Christmas Ornaments #22: Paris!

 In 2025 we went to Paris! It was dreamy. We saw all the famous places, didn't get lost at all, rode planes, trains and subways, and spoke enough French to survive! We needed an ornament that represented the trip as a whole more than just one spot, and we found this ornament. It is the iconic art nouveau metropolitan signs that were put on most (all?) of the metro stations back around 1900. Not a ton of them remain today, but we definitely saw a few of them. And after 10 days in Paris, we got pretty good at riding the metro.

Christmas Ornaments #21: Yosemite

 

In 2024 we went to Yosemite National Park. We went for spring break, though it didn't quite feel very spring-like. We had hoped to hit Kings and Sequoia National Parks as well, but they were pretty well snowed in still. And the high alpine roads in Yosemite were still closed. And we went on some snowy hikes. And we had to buy (but not use) chains for our tires to go over the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the way home. But I guess all that snow put us in the mood to buy a Christmas ornament even if it was "spring". The trip was still a lot of fun, the valley floor wasn't snowy, and the crowds were minimal. The trip also gave Ella a new life goal: hike Half Dome. As of this writing we haven't done that yet, but we (me and Ella) still hope to some day.

Christmas Ornaments #20: Comedy and Tragedy Masks

 

In 2023, we became theatre goers. It's not like we'd never seen anything theatrical before, but we turned that knob up to 11 in 2023. Ella was in Newsies, and Mike got tickets to four Hale Center Theatre productions (and since someone had to drive him, the rest of us got to see some of them with him). We also made a trip to Cedar City to see A Mid Summer's Night Dream and The Play That Goes Wrong. Ella got to see a production of Clue, and Shannon and Mike went to the high school production of A Mid Summer's Night Dream. Maybe there's more that I can't remember, but that's a lot of plays for us, so we picked a theatrical ornament to remind us of a new-found interest.

Christmas Ornaments #19: Yellowstone

 

In 2022 we went to Yellowstone and spent a couple of nights at the old lodge at Old Faithful, which has been a fanciful experience every time I've done it. (Twice) The lodge doesn't have TVs, or WiFi, so you're forced to just sit and enjoy the building, listen to the live music, and watch the geysers. I think we saw Old Faithful go off 7 times, from a number of different vantage points. Anyway, about the ornament. We found this beautiful ceramic ornament with an elk on one side, and a John Muir quote on the other.

Despite the perfection that is this ornament, Ella was not impressed. So we had to buy this bird ornament from Target or something so make her happy.

Christmas Ornament #18: Sloth

 Unlike all those years when we left our Christmas ornament shopping until the last minute, in 2021 we set a record for the earliest ornament. In June we went to St. Louis to visit family, and while we were there we went to the zoo and found this guy:

For reasons I've never fully understood, Shannon has a deep, deep love for sloths. This guy was handmade by someone in central Asia and has slowly crawled his way all the way to our tree.

Christmas Ornament #17: Angel

 Perhaps you've heard: 2020 was rough. It was rough for just about everybody, so while it wasn't uncommonly rough for us, it was still rough. We figured we needed a little angelic help to make it through the quarantine-y holiday.

Christmas Ornament #16: Sheepy

The only problem with waiting multiple years to write down what ornament you got is that you forget if there was a reason that you got it. I don't know about Mr Sheep here, but since we've already got a fox, a reindeer, doves, cows and who knows what other animals on the tree, me might as well keep turning it into a full on zoo.

Christmas Ornament #15: Angels

 When last we visited the annual Blockburger Christmas tree ornament tradition, I said, "We picked [Mary, Joseph and Jesus] over the set of three angels, so maybe Target will still have this line going next year and we can continue to augment our nativity set." Well . . . . 

There they are. Target did keep them around for another year. These three are on the tree this year hovering just above baby Jesus. The wise men are on the other side of the tree making their way.

Paris, The Not-Vacation Part

What's the opposite of vacation? The best the internet is giving me is "occupation," "work," or "continuation." I see what they're going for, but none of those really have the right feel to them. I'm voting for nightmare.

Our Paris vacation party consisted of me and Shannon as well as Shannon's sister and mother. About half way through the trip, while visiting the lovely Chateau Chenonceaux (such a perfect French word), Shannon's mom didn't see a step that was lurking in the middle of a little hallway. The resultant fall ended with a fractured elbow and two hairline fractures in her pelvis. And there, in the hallway at Chenonceaux, is where our vacation ended. The helpful and kind staff at the Chateau kept us company while we waited for the ambulance to come take her to the hospital in the bustling metropolis of Amboise (note: not a metropolis) to see the extent of the damage. After the x-rays confirmed the damage, and that she needed surgery to put her elbow back together, we got to start facing the first of many questions that we had not previous considered when planning our trip.

1. Where is the best place for 3 people to get a room on short notice in Amboise, France?
2. How do you say "elbow," "surgery," "screws," and a whole host of other similar words in French?
2a. If you're me, how do you say anything in French?
3. What do you do when your best French speaker is now hospitalized?
4. How do you get insurance forms printed while in Amboise, France? Is there a Kinkos?
5. Is the surgery going to be tomorrow? (Answer: no.) How about the next day? (Answer: yes. No, wait, never mind, no.) How about the next day? (Answer: Yes. We think. Probably. Call in the morning to find out. Ok, it turns out, yes, it did happen on day 3.)
6. How is the French medical system? (Pretty good.)
7. How much English does the hospital staff speak? (Very little.)
8. How do you make a phone call from an American cell phone in France to a phone in France?
9. Should Kim go home as planned on Wednesday, even though the surgery hasn't happened yet? (Yes.) If so, how does she get back to Paris? (Lots of different trains.)
10. Can we return the rental car 3 days late and do a different location? (Yes, they were very nice, though those extra three days apparently cost more than the first 4.)
11. Is it possible to have surgery in the morning, get released from the hospital in Amboise at 5:30pm and drive to the airport in Paris all in one day? (Yes) Will this be fun? (Not by the end.) Will it rain? (Indeed.) Will the freeway be closed? (Of course!) Will the gas station be closed? (Clearly.) Will your phone battery die? (Nearly.) Can you stop at the temple along the way? (Yes!) Will you get to drive through the longest urban motorway tunnel in the world? (Yes. It's over 6.5 miles long.) Will you take the wrong exit when the tunnel forks halfway through requiring you to go back through the tunnel a second time (and pay the toll a second time)? (Undoubtedly. It was just that sort of day.)
12. How do you navigate Charles de Gaulle International Airport with someone who can barely walk and needs a wheelchair? How do you say wheelchair in French? (It doesn't matter, once you get to the airport they all speak English and Francois will take care of everything.)

Getting from the hospital in Amboise to airport gate 16 hours later was perhaps the most exhausting thing I have ever done. I suppose once the trip is sufficiently in the rear-view mirror (not yet) this will all seem a wonderful character building experience. Check back in a year and we'll see how I feel. But I guess we proved that we can survive unexpected challenges in a foreign land.

It wouldn't be a trip to the hospital in France if the ER isn't on strike. (But they were still there working. I'm not sure how this all fits together.

Is the fact that this cemetery is right across the street from the hospital a good sign?

This macaron was very tasty. The decor in our emergency hotel room was .... less tasty.

Continuing the theme of "pastries you do want to eat in places you don't want to eat them": A religieuse in a hospital room. It's like a big, round, double-decker eclair. (And for the record, I was only two vowels short of spelling it right on the first try.)

Paris, the Vacation Part

If going to Paris (PARIS!) isn't enough of a reason to re-resurrect the blog, I don't know what is.

Shannon and I went to France for 10-ish days last month, and I here I am to report on it. (The number of days is a little fuzzy. Is it how long I was away from home? How long I was in France? Do I have to adjust for time zones?) You don't want a long list of everywhere you went along with the number of steps I took each day. You just want some pictures. So here are my ten favorite pictures, in rough chronological order, from the trip with a brief blurb.

The walls of Sainte Chapelle are, essentially made of entirely of glass. Hypothetically there are a whole bunch of bible stories in there, but you'd have to be 50 feet tall and much better at remembering all the stories in Chronicles. This is your first, and last, reminder that I'm not a photographer and took all of these with my phone, and the sun is where ever it is in all the photos.

A baguette in the park, and a couple of French kids. From the start, I insisted that I wasn't going to make many demands on the trip, but that I wanted to eat baguettes in the park.

The obligatory Notre Dame selfie, for proof that I was actually there, or at least that my photoshop skills have improved. (They haven't.) Since the fire, this is as close as you can get to the Notre Dame, which looks pretty good from this angle.

Not quite so good from this angle.

The Memorial of the Martyrs of the Deportation is across the street from Notre Dame and is for those who were shipped off to Nazi death camps. The memorial is all underground, which makes for poor photography. I thought it was a very well done memorial. Above the exit it says, "Forgive, do not forget ...."

I ate lunch on the street in Paris. It turns out that when you actually do this, the tables are (I am not kidding) about 2 inches from each other, the tables are tiny, your neighbors are possibly smoking, and the foot traffic is about six inches away. It's not really charming or relaxing. But it was tasty.

Omaha beach. We had a great tour from Thomas who did an excellent job of making the tour about people, and not about nations.

When Blockburgers go on vacation, they always go to cemeteries. This one also at Omaha beach.

In France, everything must use spiral staircases. It's a law or something. These ones happen to be inside the Arc de Triomphe.

Sometimes when you're at the Palais de Chaillot checking out the Eiffel Tower a parade of baton twirlers comes by with their little 5 piece band in tow. You know, because those things just happen.

Who made this stupid 10 picture rule? The first place we stayed was just down the steps from Sacré-Cœur, and this was on the sidewalk just outside our door. (It's Sacré-Cœur, if you couldn't put that together.)

We went to Musee D'Orsay and saw art. Some Manet, some Monet, some Van Gogh, but I'm including this Renoir here because it's Shannon's favorite and is the one hanging in our bedroom.

Sometimes when all of your vacation plans have completely fallen apart, you find yourself at the train station in Amboise, France at 10pm buying baguettes from the baguette vending machine. You put in your Euro and the baguette comes "banging down the chute". (Shannon's words.)

We went to several castles. This is Chambord, the biggest (of the ones we went to). It's so large that by the time you're close enough to feel like you can see it properly, you're too close to take a picture of it. If you were to zoom in enough on the photo you could see people on the balcony on the third level. The main rooms must have at least 30 foot ceilings. Wikipedia puts the total height at 184 feet with 440 rooms and 282 fireplaces. In the center of the chateau there is a helical staircase.

Paris temple, night. We made it here 5 minutes before the visitors center was supposed to close, and stayed much longer that I thought we would on a day that turned out to be probably be the longest, most tiring day any of us have had in a long time. But I'm glad we got to see the temple.

I do really have to come up with another title for a post about books?

The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Any by Indian, we mean native american. This book is a YA novel of the story of a teenage boy growing up on a reservation in Washington. He sees a life with no opportunities on the reservation. His parents drink too much, his adult sister lives in the basement, everyone is poor, and no one ever leaves the reservation. So he decides to leave the reservation. Sort of. He enrolls in the nearest white high school where they have better teachers and the students have better prospects, and in so doing, he becomes a “Part-Time” Indian. The kids at his new school don’t like him, and his friends and relatives on the reservation really don’t like him, because they believe that he feels that he’s too good for them. Some of these situations improve, some don’t. It’s a YA coming of age novel. (With some language and sexual content, so don’t give this to your 11 year-olds.)

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Sometimes when I don’t have anything to read, and I don’t have any suggestions for what I want to read, Shannon starts grabbing random books for me at the library. I don’t really understand her methods, but if I don’t have any suggestions, I can’t hardly complain, can I? And so, Olive Kitteridge arrived in my reading pile. This is a collection of short stories that take place in a small town in Maine, which are tied together by the character of Olive, a retired middle school math teacher who speaks her mind. In some stories, she’s the main character, in others she only passes through briefly. The stories focus around the daily lives of the characters; marriages, depression, arguments, grandkids, death, affairs, devotion and patience – the things that make up regular lives. It’s a bit like getting the gossip of the entire town.

Earth Afire by Aaron Johnston and Orson Scott Card

Earth Awakens by Aaron Johnston and Orson Scott Card

Last year I read the first of the Ender prequel novels, Earth Unaware, and I finally got around to finishing out the trilogy. In the first book a family of minors at the edge of the solar system get the first glimpse of the Formics and one of them, Victor rushes back to Earth to warn humanity. In books 2 and 3 the Formics arrive and invade earth. The action bounces back and forth between Victor and friends trying to attack the mothership, and Mazer and friends dealing with the invasion on the ground, and for some reason we continue to follow Victor’s family. I read these books out of devotion to Ender, I guess. (I suppose I’ll have to read the next trilogy about the second invasion, too.) They’re alright, though they fall into the classic sci-fi trap of conveniently having the same three characters showing up at every major event.

Summer Reading

It's been a while since I went through the books I've been reading. Let's see if I can remember what they were about ...

The Android's Dream by John Scalzi
This is the story of a bunch of humans and aliens running around Earth and other planets trying to get their hands on a genetically modified sheep, because it plays an important role in a interplanetary political crisis. As I recall, the book had a little too much going on, particularly at the beginning, and keeping the various characters straight was challenging. The whole premise is a little bit silly, and the book was ok.

American War by Omar El Akkad
Sometime in the second half of the 21st century, there was another American civil war, again between the North and South. The North won once again, but Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia are left as a separate nation. The book is not about the war, but is the life story of a young southern girl who first becomes a refugee, and then becomes essentially a terrorist fighting for the southern cause. The book is dark, grim and unhappy. While the story of her life resolves, it is not a happy ending, and there is no peace and prosperity at the end. War is a terrible, ugly thing.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow
I'd heard of Doctorow from xkcd comics, but never read anything by him, and, as it turns out, I'd never even heard of any of his books. But Shannon brought it home from the library. Near-future America (and everywhere else) has turned into a capitalist nightmare, where the uber-wealthy control virtually everything. The backlash to this is the development of "walkaway" culture where people simply walkaway from the rat race and go live semi-nomadic, commune lifestyles. The book follows three young friends who walkaway, but when a group of walkaway researchers make a technological breakthrough the big bad rich people come to take it all away (and kill them, too, because they're the bad guys). Don't read this book if you're going to be triggered by anti-capitalist, pro-socialism-pretty-much-anarchist-communism ideology.

Walking to Listen by Andrew Foreshoefel
Finally, some non-fiction. Andrew was a recent college graduate who decided that he didn't feel ready to enter the real world, so he hatched a plan to go ask other people what life is all about – by walking across the country and asking people. He started at home in the Philadelphia area and made it to the Pacific Ocean, by way of Atlanta, New Orleans, Death Valley and all those places in between. The book is a record of the places he went and the people he met. Crazy people on the sides of forgotten back roads, yes, but also so many people that invited a stranger into their homes so he could shower and get a decent meal. Strangers that emptied their wallets of the 3 bucks they had, so he could get himself a cold drink at the next town. At one point while walking across Texas, he was on a route that a trucker drove back and forth every single day, and after passing him a couple of times, the trucker stopped to ask him what on earth he was doing. After that, the trucker would stop every time he passed him to give him a cold drink or food. The book was good (not great), but at least no one is killing anyone, unlike all the other books on the list today.

Linesman by S. K. Dunstall
This sci-fi novel suffered from not ever getting around to explaining the core technology that shaped their world. I guess even the characters in the book don't really understand it, but usually books get around to revealing something about how it all works at some point. This book felt like it was trying to save all of that for the subsequent books in the series. Basically, interstellar travel is made possible by magical "lines" in a ship that make it all work. This lines can be maintained and repaired by linesman, who have a psychic ability to affect the lines. The story follows one top-rated linesman, who is universally disrespected because of his unusual techniques, but of course, he'll turn out to be more gifted than anyone knows. A strange line-related physical phenomenon, and an alien spaceship start a intergalactic crisis that he ends up in the middle of. I don't plan on reading the next book in the series.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
This book is 154 pages of Mr. Coates explaining his life as a black man to his teenage son. It is not neatly organized, or full of fun and humorous stories, but is entirely about his experiences as a black man in america. This book was hard to digest more than a dozen pages at a time, which is made all the more difficult by the book not really having chapters or obvious divisions. When it comes to appreciating what life is like for people who have lived a very different experience than you, I think most people do a far worse job than they think. I hope this book helped a little with that, though the writing style wasn't my favorite. He's a very impassioned writer, but I would prefer a more concise and neutral style.

Let's do ALL the hikes

A previous blog post promised an epic running adventure planned for late July. Seems like I should unveil it before it actually happens, and since it is happening tomorrow, here we go.

Let's talk about ultra-marathons. Technically, an ultra-marathon is anything longer than a marathon. (Aside: A marathon is 26.2 miles long. That is the only distance that is a marathon. If it isn't 26.2 miles, it isn't a marathon. Every time someone calls any other race a "marathon" a distance-running angel loses its wings.) So, I guess a 26.3 mile race is an "ultra". But really, they tend to start at 50 kilometers (just over 31 miles), and go up from there, generally to increments of 50 miles, 100 kilometers and 100 miles. There is an expectation in road races from 5k up to 26.2 miles that the distance is very accurate. Ultra marathons are generally a lot less picky about the exact distance, because once you're going that far, what's a half mile more or less among friends?

The other reason they're less picky, is because ultra-marathons are often not on paved roads the whole time, and trails are hard to measure distance on. But there's one other thing about trails – they tend to go up and down mountains. Some famous ultras include the Leadville 100, which spends most of the race above 10,000 ft in the mountains of Colorado, or the Badwater 135, which starts in Death Valley and ends up at 8360 ft. The key numbers for these races end up being the total distance, and the total elevation gain. Even if the race starts and ends at the same point (net elevation gain of 0) if there are lots of hills in between you'll definitely notice.

Rather than typing more, I made two charts:

And now I'm ready to introduce the running adventure. You see that green bar? That's the Millwood 100. It's not a race, but it is a route that someone (Jared Campbell) made that runs through Millcreek, Big Cottonwood and Little Cottonwood Canyons for 100 miles. There's only about a mile that's on pavement, and about a half mile where you loop back onto something that you've already run. Oh, and it absolutely crushes every race that I know of when it comes to elevation gain, other than the Barkley Marathons. (If you haven't heard of Barkley before, block out two hours of your time and come over to my house and I'll tell you all about them. It's crazy. Only 15 people have ever finished. And Jared Campbell is the only person to ever finish it three times.) The fact that Millwood is insanely tough isn't an accident, it was the designers plan, and the question isn't so much "Where does it go?" as "Where doesn't it go?"

Clearly, your question now is: "Clark, how crazy are you to do this?" Answer: "Not crazy at all! Because I'm not doing it!!!" Shannon's brother, however, is apparently exactly this crazy. So if you've got some extra energy, you can join him for a run, starting at about 3:30 tomorrow morning. I'll be joining him from mile 27 to mile 48, at which point I will go home and sleep, while he tries to run another two marathons through the mountains. (Various people will be running with him throughout most of the course.) Assuming no major problems after 35 to 40 hours of trail running, he'll have indisputably proven himself crazier than almost anyone I know!

Ragnar Recap - My weekend with Liars and Cheats

Me and my 11 newest friends conspired to run 184* miles last weekend. It’s the Wasatch Back Ragnar. It’s now Monday as I type, and I still haven’t recovered the mental energy to write a long blog post, and for that you should all be glad. This might just stay less than 3,000 words. ;)

[Editor’s note: Yup, not even 2500 words!]

Runners 1 through 8 got up sometime before dawn and got themselves to Logan to start running at 8:30 in the morning. Those of us who were smart signed up for one of the last 4 legs, so I got to have a nice morning at home before heading out after lunch to meet up with everyone in the Huntsville area.

After all the work that I did estimating when we would finish each leg, the weekend became an illustrative example of the “garbage in, garbage out” principle – i.e. when everyone lowballs their individual paces, you end up many hours ahead of schedule. Case in point: Tom ran right before me and had claimed a pace of 11:30/mile. He ran the first leg at 10:55/mile, the second leg at 10:52/mile despite it being over 8 miles and slightly uphill, and the last leg at an even 10:00/mile despite the previous legs and the lack of sleep. He wasn’t the only one.

I was the very last runner to finally get a turn to run. Being in the last 4 made for a nice morning, but being the very last made for a very, very steep weekend. My first leg was from Pineview Reservoir up to Snowbasin. 6.9 miles long and 1800 feet up. My mile splits were 8:25, 8:59, 8:42, 6:27, 8:19, 9:59, and 7:36. Can you guess mile had the downhill? Before I did that run, someone asked me how fast I could do it, and I said, “8:30/mile?”. This got a raised eyebrow, and I hedged with a, “8:45/mile?” I ended up averaging 8:32, which I think is pretty impressive.

My survey says that 1 in 6 Ragnar runner wears awesome shoes

Because this was hypothetically the hardest run of the race (the “Ragnar Leg”), I got an extra medal at the finish line. There isn’t a ton to say about the leg. It was steep, I ran hard and stopped to walk once or twice. I passed 31 people, which I think was pretty good considering there were only 392 teams in the whole race and undoubtedly many of them were behind me when I started. The leg did end about a half mile earlier than I anticipated. Turns out the info on their website and on their app don’t quite match, and the app is the one that was correct.

Once that was over, I hopped in the car and we went down to Mountain Green. I didn’t really appreciate how little down time there is in the Ragnar, because you’re continually driving to the next exchange point and often only have 10 or 15 minutes there before the next person takes off. We were in Mountain Green long enough for me to walk up to the cemetery (we had literally parked right below it) where many of Shannon’s relatives are buried. It’s not a weekend out for a Blockburger without a trip to the cemetery!

Now it counts as an adventure

The next exciting thing for the trip was at about 11pm Friday, when we had a runner miss a turn, and instead of ending up at exchange 17 he ran to exchange 18, which was only about half a mile away. (Leg 18 was supposed to take a more circuitous route from 17 to 18.) Fortunately, the van made the same mistake and also went to exchange 18. So then we sent runner 18 off running and tried to find exchange 18, not realizing we were already at exchange 18. We drove around in circles for a bit and argued about where we were supposed to go before we finally figured out what was going on. (We were all tired at that point, and it was dark.) Basically we skipped all of leg 18, and runner 18 was running leg 19. Runner 19 was getting skipped, and runner 18 was going to arrive at the wrong place and we weren’t going to be there go meet her. And, of course, this was all happening to our youngest runner who was only 12. (I think – I mean, I know she was the youngest, but I’m not sure on her age.) It all ended up fine. In the end, it all worked out. One of our other runners was having some painful IT band issues, so runner 19 (who was skipped) got to run his final leg, and I think everyone ended up ok with how it turned out. So, yeah, we’re cheaters. We didn’t even turn ourselves in. (We got 88th place overall, and 70th in our category, so I think the integrity of the event was left intact.)

One result of our running ahead of schedule (and, you know, cheating) was that instead of my runs coming at 6pm, 5am and 4pm, they came at 5pm, 3am and 1pm. I do not consider that an improvement. My second leg was 3.8 miles on a trail on the back side of Echo Reservoir. It was pretty flat, and the trail wasn’t too rocky, though in the dark it was impossible to tell if any pointy rocks were lurking or not. I decided that if you can’t see them coming, you might as well run as if they aren’t there, and I didn’t hit anything too major. By this time I had learned that the Ragnar lingo for passing a runner is a “kill”, and I racked up another 20 kills on this leg, with mile times of 6:41, 6:42, 6:48, and 6:43. Remarkably consistent for 3am, in the dark in 40 °F weather. My goal had been 7 minute miles, so that counted as another win in my book.

I carried this hitchhiker the last two miles of my run. It was stuck between my toes – hard to see the weeds in the dark.

Another challenge of Ragnar is not really knowing when your turn is going to come. The whole weekend was filled with repeated mental math problems trying to guess how fast someone would run, looking up how long and steep their leg was and then trying to minimize the time you had to spend standing out in the sun or cold waiting for them. The longer a leg is, the more uncertainty there is in the timing, so I spent about 10, maybe 15 minutes standing out in the cold waiting for Tom to come in to start my nighttime leg. And then when I finished . . . no one was there. I stood around for about 10 minutes before finding someone from my team, but not the next runner. She was in a different cae …. Somewhere. She finally showed up, I gave her a bit of grief about it, and I hope she figured out that I wasn’t really upset or anything. It’s probably some karmic payback for our cheating.

Most Ragnar teams of 12 (some crazies do it with fewer runners) divide up into two groups of 6 that work more-or-less independently over the whole race. Our team was an extended family (plus me and on other hanger-on) and they don’t like that method and so have worked out a system where 8 people are in the big van at a time and 4 people are “on break”. Our break came after my late run and we made the 30 or 40 minute drive from Coalville to a condo in Midway that the team had reserved. It was nice to be able to shower and sleep on a stationary mattress. I got about 3 ½ hours of sleep, and would have enjoyed 3 ½ hours in the shower, but sadly, I had to be as quick as possible. (A real challenge for me.) This was one point where I was glad everyone had lied about their paces, as we got to sleep while it was dark outside.

We went back out to the car to make the 30 minute drive to meet the team in Peoa only to discover that the car was completely dead. It was Tom’s in-law’s car, and is a hybrid. So we started down the twin paths of figuring out how to jump start a hybrid (where is the battery? Are there any jumper cables? What on earth happened to have dead batteries in a car that is full of batteries?) while also calling an Uber to get us back to the race. The Uber came before we could make any real progress on the car (we found the terminal to attach a jumper cable, but still didn’t have a cable or a functioning car) when the Uber came, so we abandoned that car and headed for the race. I think Jim had only been waiting a couple of minutes when we finally got there (More karma?) and the race was back on.

My final (and the final) leg came at 1pm. It was essentially two completely separate runs. First a three mile run that was gently downhill on the side of a road. Despite the time of day, lack of sleep and fatigue, I was killing it: 7:00, 7:02, 6:53. At that point I was 50 seconds ahead of where I had hoped to be. And then the hill came. And by hill, I mean mountain. 900 feet of climbing in under 2 miles. I was planning for 10 minute miles. The first half mile was still relatively flat and then it started getting steep. That mile came in at 9:09. Great. Still ahead of pace, and with a cushion for the rest of the hill. And then the thing went vertical. Crushingly steep, on a rocky, dirt trail. It wasn’t a run, it was a hike. The best things I can compare it to is the hike to Cecret Lake, which is about 500 feet over ¾ of a mile. So it’s certainly worse than that. Or hiking to the ‘Y’ in Provo, which is about 930 feet in a mile – about the same height as that, but spread out over an extra half mile. So you can imagine either running to Cecret Lake twice in a row (no downhill in between) or a somewhat less steep run up the Y. Either way, it’s brutal, as my mile split can attest: 14 minutes, 20 seconds. It was on that climb that I was passed by the first (and then second) runner of my race. I watched them go, dumped some water on my head and made my way up as best I could.

Once on top, the descent was on a mountain bike trail. That means rocks, and sharp, banked hair-pin turns every 30 feet. I swear there were a hundred turns in that two mile descent. (I just counted, it was only about 50. Felt like 100.) It was as technical as anything I have ever tried to run. I stubbed my toes a couple of times, and stepped on way too many rocks. My two descending miles were done in 8:19 and 7:56. My team was there 30 yards from the finish line so we could all cross the finish together. Unfortunately for them I was a jerk and just ran past all of them; it was still steep down hill and slowing down would have been hard, plus, my feet were on fire from the pounding they took coming down. I crossed the finish line, found a patch of grass, laid down and ripped my shoes off. I was frankly surprised not to find bruises on my feet that night. I had been worried about the footwear for those last two miles and my fears turned out to be well founded.

The descent. There were many turns.

So that’s the tale of the Ragnar. 17.7 miles. 2882 feet up, 1561 feet down. 2 hours and 24 minutes. I had a good time, and the family that let me tag along with them for a weekend was great. I’d probably even do it all again, though it might be someone else’s turn to do the legs with all the climbing (I did 1000 feet more climbing than anyone else and 2000 feet more than half of the team).

Team "Got Pecks?" (left to right): Shawn, Clark, Jim, Sally, Rob, David, Lindsey, Tom, Abby, Caleb, Chace and Garrett 

Ragnar swag: shirt, slap bracelet "baton" (no one else wanted it), bib, finisher medal and Ragnar Leg medal

General Observations, Notes and Comments:

1. The van was significantly less smelly than I would have anticipated. For 30 hours we had 7 people at a time in the van, most of whom had run more recently than they had showered. Maybe this is just a time when my weak sense of smell is a feature.
2. I ate far less than I anticipated. I took about 3000 calories with me and hoped that it would be enough. I also figured that we could/would stop for something somewhere along the way. I didn’t think that through enough, because 1) it’s hard to stop when you generally have to be somewhere else in another 30 minutes or so and 2) there aren’t tons of places to stop in the great metropolises of Utah: Peoa, Oakley, Liberty, Mountain Green, etc.
3. If there is a next time: Chex Mix, Fig Newtons, Peanut Butter M&Ms.
4. I did take granola bars, apple sauce, pop tarts, fruit strips and those were all good.

Ragnar Preview

I am running the Reebok Ragnar Wasatch Back in a little over a week. A friend from Michigan (who now lives in Oregon) has a sister who lives just a few miles from us. When said friend was in town for spring break, we met up at a park and met her sister for the first time. In the course of conversation, she mentioned that her family was running the Ragnar in June and were short a couple of runners. I not-so-casually mentioned that I would be very interested in joining a group. A few weeks later, it turns out that they still needed someone, and the price was very right, so I'm signed up.

How excited am I? Even before I officially had been offered the spot, I might have started developing my own spreadsheet to evaluate each leg of the race based on distance, time of day and elevation gain, and to estimate their relative difficulty. I started my packing list. And of course I've been talking about it to the point that Shannon probably wishes it was over already. (Also, their website has some typos, and the rule book has a couple of minor inconsistencies. But who's counting?)

If you're not familiar with Ragnar, it's a relay race, usually run with teams of 12. The route this year is 184 miles long, and will take a very mediocre team like ours something like 30-32 hours to complete (I think). They stagger the start times for the teams letting the slowest teams start first, for logistical reasons. We'll be starting in Logan at 8:30 on Friday morning, and hopefully finishing somewhere around 5pm on Saturday in Kamas. The 184 miles are divided into 36 legs, and each runner does three of them. (Some teams are crazier and do it with fewer runners.) Just in case you don't quite appreciate what 184 miles is like, here's what the route looks like in map form:

I get to run legs 12, 24 and 36, which I've roughly marked on the elevation map below between the pairs of red lines. It was only once I did this that I really got to appreciate that I get to do 2 of the 5 biggest climbs and run the highest part of the race. The jury is still out on whether I should consider this an honor or a punishment.

As this is a continuous relay, the team will be running through the night. My legs should work out pretty well in that regard, as I expect to do my first leg around 6pm, the second at 6am and the last at 4pm. I still haven't met 9 of the other 11 runners, and probably won't until the night before at the earliest, so it's going to be a big adventure hanging out with them for that many consecutive hours. I'll try to remember to take some pictures, and you can be confident that there will be a lengthy write-up of the race afterwards.

And if that doesn't get you excited, then just wait until I unveil the next epic running adventure that is planned for late July. It makes the Ragnar look like a walk in the park.

Never Ending Stories (and their reviews)

The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie
Yes, that's Hugh Laurie, the guy who played Dr. Gregory House on TV. Or perhaps you think of him as the the Dad from Stuart Little, or Dr. Cockroach from Monsters vs Aliens, or you remember back to his days on Blackadder. But in his first novel, the role that I was thinking of most was that of Bertie Wooster from Jeeves & Wooster. "But this is a book he wrote, and not a TV show he's acting in," you say. And you're right. It's the story of a PI who turns down a job that don't meet his morals, and then ends up getting dragged deeper into the immoral morass than he ever wanted. It's got thugs and politics and assassinations and conspiracies and all that, but at the center of it, the main character has the personality of a P.G. Wodehouse character injecting a hint of silliness into the most desperate of situations. I suggest reading the book in your head as if Mr. Laurie himself is reading it aloud to you. (perhaps there is an audio book that does just that?)

Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov
This is a collection of Sci-Fi short stories by one of the great science fiction writers. The first story is also included in I, Robot, but the stories are generally not about robots. They are about people in the sometime near, sometimes very distant future, and like many short stories, each story is there to frame a single central idea or question. How would humans get along with aliens, and what if one species is inherently dangerous to the other? What if computers know us better than we know ourselves? As computers start to do all of our thinking for us, will we still learn how to think? Many more of the stories center around computers rather than robots, and along the way its fun to see what Asimov saw of the future, back when computers were brand new to the world. Like many, he didn't appreciate how quickly computers would become both extremely small and extremely cheap. He doesn't seem to imagine pictures taken without film that needs to be developed, or the invention of user friendly computers. But what he does find is questions and situations that are compelling, even if the technology around them seems at times both out of date and futuristic.

A Zion Canyon Reader edited by Nathan N Waite and Reid L Neilson
This is a collection of essays and things about Zion Canyon. 28 of them make up the 244 pages, so they're not long, and they cover things from geology to plant and animal life in the canyon, to early settlers, to more modern concerns. Writers feature well known names like John Wesley Power, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey and Juanita Brooks, as well as plenty of people you've never heard of before. Occasionally it was way too touchy-feely, "feel the spirit of the canyon wash over your soul", but even at its most annoying, that essay would be over in a few pages anyway. The more interesting ones (to me) focused on early Mormon settlers, as well as some of the first (white) people to document trips through the canyons.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
This is the second book I've read by Kim Stanley Robinson, and I'm noticing a trend. Most sci-fi books have a well defined story line, where even from the beginning you know what bad guy needs to be defeated, or curse reversed or whatever. The fun is in the details and journey along the way. Mr. Robinson, however, writes books that don't go where I expect them to. This book is about a spaceship taking a multi-generation trip to colonize a new planet, Aurora. So it's a book about setup up a new colony, right? Nope, we spend a long time on the ship just getting there, dealing with the impossibility of maintaining a self-sufficient biosphere for 160 years. Then we get to the new planet, it sucks, and we have to make a new plan, and start a new trip with new challenges, and surprises along the way. Really, when you think about it, most novels are contrived in the way they have such clear cut story arcs that lead up to a big conflict at the end. Real life, at least my life, doesn't have such clear cut beginnings and endings to stories, but is just a single story that lasts a lifetime.

Eastlake 5k

I won a race. There are no pictures, nor any other evidence to document this.

We all ran a race, in fact, though details are sparse. The girls' elementary school had a 5k/1mile race as a fundraiser. We won't be attending the school next year, but apparently will pay to run on the sidewalks in our neighborhood that are free to run on all other times of the year. (In fact, they were free to run on even while the race was going on.) The race was small, not all that well organized, not terribly competitive and had a few major flaws. Oh, and it was raining the whole time, too.

As this was put on by the elementary school and was a family event, they had a 5k and a 1 mile race. Unfortunately, they started the 5k, and then a few minutes later started the 1 mile, so the 1 mile was pretty well over by the time the 5k finished. This does shorten the overall timeline of the evening, but not without a significant drawback: if my wife and I are both running the 5k (which we were) but our children, ages 10 and 7, are both running the 1 mile (which they were), we are completely unable to provide any supervision or encouragement for them. Further, there were no details about the timing of the races provided beforehand, so it was impossible to know about this until minutes before the race. For a race for families, this wasn't terribly family friendly.

So, Julia and Ella both did the 1 mile race. I don't really know how it went, other than Julia ditched Ella and Ella wasn't happy about that. I'm not sure how long it took them either, as the event was essentially un-timed.

Now about the 5k. The course ran through the neighborhoods of Daybreak, starting and ending at the school, and passing by the temple and the lake. It stayed on sidewalks and asphalt paths. I have some questions about how close to 5,000 meters it really is, because it is very difficult to hit distance targets when you have a single start/finish line and nowhere in the course where you can make small adjustments in the length. Maybe the design of the sidewalks and paths in the neighborhood fortuitously line up to give you a perfect 5,000 meter race, but I suspect they just picked the streets that gave them the closest result they could find. My watch and Google both put the distance at 3.19 miles, though those measurement systems certainly have their limitations, too. One last note about the course: it starts with a 90° left hand turn. Not like a turn near the beginning, but the start line was literally perpendicular to the course at the start. There was a turn zero feet into the race. It is always apparent when people planning a race have no experience running races.

The actual race was essentially an individual time trial for me. There were some kids that were in front of me for the first 50 yards or so, and then a pair of teenager that I could hear behind me for most of the first mile. But from there on out, I was completely alone running in the rain. I finished mile 1 in 6:24. Mile 2 has the most up and down and is the part of a 5k where you question whether you went out way too fast. It took me 6:36. Somehow, my watch thinks that I spent 4 seconds of that mile not moving. I promise you that is inaccurate. Mile 3 had the water station (no thanks, it's 56 °F and raining), and I was with it enough to notice that they were running out of the red tape they had put on the ground to mark the route. The pieces of tape were getting smaller and smaller and then in the last mile they switched to black. (It should be pretty simple to calculate putting a piece x inches long every y meters, plus some more for corners and things. Or, start with how much tape you have and back calculate your tape usage. See, you need basic algebra skills even as the PTA putting on a 5k fun run!)

Despite running low on tape, the course was still sufficiently marked. One danger of being in the front of a very small race is getting lost, which was thankfully not a problem. Mile 3 came in at 6:31. (Again, I apparently took 3 seconds worth of breaks. My watch is a liar.) If you're doing the math at home, you'll see that this brings us very close to the finish of the race, and very close to 20 minutes of elapsed time. That magical 20 minute barrier comes out at 6:27/mile, and I've never broken it. I've never come all that close either, except for that time that I totally smashed it, but not in a 5k. Let me explain: This was my 9th 5k. I know, to the rest of you it probably seems like I've done a lot more than that, but I haven't. Seven of them are the Rex Lee Run, plus this one and a 5k put on by my stake in St. George. Seven of these races are from 2010 or earlier, when I was young but not a consistent runner, and two of them are this spring, so there was a seven and a half year gap between 5k races for me. My PR was in my very first race back in 2004 when I ran it in 20:41.6 (6:40/mi). And that one time that I totally smashed it? Thanksgiving 2015, when I ran a 4 mile race at a 19:16 5k pace (6:14/mi). But the whole point here is that I was in the ballpark for sub-20 5k, though I wasn't sure how close.

Not that close* as it turns out. I finished in 20:35.5 on my watch (6:38/mi). I'd give you the official time, but there is no official time. In fact, when I crossed the finish line, no one noticed. I won the race (second and third finished together several minutes later) and I am confident that I was the only person there who knew it. Apparently we don't run for the glory. At the very least, it was a PR by 6 seconds, and seconds are hard to come by when you only have 3.1 miles to make them up in. At the very most however . . . . did you notice that asterisk at the beginning of the paragraph? And 3 paragraphs ago where I mentioned the distance? Again, I don't have a precise way to measure the length of the course. I suppose I could get a tape measure and spend the afternoon looking like a weirdo. I am confident that the race was not officially measured or certified in any way. If we assume the course was 3.19 miles long, then my adjusted 5k time would be 20:00.6. (But if we use the Google distance of 3.1931 (because it is totally accurate to that many significant digits) then my adjusted 5k time would be 19:59.5!) Now, let me be clear, there's nothing official or precise about any of these distance measurements, or my time measurement. I'm not going to claim this as a sub-20 5k. But I think I'm close, and I think I was closer than 35 seconds off last night. I suppose I'll have to find a nice flat, straight 5k and try again, but I've got a Ragnar to run first.

p.s. Shannon set a PR by 3 seconds, if I'm remembering her time right.

I Continue to Enjoy Reading Books

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
This is the story of William, a typically poor kid growing up in Malawi and his dreams of getting an education and escaping the poor farming lifestyle so many people in Malawi suffer through. He tells the story of growing up, farming, struggling through drought, famine and hunger, and the disappointment of no longer being able to afford to pay for school. In an effort to not fall too far behind his peers, he starts studying from books he can get from the library and becomes fixated on generating electricity from the wind. He scavenges parts from the junk yard, digs up PVC drain pipes to make into blades and works odd jobs so he can pay for some welding. The book spends a lot more time on his life in general than I expected – friends, school, farming, family, drought, etc. – and took a while to actually get around to the wind power. But it was an interesting (true) story, and a good reminder about the many people in the world whose lives can be changed by something as simple as having an electric light in their home for the first time.

X by Chuck Klosterman
Chuck loves two things: sports and music. This book is a collection of articles that he has written over the years on these two topics for places like GQ, Esquire, Grantland, and others. He's a good writer, and I enjoyed the essays on sports. As for the music . . . well, when he decided to devote 34 pages to the band KISS, I chose to skip ahead. I still read his interviews with a lot of 70s and 80s rockers (Van Halen), as well as younger artists (Taylor Swift), but the book would have been better for me if it had been 60% sports and 40% music instead of the other way around.

Artemis by Andy Weir
It must be daunting to try to follow up a first novel that was as successful as The Martian, but Andy Weir has done a decent job of it with Artemis. Set in the near future, Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara is a determined, independent, struggling woman in her 20s who lives in a small town, which just happens to be located on the moon. She makes a living by making deliveries for the people and businesses throughout the permanent moon base, which gives her excellent cover for her second job: smuggling small basic items that aren't allowed on the moon – mostly things like cigars that aren't allowed up there. (Fire is bad when you can't go outside in the event of an emergency.) She gets contacted for a job that is a little outside her normal realm – industrial sabotage – which unsurprisingly gets her involved in a situation that is much bigger than she was lead to believe.

Just like The Martian, Weir does a good job of thinking through what it would be like to be on the moon. I didn't have any issues with the way he deals with things like gravity, air pressure, oxygen generation, food supply, communication and things like that. The plot of his first book was essentially one engineering problem after another, while this book is more of an adventure novel with hiding from the bad guys, breaking in to places, and trying to keep yourself out of jail. The book has some language, particularly sexual references in conversation between the characters. (There's no actual sex in the book – there's all of one kiss – but things are discussed in terms that I wouldn't repeat, or suggest that my mother read.)

Rex Lee Run Race Report

After many years away from Utah, we were able to run the Rex Lee Run once again. This 5k (there's a 10k, too, though I've never done it) is essentially a full lap around BYU. Officially, this was the first 5k I've run in 8 years, and my PR is 14 years old, set way back in the 2004 Rex Lee Run. I hurt by knee back in December, tried to run through the pain in January, and then got frustrated and basically took the month of February off, trying to get healthy again. The rest has been mostly successful, but it made my dreams of a new PR unlikely.

Early March can be a risky time of year to have a morning race, but the weather was fabulous. Shannon and I both ran the race (she did get a PR by about a minute and a half). I tried to insert myself at the starting line within a few rows of the front, though I still found myself behind Cosmo and a ten year old. The race starts with the firing of the cannon named George Q. and we took off. I hit my first roadblock about 20 feet into the race, in the form of a photographer standing right in the middle of everything taking pictures. I nearly plowed in to him. Not a very smart place to stand at the start of a race, because no one beyond the front row of people can see more than 5 feet in front of them. From LaVell Edwards Stadium, the course heads east toward 900 East, which was definitely steeper than I remember it, before heading down 9th East. I wasn't really sure what sort of pacing to go for. I think I was under 6:30/mi for the first quarter mile, but as it got steeper I knew that was unsustainable, and I backed off and finished the first mile in 6:58.

The second mile features the descent down 9th East, then a short climb up to campus followed by a long downhill off of campus down the ramp. My second mile came in at 6:44. From there, the course was different than the last time I had done it. Between construction changing the campus, and trying to keep the race off of roads, the last mile has a lot more turns than it had in the past. People don't always realize this, but turns are slow. From the Indoor Practice Facility, you turn right and go 440 feet before turning left. Then it's 500 feet and a right turn. 50 feet, turn left. 200 feet turn right. 95 feet turn left. 200 feet turn right. 160 feet, make a U-turn. (U-turns are really slow.) A few hundred feet might seem like a long way, but when you're running more than 13 feet per second, that section I described turns into: 37 seconds, turn, run 4 seconds, turn, run 15 seconds, turn, run 7 seconds, turn, run 15 seconds, turn, run 12 seconds, U-turn. Each turn slows you down, so you have to put the effort in to speeding back up every 10 or 20 seconds. Mile 3 was 6:40.

After that twisty section, the next 1/3 mile is mostly straight-forward (literally) with only 90° turn before you get to finish on a stretch that in only 500 feet manages to pack in about 10 stairs (yes, stairs on a race course), a left turn, a short downhill, cobblestones, a short uphill, a left turn, a U-turn and then 200 feet on the outdoor track to finish. It's not exactly the fastest finish I could imagine. My watch put my last 0.17 miles at 5:22/mi pace. This should catch your eye for two reasons. On is that this is very fast, and evidence that I should have been going faster earlier in the race. The second is that a 5k is supposed to be 3.10 miles, not 3.17. There are a number of factors that go into this distance. First off, a race should be set up so that every runner must run at least the required distance. But if you spend time weaving through traffic, or take wide turns you will end up running a longer distance. Second, my GPS watch has error. I can't say if it is prone under or over measure, or if it varies by day or location. I also have to start and stop it on time, though I can promise that I didn't miss the start line by more than a foot or two, and the finish line by more than 50 feet. (More on that in a moment.) But I do a pretty decent job of running courses to keep my route short, and 0.07 miles is 370 feet. I've mapped the course using google maps multiple times, and can't come up with less than 3.15 miles for the distance. (Not that google maps are authoritative either.) But still, I have a sinking sensation that the course might have been a bit long. 250 feet doesn't sound like a ton, but it's in the neighborhood of 20 seconds. Anyway, it all adds up to an official finish time of 21:14. That was good enough for 3rd place in the 30-39 age group (37th overall out of 808). So here's a picture of me with my medal.

It's 33 seconds behind my 5k PR, and 1:58 behind the 5k pace I set at the Fox and Turkey 4 mile race two years ago, but given the circumstances it wasn't too bad. And finally, a word about that finish. It was difficult to run hard until the last hundred feet or so, and I ran that really hard. Harder than nearly anyone else. Everyone else just crossed the finish line and stopped. Plus there were spectators just past the finish line. And cameras filming the finish line. This is all to say that I was really moving when I came across the line and immediately found myself with no where to go. So if you need a laugh, go watch the video of me crossing the finish line and then freak out as I try to figure out where I can go without running someone over. It's right at the 7:00 mark of this video. (And the link will take you to a few seconds before I come into the picture.)