All summer I wanted to run up Timp, but never got a chance. I finally made it last week, and now I can't seem to stop. This morning I ran it with Jared, also known as the SLC Samurai, and the Dorais brothers, Andy and Jason. Both of the Dorais brothers are real runners and ran the 800 at BYU. It also turns out that Andy is one of the two runners I ran into on King's Peak last month. Jared is an LDS guy with a family. He's also Asian, as his alias suggests. I'll let you decide how relevant any of this is later on. We arrived at the trailhead a little before six, and the place was packed. So packed that we couldn't find a place to park. We drove around for a while looking for a spot before we finally just got creative and invented one. (Right as we ran past the shack at the start of the trail I saw a green light coming down the trail toward me. "Crockett?" I said. "Crockett," he said. And that's the end of that little story. I hope you found it as interesting as I did.) Anyways, our little group split up pretty quickly, with Jason and I at the front and Andy and Jared somewhere else. There were plenty of people on the trail, but not nearly as many as I would have expected based on the number of cars in the parking lot. That is, until the saddle, where we ran past what looked like at least 50 people milling around. Jason and I kept the pace conversational, but we were pretty quick, running the whole way until one or two switchbacks above the cirque, and running a lot of the way after that. Jared, who had been tailgunning the whole way, surprised us by showing up a minute or two later. Somehow he had managed to cut nearly three-quarters of a mile off the trail between the cirque and the summit. As a friend of ours once observed, "If you think like the Samurai, the 'trail' is simply the route between where you are and where you want to go." We hung around at the summit for a few minutes to regroup, and then we started the descent. The guys I was running with are backcountry skiers, which must explain why they're so good at running technical terrain. We absolutely bombed the descent (at least, according to my perception), and I think we covered the sketchy half mile between the summit and the saddle at least three minutes faster than I've ever done it. No near-death experiences for me, fortunately, although Andy missed a step just below the saddle and almost took a tumble down a talus field. As the descent continued, we settled back into the same groups we had on the way up. Except Jared was the last out, because he took a "shortcut" that turned out to be a wrong cut and wound up somewhere other than where he wanted to be. That's why he's a samurai and not a ninja. And now for the Exchange of the Day: White Guy in Flat Brim Hat: "Ni hao." Jared: "F*%k you." 1:39:39 up 56:52 down
2:36:31 round trip (not including the time we stopped at the summit) 2:46:36 elapsed time
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