I took a closer look at my rear tire, and noticed that the incredible friction of the slick rock had ripped some of the knobs on my tires completely off of the casing (pictured below, with missing knobs circled in yellow, you can see the red casing showing through).  The best tire for riding on that would be a semi-slick.

We then went out for a nice lunch on a patio in restaurant, and then started the drive back to Salt Lake City.