Crossing the chasm R2R2R
“One thing is certain if you hike [run] R2R2R. You will love or hate the Grand Canyon, and you will never be the same again.”
— Jean N
It’s taken more than two weeks of musing, reflection and processing to attempt to condense the 95-thousand-step, one-million thought, 45-mile journey of fun and suffering through the Grand Canyon to a reasonable number of words. Like the honorable southwest indigenous peoples, adventurers and writers before me, I am an inveterate desert rat. There is hardiness that demands of those willing to discover the abundance amongst the perceived scarcity of the unforgiving desert. The allure of rough sandstone walls, punishing dry heat and sage-infused landscapes lured me from the harsh winters of Maine to the cowboy and climber-infused outpost of Prescott in northern Arizona circa 1994.
Back then, I wanted nothing more than to ascend the steep and remote crags hidden in the rugged high desert. Sometimes this meant arduous backcountry approaches to routes in the wilderness outside of Tucson and Phoenix, long weekend road trips to Joshua Tree, discovering ochre chasms, ascending Sedona red towers or lowering into steep basalt columns only climbers knew existed. Yet in the 3 years I spent in and around Arizona, I had never made my way to the Grand Canyon.
I thought the Grand Canyon was for tourists. Something to see. Nothing to do.
Sure, in the spirit of John Wesley Powell, I considered floating and paddling my way down the Colorado. Some day.
Fast forward twenty-something years to a late winter trail run in Boulder with my buddy Tommy in 2019. I was training for 3 marathons in a 6-week span and he was training to run the Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim (R2R2R), the desiderated double crossing of the Grand Canyon, a Fastest Known Time challenge considered to be in the top ten Premier Routes of thousands of routes around the world of which professional runners and elite adventurers vie for the leaderboard.
As much as I love the physical challenge, relative convenience and sight-seeing aspect of the World Major Marathons and other scenic marathons I have run, time is no longer a major motivator and I realized, the slower I go, the longer I can run—and more time in nature is always a bonus. I pitched the idea of running the R2R2R to a couple of friends at Christian and Jackie’s house at an Easter gathering in 2019.
Spring 2020 came and kicked our global asses, shutting down the park and postponing our R2R2R as the park was shut down. This is the one thing for which I am thankful to the pandemic. There is no way in hell I would have been ready last year, knowing what I know now. I was still running soulo, my version of soulfully, slow solo and internally in-tune running style. I had casually considered some online training programs and emulated them, a little bit. I would have been rather screwed, injured or both if last year was a go. The last marathon I ran was in Austin, TX, in February 2020 and apart from hiking some Colorado peaks in the summer of 2020, I had mostly been working, casually hiking and kitesurfing. If double crossing the Grand Canyon was actually in my future, I had to make a lifestyle change. That’s the thing about these endurance achievements, they become a part of you, your life. You must live into the greatness of what it takes to accomplish such feats, to embody that endurance mindset. Essential things began to matter, fluff, drama, excess, not so much. Prioritizing my self-care and training required me to consistently love myself and attend to my overall wellness. Discipline, as I’ve grown up, is the greatest form of self-love and devotion. Mattering to myself has been revolutionary and transformational.
In late November 2020, an Instagram post about a Grand Canyon R2R2R small training group came across my feed. Without hesitation I screenshot it, emailed and joined. I knew my weakness was in strength-training my legs and glutes. I also knew I needed a plan and someone to hold me accountable. If I’m honest, I did the bare minimum of what my coach, Kim, had planned. With five trips in that training span, she had to work around my crazy travel schedule. I also had two MRIs throughout the four months of training and dozens of hours of physical therapy and body work. By February a new knee pain crept up and she strongly recommended I plan to do less than half the route, the Rim-to-River-to-Rim, which is hiking either South Kaibab or Bright Angel trails to the Colorado River and back up (approximately 21-25 miles).
I really had to balance hubris and humility here. I may be old(er) than most and definitely older than anyone with whom I was training, but what I lacked in youthful joints, I made up for in grit and experience. I had been a scrawny young 20-something for nearly a decade leading mountaineering backcountry trips and climbing big walls in the desert and Yosemite. I could lay down some miles hauling up to half my weight–for days. I didn’t feel the need to explain myself, but I knew I had to find the right partner to defy doubt and as life-grabbing, hard-charging, yes-man, Christian would be that person.
March 12, 2021
Me: I’ve been reading a lot more about it. Yes, it’s long, but it’s just going to take slow and steady and I think we got it.
Christian: I am pretty good at toss yourself into the deep end type things. Definitely a cockroach.
Me: (LOL emoji) Samesies.
Christian: Just two old cockroaches meandering in a canyon. Nothing to see here.
I felt seen and understood when Christian described me as a “hard-driving no quitter” after our epic day in the canyon. This foundational training in tenacity doesn’t have an expiration date.
One month to the day after this text exchange, we were having a blast singing, storytelling and eating our way to the Grand Canyon, the day before we’d take to the trail. As we got closer, I told Jackie and Christian I didn’t want to see it before we ran it. They laughed, like, you can’t NOT see it, we are staying right at it. The moment we reached the edge, I was in desperate recall of language. I simply could not retrieve words necessary to describe the magnificence of what I was seeing.
Then the fear. I could not fathom how my frightened body would get me to the other side—which was not even visible–and back.
When attempting any great endurance feat, you face the reckoning of success and the humbling vulnerability of your limitations. There was nothing about ego and striving in this endeavor. I was being called and turning away, even as my stomach turned on itself, was not an option I cared to consider.
Relinquishing the complication of society and all the pressures of modern life is appealing, revealing and healing to me. Over the years, I have wavered on the spectrum between the desire to escape it all and fulfill the roles and responsibilities I carry in life (i.e. daughter, parenting and educating my children, bill paying and society-serving work). Somewhere in the back of my head, I hear “it’s selfish to spend so much time training”, “it’s not reality to escape into the wilderness”, “this is too time consuming and indulgent”.
The training and logistics of this undertaking require focus, attention to detail, investment and rechecking all of that over and over. Everything seemed good to go and well-considered except my stomach the day before. I spent hours in my head the day before fending off worries of being sick, assigning the nausea and dizziness to nerves. Totally normal.
I unwisely mentioned this to my mother and training coach and they both urged me to cut the run in half or abstain all together. Be happy with a Rim-to-River-to-Rim. It will be a nice day. Still lots to see. Yeah, no.
There is something beyond the beyond that intrigues me. Knowing that we have the strength to show up for ourselves and others when things are not going our way. There are many ways to “train” for this strength and resolve, whatever you want to call it. For me, it happens to be moving energy from my mind, spirit/soul and body through my feet. Actually transforming my life by moving through it, consciously, sometimes quickly and other times slowly, but always intentionally, moving as if by meditative and medicinal force.
Some people sit and do this in ancient practices of meditation. I don’t sit well, so I move. But, just as in meditation, we don’t sit to learn how to sit better, we sit to learn how to do life better. Some actually do run to run better. I run to learn how to endure life better, to keep pushing through the unpleasant and undesirable better, to turn a corner and see a new perspective more wisely and patiently and to know, I simply can.
I craved a wildly committing wilderness experience and yet, it also scared me. To be off the grid is so rare for many of us these days. There is no cell service to distract, nor to rescue. Unfortunately, the day I chose to do this run many months before also happened to be the day my father was more recently scheduled for a heart surgery, and on top of that upon landing in Phoenix Monday morning, I was notified that one of my daughters was directly exposed to covid and I had left her and her sister in the care of one of my close friends. I called all of them immediately and told my friend she didn’t have to come stay with them due to the potential risk of her being exposed. It would be the first time leaving my 14 and 15 year-old girls alone, but figured with food delivery, this was the sign of pandemic times. They would manage and I would ask the neighbors to keep a well-distanced, but intentional eye on them. My friend was not worried about potential exposure if they wore masks and maintained distance. She planned to stay with them anyway.
On top of logistics of gear, food, rental car and hotel check in, I scheduled them covid tests and had to suspend that particular worry for now. Of course, the results would come back while I was in the canyon and I would have no way to retrieve them. The ability to suspend worry is a practice and therapeutic issue often discussed in my practice with clients. I mentally retrieved this Buddha wisdom, channeled by the Dalai Lama:
If a problem is fixable, then there is no need to worry.
If it’s not fixable, then there is no help in worrying.
I opted to put the guilt aside, at least until later, when my father texted me mere hours before I would have to awaken in the middle of the night to start the run:
Please reconsider doing this, if something happens to me tomorrow and something happens to you tomorrow, it would be very bad for your mother.
I’ve straddled the guilt and living-my-truth chasm for quite some decades now and I could see I was descending into a no-turning-back deep chasm of owning my shit on this pathway to pain and purpose. There is no way you can have doubts once you descend into that pre-dawn darkness. It’s only going to hurt more when you have to climb out a dozen hours later and thousands of feet to go. You must dump everyone’s non-essential baggage, as well as your own, in order to preserve your strength. Extraneous worry, guilt, shame, regret and other people’s neuroses and demands do not serve this journey. You get essential. You’re on your own. You must rely solely on everything you came to be up to that point in your life and take each step toward a future stripped down to essential fucking badass you. No excuses. No baggage. No complaints. No rescue. No drama. No guilt. No time for extra. No time for all the demands of other, just everything you need to run, breathe and move with the ultimate precision, grace and focus to get the miles covered and even, enjoyed.
There is no medal at the end of this enduring adventure. Very few people know what it takes to prepare for this, let alone do it, and those that really get it are marinating in the bliss or still pondering the poignance of it. At best, you join this family of wandering wild ones with a quiet knowing of something between careful pride and connection with the crazy kindred.
So, why go through the physical demands and the emotional duress of can I actually do this? (besides it being astonishingly gorgeous and unpopulated by humans).
It’s training for life. It’s surrendering to the momentary discomforts, knowing they will fade and shift. Training for life on the trail means moving forward and remembering there’s a new perspective around the corner. Training for life on the trail is supplanting suffering for gratitude. Training for life is being so raw in vulnerability, humility and feeling impossibly small in the vastness of the grandest canyon on earth, and yet hugely limitless and expansive in spirit, soul, pluck and grit.
Being seen and cared for in the suffering presence of another is a sensitive and evolutionary place to be. I don’t want to get into the details of my illness that day, but briefly, it ended up not being the ideal day for an 18-hour endurance event. No matter how well-trained you may be, the day arrives, and the reality of unfavorable weather, lack of physical wellness or extreme acts of nature may occur. Gratitude is not a platitude or a journal exercise out on the trail. Gratitude is having depleting diarrhea in the desert for 18 hours and being grateful it wasn’t a broken ankle.
The metaphoric power of crossing the wide chasm and back was not lost on me. As we approached the Colorado for our second crossing before the demanding ascent up to the South Rim, I believed the river could wash away residual baggage of guilt lingering in my life. With our Wellfit Girls, I started a tradition, upon reaching the summit of the mountain, the girls take a rock, identifying something they have been wanting to release or let go of in order to powerfully and confidently move forward in their life, claiming a new identity or way of being. Before walking forward off the other side of the mountain pass, they toss the rock back, leaving that burden behind.
I silently picked up a rock and held it in my hand, identifying the guilt and shame I’ve carried along the way in my life, the choices I made out of fear and ignorance, selfishness and self-doubt. With that rock, looking into the mighty, moving water, I forgave myself, released guilt and took my first steps toward forgiveness and bold self-acceptance.
Every existential metaphor and cliché rose up to meet me in the face of that final climb out of the canyon. And I wonder now, if those dark thoughts of the few other close-to-death experiences I’ve had were ominous intrusions or salient signposts reminding me that I was made to rise up and shine my light through the darkness.
Why do I take on these challenges?
For the adventure of not knowing what comes next and the awe-inspiring strength to know that I can handle whatever it is.
There are many entertaining and informative personal accounts written about the R2R2R—from how to suffer better and avoid mishap—check them out! This was my personal philosophical and emotional reflection, an opportunity to see there is no separation between my life as leader/coach/therapist with others and the way I process my own life. In my next blog I might write more about the animals, landscape and antics along our way, or better yet, complete that video with the footage I captured.
It’s impossible to complete this run without some solid “what-not-to-do” advice and some dirty, humorous tales of suffering, so if you’re up for the challenge, reach out and I’ll drop you the details.
Quick Stats:
Trained from December to April, not for a fast time, but a moderate 18-hour finish
Started the run at 3:11am, finished at 9:07pm
Met goal time of 18 hours (almost to the minute)
Spent 2 hours of the 18 having diarrhea (could have beat goal time by 2 hours if not sick)
Ran 70% of the mileage. Fast-hiked the steep inclines
Temps ranged from 34 degrees at the South Rim start to 86-90 degrees in the canyon
Surprisingly didn’t cry, but maybe the tears just didn’t fall out of my eyes due to dehydration
Would actually do it again, who’s in?
