And Then What Happened???

The original plan included a R2R2R the following day, but due to time constraints, we made the decision to bag it. We were initially counting on running a 10 hour race on Saturday. That would put us at the finish at 3pm. Plenty of time to recover, get clean, get fed, then make the 4 hour drive northwest to the South Rim to be in our sleeping bags by 10pm. But that's not how it happened. Trevor finished around 11 1/2 hours. I came in around an hour after that. So it was already 5:30pm when I finished and that was putting us in our sleeping bags past midnight. And with an early departure set for the R2R2R, we decided it was a better idea to drive south to the Phoenix area and spend Sunday with my Grandmother at Leisure World, a retirement community where she lives. It would be warmer there. And there was a pool. And my Grandma would love to see us. So that's where we went.

Jen and Trevor and I hung out there on Sunday, then Trevor had an early flight back to Portland on Monday so he was up and off before any of us were awake. Jen and I visited the pool that morning, had a nice lunch with Grandma, then we decided to head up to the Grand Canyon after all since we missed it the day before. We would have liked to have made it to the North Rim, but it wasn't set to be open to vehicles until My 15th, so we settled on the South Rim instead.

The original plan was to hike down to the river and back together from the North Side. After we found out it wasn't open, we figured we'd just hike down to the river and back from the south side. But then a funny thing happened to me on the road to Tusayan...

I felt the call. The call of the canyon. And I wanted to do another R2R2R. I'd felt good after Zane Grey. My body had come through the race in good shape (other than the hundreds of scratches). My joints and muscles were fine. It wasn't my fitness level that got in the way during the race. It was my failure to let my stomach digest that threw me up, so to speak. So I felt ready to run. And seeing as this would be my fifth time running it in 2 1/2 years, it was fairly routine to prepare for. No big deal. Just gonna run 24 miles across the grandest canyon in the world and turn around to run the same 24 miles back.

Jen trusted I knew what I was doing. And even though I don't think she really wanted to do the hike to the river and back alone, she accepted my idea and after another night spent at Mather Campground, I set off from camp in the early morning light at 5:30am to cruise the 2 miles over to the Bright Angel TH on the South Rim.