It’s worth reiterating that the following story is purely for entertainment purposes. It is by no means meant to be instructional. The activities depicted are of a serious and potentially life changing if not life threatening nature. It merely recounts something I did and how I trained for it. I do not recommend attempting this nor do I promote this as necessarily being the best way to train.
Proceed with the upmost caution and at your own risk.
And as always, remember… there is a fine line between bad ass and dumb ass
You may have wasted some of your precious time reading my story of our attempt at hiking the Grand Canyon canyon Rim to Rim. If you like that sort of thing then you are in luck! The memory of the suck faded pretty damn quick. I think it was mostly gone after the first post hike beer. If you recall… we were not successful, although through no fault of our own. So yes of course… this tale is about a rematch.
No ordinary rematch however. I wanted to up the ante. Considerably. Yep, you guessed it… the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim to Rim. Called by some the R2R2R. The cool kids however, refer to it as the R3. (Which is of course how we will refer to it herein) Obviously this is a much bigger deal than the rim to rim. Twice as big, if not bigger. We are talking about 77km and close to 6,000m elevation gain. In a single push of course.
This level of effort and commitment was beyond what my friends who did the canyon with me last time were comfortable with. There was no pondering or waffling involved; it was a flat out and unequivocal NO! Now… I am not unable, nor unwilling to do this solo, but considering the scale, it’s probably prudent to have partners. The good thing is that I knew of two guys with whom I would love to share the experience with, and I knew that they would jump at the chance. Even better was that they are brothers, and my nephews. A couple of text messages sealed the deal, and before long we had a date picked.
Timing is pretty important for this project. There can be wild temperature swings, and there are really only a couple of brief window’s in the spring and fall where conditions are ideal. That being said, it ‘can’ be done any month of the year if one is willing to tempt fate and risk seriously life threatening conditions. Due to work and school commitments the youths had, we were not able to select the optimal time, and would be going in what I call ‘post-optimal’ time. This meant in mid-May.
So, how exactly does one go about training up for such an adventure? As you can probably imagine, there are going to be differing schools of thought on this. All I am going to do here is describe stuff from the perspective of what I am doing. The first thing in any such endeavor is to have some goal or target in mind. The overall goal is obvious. Do the R3. After that… what modifiers or caveats are in play? For me… the following two: do it in a day, i.e. within 24 hours, and finish well. By finishing well, I mean basically not being a dead man walking (or crawling) at the end. I expect to be sore and exhausted for sure, but also expect to have some semblance of decorum left.
As I started to put pen to paper it was mid-October. I was deep into training road cycling in preparation for the annual El Tour de Tucson. In another month, almost to the day I needed to start transitioning. I also hadn’t run in several months, and was dealing with a case of plantar fasciitis. So, there are some concerns. The most glaring and obvious being that of running and hiking. Considering that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day.
Normally I would train for this sort of thing the classical way. Lots of trail running with hills, followed by some more running. I know that at my age, that much running isn’t necessarily prudent. Well… this whole escapade isn’t exactly prudent, but that’s another matter altogether. So, this left me with the conundrum of how to train for what amounts to an ultra marathon trail run without doing any running. Okay… some running, but I wanted to minimize the volume of it, whilst maximizing the effectiveness of it. The other challenge is what to fill in the remainder of the training with.
I’ve got my own matches and sulphur, I’ll make my own hell…
– Kipling
The good thing is that I had a variety of options. What I don’t have is a confidence level that this ‘dry-land’ training is actually going to work well enough as a running substitute. But let’s not get too far ahead. Right now as I am starting to piece this story together, I am dealing with a spot of bother. Namely the plantar fasciitis mentioned earlier. I went to the doc to have that diagnosis confirmed, and I started doing the prescribed physiotherapy.
I was very diligent about doing the PT for my foot. It’s a long journey, but by early to mid December I was cautiously optimistic about the outcome, or at least was armed with tools to keep it manageable. As soon as el Tour was finished, I took a short break before I started switching into the real preparation work for the R3.
To be continued…
