Mothers day & Training

Happy belated Mother’s Day! Megan went to California for Mother’s day with Charlotte to see her Mom and our nephew Bradyns baptism. She sent me this picture on one of her morning runs....saying "wishing you were here!"

She had a great time with her sisters and family.

I on the other had took Savannah with me to Monticello UT to my sister Kristine and Kedricks wedding open house. I will share about that on another post possibly, but we had a great time as well. Savannah makes a great travel partner and we had a lot of fun. I wanted to post about my dad’s and my last 6 months training for the Squaw peak 50 mile trail race. We have had some great experiences and some awesome training runs. So I wanted to archive a few of them. It’s been a great experience. About 6 months ago I was watching the Hawaii iron man on TV. You know how they always show the heart wrenching stories and it made me think about how hard it is to train for these distance events and I felt for these people. I have trained and ran races for a lot of my adult life and watching some of the stories got me all emotional thinking about these people. Anyways the next day a friend from our old ward emailed out an invite to register with him for the squaw peak 50 mile race. I had paced him for the final 17 miles of this race 2 years earlier. All motived from the day before I thought I am going to do this. After thinking about it, I figured I would do it only if my dad did it with me. I needed a training partner and he is mentally tougher than I am and would push me to train hard and it would be a good chance to spend some time with him training. So I gave him a call and he said he would do it with me! We were in! So here are some of our runs from December to now. My dad and I trained separately during the week and ran together on Saturday’s. We did a training run up Granger MT in December. It was snowy at the top and funny to think how far we have come since this time. This was one of our first good hard workouts. My dad kicked my but up this mt by the way. This is us at the top.

I remember running in the snow up Weber Canyon in Oakley. We did like 7 miles and it was cold and miserable. We worked our way up to a 20 mile run. We ran most the whole Jordan river parkway. This is one of the worst training runs I have ever experienced. My IT band went out at about 14 miles. I had trained really hard that week and just put too much stress on it. My mom picked us up at a lowes at like 3900 south and I was spent. I remember just kind of hobbling at the end. The end of March we ran up Mt. Olympus. It was snowy at the top but the saddle was beautiful. Here is my dad at the top.

We spent a weekend down at Brian Head in Cedar city and did a 30 mile trail run in Zion National park. It was a beautiful day. It was a tough workout. My dad’s legs went out on him at about 28 miles. We saw some awesome things though. We ran into a spring about 15 miles in and it was heaven sent. We soaked our legs and took a quick pit stop. We finished running down Angels landing and the cliffs a few miles about it were amazing. My phone battery ran out at about 20 miles. here are some random pics.

Our last and final HARD work out was this past weekend in Monticello UT. We did a 20 miler up a mountain literally to Foy lake. Foy lake is at around 8000 feet elevation. Foy lake was our half way point and there were some fisherman there. It’s a freezing cold lake as you can imagine this time of year. We striped down and dove right in. The fisherman were yelling and clapping how crazy we were. It took your breath away and after about 60 became numb. After that it was so refreshing and the view over Canyon lands was amazing! Foy Lake

We run the race in 3 weeks. It’s been great doing this with my dad. We have had some great talks and it’s also been a spiritual experience. I will be happy to have this past me, and Megan will probably even been happier. She is tired of having me gone every Saturday morning.