“How many miles a week are you doing?”
“Ohhh, about 40-50, but I’m not a runner…”

I’ve never defined myself as a runner even when it is my primary activity and recently it’s been no different. After fat bike nationals I put the bike up for the past few months and have been building up my mileage running. Still I don’t count myself as a runner. With my master’s and traveling I’ve decided to cut back on mountain bike racing this summer which presented the perfect time to get in running shape for rim to rim to rim in the Grand Canyon. I picked dates, emailed a group of friends and we were off, tickets were bought and training plans swapped. Some conflicts came up for a few of the girls with other trips popping up. Still Jessie, my friend from high school and Allison were in–no way would my mom let me do this by myself. We all bought plane tickets which made it very real.

I kept running and even started to find the treadmill enjoyable on bad weather days (which there were a lot). About 2 weeks ago we found out that a rock slide had closed off the trail to the north rim, North Kaibab, quashing any idea of rim to rim and certainly not rim to rim to rim. Bummer, but quickly found another option of going down to Ribbon Falls, except that bridge went out earlier this week. And the only option would be to cross the river which they HIGHLY recommend against. A few more trail closures have cropped up in the past week, and we have a plan of going down South Kaibab to Phantom Ranch and then over to Bright Angel and back up, or some variation of that. We figure with the trail closures it just means we’ll be back this fall to conquer R2R2R, sorry mom, but more time for you build up your pray bank for me!

We’ll see but we definitely bought enough snacks for the whole R2R2R jaunt.

Here is a picture of my first trek to the Grand Canyon – as my uncle reminded me it’s as dangerous as it is pretty- I responded, so just like me!

P.S. Sorry if the formatting/typos are a little off on this post- limited access has me posting from a mobile phone and I’m somewhat techno-challenged.