A fine day on Timp

Chris Adams and I have been talking about getting together to run for a long time, and we finally made it happen today on little jaunt up Timpanogos, one of the best peaks around.

Chris has been running forever and been doing ultras for a while, but only last year did he do his first hundy:  The Bear, up in the Logan area mountains, where he fully crushed it.  He got into the Wasatch 100 this year, and with the race now two weeks away he’s very much gearing up for it.  It’s funny:  we were both entered in the brutal Speedgoat 50k at Snowbird but both of us were traveling too much prior to the race (Chris packed up the family truckster and did a ‘round the country tour) yet we dealt with it in different ways:  I bailed for fear of…..pretty much everything associated with doing that race unprepared, and Chris did it to jump start his training for Wasatch!  And of course did just fine. 

It’s been 4 days now since that silly Skyline marathon, and my legs were feeling sorta ok by spinning on my road bike and some easy-ish mountain biking, so I thought they’d be fine today……but alas, no.  For some reason my hamstrings are super sore, and even after talking to Colin last night about his torn hamstring and specifically saying “well, the hamstring is one of the biggest muscles in the body, so it takes a long time to heal” I then absolutely neglected my own thought and agreed to join Chris on Timp despite my sore hamstrings.  But he was kind and we weren’t in a hurry so we moseyed on up and then moseyed on down, and as ever Timp was stellar; every time I go down to Happy Valley (Provo/Orem/Alpine; one of the nation’s capitals for anti-depressant use!) I’m amazed at the relief and sheer awesomeness of that area. 

gratuitous summit shot

I’m going to pace Chris for the Big Mountain to Lamb’s Canyon section of Wasatch in a couple of weeks; should be interesting and fun, tho at only 50 mi in he’ll just be getting warmed up and I won’t have a chance to watch him dig deep. 

Chris chugging towards what will undoubtedly be a good Wasatch 100 finish in a coupla weeks

For a good tale of a recent hundy Andy Dorais just threw up a great post on his rookie experience at that impressive distance at Leadville this past weekend:  http://slcsherpa.blogspot.com/2013/08/2013-leadville-100-beautiful-failure.html Hearing his tale makes my little sore hammies seem pretty trivial! Great effort, as ever.