Provo Canyon. Ran 6 miles with Ted. Then saw three runners, and decided to join them. Their names were Peter and Tim Wright, twin brothers, the other runner's name was Nathan. Of all things, it turned out that Nathan was fluent in Russian, Tim was fluent in Serbo-Croatian, and Peter was fluent in Norwegian. All three learned their languages while serving an LDS mission. Now this happens only in Utah, more particularly in the Utah County. Where else in the world would you be able to randomly approach three runners on a cold morning in a canyon and find this degree of language fluency? Here in Provo you can go to the store, and if you see a young non-Latino man without an earing, tattoo, extreme hairstyle, or other similar marks, you can start speaking to him in Spanish, and there is about a 30-40% chance that you will find him fluent. For Russian, it is somewhere around 10%. There is about a 70% chance that he will be fluent in some foreign language. And we are talking about a very decent level of fluency. Your average former Russian-speaking missionary sounds like an Estonian that did well in his Russian classes. The better ones sound essentially native. I was having so much fun chatting with my newly found friends about the intricacies of learning a language and other things that I decided to go a little longer than I planned. We ran past the Bridal Veil Falls where the search and rescue operation for the three stranded climbers was in progress. I ended up with a total of 15.75 miles on this run in 2:01:33. A very healthy base-building run. Ran some more with the kids in the afternoon, total of 17.5 for the day. | 