Prologue
How It All Came About
Phoenix 2004 (the year, not the temperature) living with my partner Bernice in a lovely condo we called Paradise. I’ve just competed in a Master’s Track & Field meet in adjacent Mesa. A few of us Gentlemen Sprinters have converged on a local bar/restaurant to rehash the events of the day and establish bragging rights. On this occasion, John Davis, one of our more successful sprinters, chose to regale us with stories of his adventures with “the big ditch”. As it turned out, the “ditch” was the Grand Canyon and the adventure was to run it rim-to-rim in the same day. For those of you not familiar with this endeavour, let me just say there are signs along the Canyon trial warning hikers to forgo attempting this feat on pain of death.
Why I went for it
I’ve always been a sucker for near impossible feats, and John’s tales captured my imagination. So before we drained our last pint I had committed to training with him and his Canyon posse for his annual ditch run scheduled for early October of that year. John and I were both 61 years old at the time. It had been ten years since I had done any serious distance training. I had culminated my first long distance era at age 51 when I summarily switched to Masters Track & Field. But I was getting the itch to start a new Long Distance Era, and given my affinity for the Grand Canyon (two day hiked it and floated through it on the Colorado River) John’s run seemed just the ticket back to my former long distance glory.
Why I should have passed
To be successful with endurance events you need a base and a pace. At the time of the ditch decision, I had very little of either. What I did have was the hope of the eternal optimist.
Training
John set up a training schedule for several of us would-be-rim-to-rimmers. The schedule consisted of one trail running session together every weekend. This was to be the focus run, and we were supposed to do the rest of the work on our own. The workouts with John and the group were brutal, mainly because everyone was so much faster than I was. They would run ahead, circle back to me, or occasionally just rest until I caught up to them. Of course they took off again as soon as I approached, obligating me to push on without resting myself. Having only one gear, low, my pace was erratic and my conditioning did not seem to be improving with practice. And yet I had hope.
Long after the fact, John offered this assessment of my rim-to-rim performance:
Quite candidly, I thought you would be able to keep up with us better than you did. One thing I would harp on every year with everyone who would go with me was to train hard and get in shape because doing the canyon was no small thing! Did I not also do that with you?
You be the judge. In between our weekly sessions with John, I maintained two additional trail workouts: 1) a 60 to 90 minute run in the Phoenix Park Preserve; 2) a run up Piestewa (AKA Squaw) Peak. On the Peak run I had to enter the park before it opened at 5 am in order to avoid the embarrassment of having hikers pass me while I was attempting to run up the Summit Trail. The remaining days of the week, I worked on my track & field events. Looking back, I don’t think I was capable of harder training.
