First Full Marathon & Backpacking Mt. Timpanogos

Deseret News Marathon: 24 July 2017

Growing up I never even imagined running for fun. The summer before my freshman year of high school I ran a hometown 5k run with my sister Abbey, and afterwards her friends who were on the cross country team were talking me up to convince me to join the team. My time was not good, but they made me think it was and that I had potential. They somehow convinced me to join the team that next August. I was never any good, but they needed a 7th man for the team. (It was a small high school) I stuck with the sport through high school and enjoyed being part of the team and going on the trips. Looking back, joining the cross country team was probably one of the best things I could have done for my life. It taught me how to run, and the value of living a fit healthy lifestyle. The inspiration to run a marathon came while serving as a missionary in Russia in 2013-2015 as our mission president recounted his experience running his first marathon.

The morning of the 24th was an early one as I had to bus out to the starting line up in the mountains.

The first half of the marathon was in the canyon, and we were already at about 16 miles when we were spit out into the city. I ran a half marathon in the summer of 2015, and had a time of 1:52. At the halfway point of this marathon I was about 5 minutes ahead of that time and I was feeling really good. 

This is about when I stopped feeling good... All i have to say is that the wall is real! Up until mile 19 I was on track to finish the marathon in under 4 hours. The last 6 or so miles were really rough.

I sat by this guy on the bus to the starting line and he caught up to me as I was struggling to finish the final stretch and motivated me along the way.

You can't see the pain I'm in...

The final mile of the marathon followed the pioneer day parade rout.

Having never run more than 18 miles in one go, I didn't know exactly what to expect, but I was very happy with the race and even happier to be done!

Hiking Mt. Timpanogos: 8 July 2017

Clint, Carli and I set out to hike Mt. Timpanogos one day. Our plan was to hike up to a valley near the top to camp, then wake up before sunrise and hike the rest of the way up to catch the sunrise.

We were doing great, and were about 4 miles up when we came to a huge section of pack ice covering the trail and going up and down the mountain. The snow would normally have been gone by then, but we had a record snowfall winter leaving spring and summer hiking to start later.

The first couple patches weren't very wide, so we made our way across them which was pretty sketchy. If we slipped, we would have slid down about 25 yards. After we made it across the two smaller ones we turned the corner of the mountain and there were two huge areas that we knew we couldn't cross. There was a group of 5 or so hikers far out on the ice that looked like they had crampons and ropes and stuff. We thought it wouldn't be safe to cross and decided to hike back down. We stopped there and enjoyed the dinner that we had packed, and ate and drank as much as we could to lighten the load for our hike down.