Jason: Ups, Downs, Sights, and Sounds in Marathon Training on the Road

I reflected back on this big part of my experience in our four weeks on the road. In my marathon training plan, the four weeks coincided with a wave of increasing mileage week per week, in total managing 173 miles, with 8,595 feet of elevation gain in the 24 hours and 21 minutes I spent pounding the pavement, trails, and beaches.

While the first week of our trip was an easy week in my plan, things got more complicated as the load increased. In week 2 in particular, we found ourselves boxed in by mountains in most places, so I had no choice but to do hills, and lots of 'em! Three days in a row Strava (the app I use for run tracking) showed I gained more than 600 feet of elevation, which is a lot for a Manhattanite!

I also encountered the most difficult run conditions I've ever attempted at Crater Lake. It was truly epic - High altitude, sharp elevation changes, forest fire smoke, and terrain that alternated between rocky climbs/descents and soft sand. It's the first run I've done in years where I had to walk for stretches, due to steepness or tricky terrain, usually both. Intending to do 14 miles, by 3 I knew this was just stupid difficult, so I turned back and called it a day at 5 miles.

Yeah, that was nuts.

But with mountains come great views, and there were plenty of them! By the third week I had accepted that I needed to take it easy when in mountainous and high-altitude terrain, and just enjoy the scenery. Here are some of my favorites:

Running the rim of the Grand Canyon

Looking inland from Malibu

Above the beach in Carpinteria 

Just a silhouette of Wizard Island in Crater Lake

Mount Hood from the Oregon High Desert

Swans in the mouth of the Yellowstone River

Looking down the sulfur walls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

The Tetons from Swan Lake

The namesake of Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Another challenging issue was time - We kept a pretty aggressive travel schedule, usually counting on 3-5 hours of driving each day along with sight-seeing. Between prep, running time, stretching, and cleaning up, I needed between 1.5 and 3.5 hours to accomplish a run, so we had to get creative many times by:

1. Shifting the time of day of the run from my morning routine (sometimes bringing challenges like afternoon heat, higher altitude, or darkness... yeah, I twice ran with a headlamp)
2. Switching around workouts, like moving a long run to an earlier day to leave a shorter one on a bigger sight-seeing day
3. Getting up before dawn and heading out in the cold
4. Just plain cutting down the miles in a run

My final run on the road I had planned with my great friend Steve well in advance - we both signed up for a 10k race on Labor Day in his home city of Minneapolis. The run went perfectly - I had a goal pace in mind, and managed to hold it through the whole 6.2 miles to finish in 41:21, more than 2 minutes faster than I ran my last 10k race in April. I could really tell that training for a marathon, including the previous four weeks, was having some great effects! It was a fulfilling way to cap off a month of challenges and beauty.

Mission accomplished!

Canyons, Mountains, and Bears, oh my!

For our last morning in Yellowstone, we resolved to see the features we missed before heading out the southern route to Grand Teton. Jason had gone on a run to view the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (a big canyon carved by the Yellowstone River) and insisted Kate see it as it was near our campsite. It was indeed a very beautiful place.

Jason commented that he finally understood why they call it Yellowstone.

Now THAT's a waterfall!

After taking photos at the canyon, we moved on to Midway Geyser Basin which we had skipped during the busiest hours due to crowding and parking constraints. It consists of one of the smaller, but most popular stops in the park- and for good reason! It's truly spectacular.

Even the mud is beautiful!

Grand Prismatic Spring, what we agreed was the most beautiful feature in the park. The colors were just amazing.

Normally when we do parks, we take more time visiting and hiking the less-travelled paths. This trip has been different for us in that it's been more about the drive, easy hikes and paths, and seeing the larger attractions. From our experience, we've started making a list for longer visits and backpacking adventures when Ella gets a little older. Yellowstone is high on that list. We can't wait to come back!

We continued down the road south out of Yellowstone and into the mountain and lake country that makes up Grand Teton National Park. The Tetons is a very young mountain range that rises abruptly above the adjacent valley, and it's still getting taller by a few millimeters each year. We arrived at our campsite at the park's Colter Bay Village in the afternoon, and decided to walk the path to the lake and check out the Ranch House for dinner.

A minor bucket list item of Jason's was to see a bear, so we were a little disappointed not to encounter any at Yellowstone. Luckily, Grand Teton obliged. We watched this little black bear forage for berries.

Looking for bear-ies... hahaha.

Dinner at the Ranch House was excellent and exactly what you would expect from a ranch house... good quality meats and bbq, plain but good quality food. The corn bread skillet with a side of local honey- yummm.

Ella checking out the menu

We walked back along the lake path and stopped to see the sunset over the lake! What a long, but fantastic day in a truly beautiful place.

The lake path... a nice walk with stunning views!

The Tetons during the day

Cool Nights in a Large Volcano- Yellowstone Pt 2

Our second day in the park was our big volcano day. Not everyone may be aware, but Yellowstone is in fact an enormous active volcano. It erupts sparingly, once every few hundred thousand years, but a major eruption would significantly change weather patterns in the northern hemisphere for years (beyond leaving a big scar across the West of course). Inside this volcano is a plethora of cool volcanic features, and we set out to see as many as we could.

First was West Thumb, a section of Yellowstone Lake that opened up with the last eruption about 150,000 years ago. West Thumb has a number of cool steam vents, geysers, and pools.

West Thumb from across the lake.

Checking out the boiling hot pools. She's saying "that's stinky, mom!"

Nice lake view from the volcanic features.

Bacteria make the beautiful blue seen in many of the pools in Yellowstone.

Next we headed to Old Faithful, the most famous feature in the park. It's the big geyser with the most predictable eruption timing in a short timeframe - about once every 90 minutes - though it's not the tallest or the most frequent. We hung out for a show, and Ella enjoyed it until near the end when she got spritzed in the face with warm sulfur water.

Yay, it's a geyser!

Woosh!

We then went by Midway Geyser Basin. It was packed then so we actually continued on and came back the next morning. Midway is home to Grand Prismatic Spring, one of the "postcard views" of Yellowstone.

We then stopped at the Fountain Paint Pots, mud pits alongside steam vents, geysers, and springs.

A little sulfur-y pool

Heading along the glowing bacteria mats

A steam vent. It was pretty loud!

Our last section of the day was a long drive through the north side of the park, up to Mammoth Hot Springs.

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Mammoth Hot Springs

The narrow road was under construction, so it took quite a while to navigate with white knuckles, but we made it to several pretty areas before calling it a day at Canyon Village, our camping spot for the night.

The weather in the park really surprised us in one way... it was beautiful during the day, but it was really cold at night! It got down as low as 38 degrees. Luckily, we had plenty of warm sleep clothes to bundle up in as Canyon Village did not have hookups or allow generators after 8pm. Brrr.

Daddy got creative in the middle of the night!

Large Lakes- Yellowstone Part 1

The next day we continued on to Yellowstone, a few hours south of Glacier. Along the way we passed near one of the fires raging in Montana - there was an enormous volume of smoke billowing from the source, and it followed us for several hours down the road. Later, we pulled over at a pretty overlook at Earthquake Lake.

Jason hopped out to read an information sign, and ended up hearing a tearful story from an older woman with her husband there, who was 9 years old and staying with her grandparents nearby when the largest earthquake in the Rockies in recorded history struck the Madison River. Boulders had come tumbling down from the surrounding mountains in the middle of the night, burying two dozen sleeping campers, while damming the river to create the modern lake where a campground once stood. It put the scene in a sober light, the dozens of leafless trees in the water marking the lives of those lost in the night.

Earthquake Lake

We drove on into the park, entering at the west entrance and taking the road past Canyon Village (where we'd later return) down to Fishing Bridge on Yellowstone Lake. We hunkered down there for two nights.

Buffalo crossing on our way in! We are indeed in the park.

On our first full day in the park, we took a relaxed day, sleeping in, doing laundry, and just checking out things around the lake. We headed to the Lake Hotel for dinner, and found it to be a lovely Victorian-era naturalist lodge, one of the type we've talked about staying in on a future national-park-hopping trip.

Dinner at the Lake Hotel with lovely views and delicious food.

For those who haven't been to a lot of national parks, back in the late 1800s/early 1900s, a popular vacation for the well-to-do was to go out into the wilderness and stay in a conveniently-placed top-notch hotel, with all the comforts and services of home along with nature walks and rare game hunting and fishing. Such hotels were built in a lot of parks and private wilderness areas, and many still exist in all their splendor - the Mount Washington Hotel, where we got married, is one example.

Jason and Ella in the "sun room".

The magnificent fireplace!

On our way back to our campsite we decided to have some desert by the lake at sunset. While we didn't get the colorful sky the way we did other days of the trip, it was still a fantastic way to enjoy the evening!

Relaxing by the lake with wine, pie and ice cream!

Glacier and Huck

We left our camp on Bainbridge Island and this time, drove the RV to the ferry to Seattle. It was a tight squeeze on there! It's a commuter ferry, so the staff was used to lots of cars and big trucks.

After crossing Puget Sound, we started east, our primary direction for the rest of the trip. We even hopped on I-90 for a little way.

Since we had cut short our stay at Crater Lake some days earlier, we had extra time and decided to add in Glacier National Park, which was now our next stop. It was more than a day away, so we drove until a beautiful sunset greeted us near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

That day happened to be August 24, two months since Ella was born! We celebrated with two renditions of "Happy Birthday", and with a Voodoo Doughnut (from Portland a few days earlier) for a cake.

Happy 2 months little noodle!

A little unsure of that birthday cake?

All worn out

The next day, Montana greeted us with one of its treasures: Huckleberries! Huckleberry shakes, huckleberry popcorn, huckleberry liqueur, all exist and are super tasty.

Agreed.

Mid-day we made it to Glacier in time to catch a shuttle to the heart of the park at Logan Pass - we couldn't drive the whole way since the road is too narrow and wind-y for an RV. The scenery there is gorgeous!

The park was so busy that day that we needed to wait about an hour for a shuttle back down. The driver was a real character - picture Kristin Wiig playing a 70-ish little lady with thick glasses telling stories non-stop, turning back every few seconds to make sure we heard each important point about her grandson's football game, all while negotiating steep hairpin turns in the bus.

We talked with and overheard a number of people who were hiking there, and it sounded just incredible, so we resolved to come back one day when Ella is older. If it's easy for us to get back there one day, it'd be top on our list of places to explore more!