18.2 miles @ 9:59/mi. Provo Canyon (mouth to Trefoil and back).
Wayne and I ran the whole distance together. Kevin ran the first 4 to Bridal Veil Falls with us then turned back. He's running the Big Cottonwood marathon next week.
We knew with half the route being uphill, this week's 18 miles was going to be quite a bit harder than last week's 17 miles down. We didn't push the 9 miles up. By then, our legs were so tired we didn't push the next 7 miles down either. We did push the last couple of miles a bit (9:02, 8:57), and I went sub-8:00 the last 0.2.
We had an interesting experience on the way up. As we came around a bend there was a big bull moose grazing on the grass at the side of the road. The road is pretty narrow, and with the moose staring at us, we didn't feel like risking a charge if we tried to run past him. We tried tossing a rock near him, and one in the trees across the road from him, but he didn't budge and eventually started grazing again. Finally a truck came up the road and we flagged it down. It turned out to be a rancher who lives up there. He had seem the moose around. He graciously gave us a ride past the moose. As we passed, the moose wandered into the trees off the road. We didn't see him on our way back down. But as we continued up, shortly after the moose we came across 7 wild hen turkeys in the road. We joked that the rancher was going to find us pecked to death by the wild turkeys...but they just moved up the sie of the road and let us pass.
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