After packing up last night in preparation for my road trip to the Portland airport and the return flight to Salt Lake City, all there was left to do in the morning was to get in a nice run. Consequently, I headed out the door just after 6:30 am in my Vibram Five Fingers and ran down to Drake Park. Then I crossed the Deschutes River by running over the park’s wooden bridge (running over the bridge’s wooden planks of in shoes that offer very little support is a neat feeling) and headed into town and up to my Aunt and Uncle’s place on Hawthorne where I met up with Dad to drive up to Portland.
On the way to the airport we made a couple of rest/running stops. First, we stopped at the town of Madras where I practiced running back and forth over a fifty-meter section of the Safeway’s parking lot. I’m sure the shoppers were probably wondering about why some strange guy was repeatedly running fifty-meter forward then backwards across the parking lot. Only true runners can understand the method to our madness (i.e., I have read in Runner’s World that running backwards will help lengthen your stride).
For our second stop, we took a nice long break at Mt. Hood’s Snowpack Summit ski lift (i.e., on the west end of Government Camp). During the trip, the weather was perfect, until we reached the Mt. Hood National Forest where it all of a sudden the sky became overcast and it started to drizzle. Consequently, I put on a windbreaker, gloves, and a ski-cap before I started my ascent to the Timberline Lodge. I was really excited to see this site since my Aunt informed me that one of my Great Aunt’s had her picture taken with President Franklin Roosevelt in this legendary lodge that is probably best known as the outside of Overlook Hotel in the movie The Shining. In regards to the latter, my 3.5-mile run up to the Timberline seemed to turn into a Stephen King novel; that is, the climb was extremely steep (it took me just over 50:19 to compete and I was running the entire way up), the trail was very technical and rocky, the intensity of rain continued to increase, and a thick fog engulfed the mountain side. In fact, the fog was so think that I could only see about twenty-meters in front me; therefore, the various ski lifts that I ran under seemed to come out of nowhere.
When I was completely soaked from head to toe, I felt the wind really pick up and it began pushing against my body. As the wind was howling through the pine trees, I checked my Garmin watch and it was reading approximately three-and-a-half miles and there were no signs of a lodge (or anything for that matter) as I looked around through the haze. I was wondering if I made a wrong turn and decided to tough it out for another half of a mile before turning around. Of course, this is when the shingled-frame of the Timberline Lodge appeared through the fog. I was surreal to run through the fog, gusting wind, and pelting rain around this historical landmark. Since I was completely soaked and not wanting to freeze to death, I decided not to go into lodge in order to maintain some of the body heat that I created with during the climb. As a result, I high-tailed it down the trail in a time of 33:42. The total distance of this run was 7.5 miles at a slow, but gritty pace. In addition, given that I was heading to the airport (what a heck of a trip), I had plenty of dry clothes to change into; however, it took me some time to become un-waterlogged.
Finally, my non-running workout was concise in that I completed just 200 sit-ups and 25 push-ups. | 