the fine line part 10a…

If in doubt… go anyway

And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:—

Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!—Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.
– Melville

Well folks, this is it. This is what all of these little story segments have been building up to.

The last few weeks had been spent dodging injuries and trying to not lose any appreciable amount of fitness. Any training now, was not going to really drive any positive adaptations, but could certainly contribute to negative ones… vis à vis injury or illness. Between the three of us we had collected a world class niggle collection. So it was now the time to taper and rest. Some easy runs and hikes. Drop the volume. Drop the intensity.

To recap briefly…

Matt did most of his training by doing lots of running. Running through the brutal Ottawa winters. Lots and lots of kilometers, but not so much vertical.

Caleb ran lots as well, but had an additional mix of cycling and strength training. He also hired a coach to help keep himself on track.

I ran the least. By far. I did however rack up a lot of specificity on rough trails with a fair amount of elevation gain. Plus I was the only one of us who utilized ‘dry land’ muscular endurance training using a variety of box step and kettlebell based protocols.

Let’s now see how things turned out shall we…

We were about one week out and deep into a supposed taper. Yeah right. I suppose one persons taper is another persons HIIT. Watching Kilian Jornet videos doesn’t help much either. But, all in all not too bad. A road run and a couple of trail run / hikes. Moving over ground quickly. Lots of mobility work to keep limber and agile.

Our plan was to spend the day prior to the run in Flagstaff, and to get plenty of rest before setting out on the following afternoon. My wife, unfortunately got a bad cold the day before our trip and that got us eyeballing one another; watching for the signs and symptoms that one of us would be next. We made a fast decision. Go now! Sneak in under the wire. Before any one of us got sick. We hastily packed, jumped in the car and headed north. We did stop briefly in Flag, but only to gas up the Subaru and grab some questionable Thai food. Once at the canyon we changed into our kit, organized our nutrition, and took the various busses over to the North Kaibab trailhead where we also got the water we would need to get us to Phantom Ranch. This particular trail has no water sources except at the beginning and at the end. I think we only took a litre each. By about 4:30 pm we were on the move. It all happened in a bit of an anticlimactic flash. Eight plus months of planning was reduced to this moment, and we were now as close to the end as we had ever been. We recited our Hans Florine motto…

Start out slow, and go, go, go…

Matt had never been here before, and of course that’s a recipe for taking lots of pictures. No worries though, because our plan was to not run this section of the trail anyway. Take all the pictures you want youth. Just keep a steady pace, which we did. We were surprised in that we saw a boatload of people going down and coming back up the trail. Some were only going down part way, (presumably to watch the sunset) but some were going to Phantom Ranch. The only person going down that was faster than us was a fully laden ranger, and she was really booking it. One poor guy we saw quite far down, and going to Phantom was significantly overweight and moving very slowly. He said he was doing okay… We never saw him again, but it was unlikely that he would have made it there before dark. Likewise, with at least one of the folks struggling uphill to the trailhead. They looked as if they were also going to be in for a long, dark, and miserable time of it.

The milestones: Ooh Ahh Point, Skeleton Point, The Tip Off, were all quickly passing by. One time distraction we employed was to guess when we would see the last people coming up the trail. I can’t remember who won that one, but as Caleb often said… “Don’t bet against crazy”. Even with our guessing game, it still took us a full 3 hours before we found ourselves at the ranch. Slower than I had done it in the other 2 times I had been there, but we were still tracking to our plan and schedule, so all was good. We wanted to place a premium on continuous movement. However, at Phantom we stopped and ate, sorted out our next block of nutrition, chatted with folks, emptied crap out of our shoes, and cameled up on water. (Maybe a mistake…) Although the sun had officially set by the time we started out again, there was still ample twilight and would be for another hour or so.

The next section of trail, all the way to Cottonwood and beyond to Manzanita would also be relatively smooth and flat, and one of the few opportunities for us to actually break into a run. Once we got moving we did run a few very short sections, but it was still oppressively warm, and the exertion put us all beyond Z3, so we backed off to a fast walk. I resisted using my lights as long as I could, but eventually I had to turn them on. This was by about 8:15 or thereabouts.

See here, you can’t turn all these people out into the night. It is inhuman, brother. Inhuman!

– The Preacher from High Plains Drifter

The lights attracted bugs, the bugs attracted bats.

Into the night we went. It was fully dark now. The full moon was still low in the sky, thus also still obscured by the towering rock walls of the box, and bringing no usable light to us just yet. None of us had been on this trail before and with each passing kilometer the situation became increasingly eerie and surreal. Whilst we had abandoned our planned running through this stretch, we were still power hiking and eating up the distance at a good clip. There was a lot of flowing water around us, even on the trail, and at times a croaking cacophony of frogs was keeping us company. Many other small critters such as mice and scorpions were often seen on the trail. I can’t vouch for what was going on in the minds of Caleb and Matt, but for some reason, larger and more problematic fauna such as rattlesnakes and mountain lions did not enter my thoughts at the time.

We had been led to believe at the backcountry office that the water was still turned off at Cottonwood, but it was on, so we took the opportunity to fill up, even though it was only a few short kilometers more to Manzanita. We were still going strong and on schedule. We took a brief stop at Manzanita to top up on more water, and have a wee nosh. It was at this point we thought that we saw a light ahead of us. But only for a moment. Maybe someone at the Pump House ranger station? Maybe hallucinations, or was it too early for that? We didn’t ponder it too much. Onwards and upwards. After another 10 minutes or so we saw the light again. It was now apparent that there was a party ahead of us on the trail, moving upwards. Moving at a slower rate, because we were gaining on it fast. Turns out it was a solo hiker doing rim to rim. Self admittedly he was moving slow, and taking lots of stops, but he seemed no worse for wear.

Bill Borders: Maybe you think you’re fast enough to keep up with us, huh?

The Stranger: A lot faster than you’ll ever live to be.

We were getting pretty high up when we passed this guy and could tell that there were what appeared to be enormous drop offs on the trail sides. Our headlights could not plumb the abyss, so best not to stray too far to the edge. The moon, now high in the sky provided some illumination, but not a lot. We could just make out the profile of the north rim skyline, but without much definition. By now we were within a few km of the top. The landscape, what we could see of it, had by this point completely changed, and we were amazed by the size of the trees. It was now getting very cold and windy, and it was at this point I was starting to feel a bit weak and nauseous, but the end was in sight… well the halfway point was in sight…

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion….

Never hit seventeen
When you play against the dealer
You know that the odds
Won’t ride with you
Never leave your woman alone
With your friends around to steal her
She’ll be gambled and gone
Like summer wages
And the years are gambled and lost
Like summer wages

– Ian Tyson