June 25 2014

            All that it took for me to be enticed to go to the Go Pro Mountain games in Vail was the ability to go. As soon as I learned that I would have a free place to stay my bag was packed. After all, there are dozens of booths, and almost all of them hand out some sort of free goodie, usually stickers. We all know how hard it is to stay ahead in the sticker game. One second you think you’re the man for having a Backcountry Access sticker on the rear bumper of your Jeep when suddenly you see a Tacoma with a sticker for a company that only sells Wi-Fi equipped iodine tablets. Most importantly, the Go Pro Mountain Games (brought to you by Go Pro- be a hero) offered the opportunity to torture myself physically and mentally for the amusement of my readers.

            I hastily pack my car (a Subaru, because everybody who moves to Colorado is greeted with a gift basket containing a Subaru or Jeep, an ounce of pot, a six pack of local microbrews, and fifteen bumper stickers), forgetting my trail shoes (this will become very important later.) As I drive east from Colorado Springs along US 24, the blue skies make the receding snow shine from the mountaintops across from Wilkerson Pass. The peaks of the Mosquito and Ten Mile ranges, now old friends after three years, jut up from the plains like the spine of a giant. Vail to me looks like a poorly done Potemkin village, a giant mall and hotel complex doing its damnedest to masquerade as a charming Bavarian mountain town and failing miserably, all designed by an executive who thinks the secret to rustic charm is to give your Oakley stores certain architectural motifs. The visitors to Vail usually confirm my misgivings. As I pull into Vail village, something seems off. The faces I’m seeing as I walk by are those of real people. The influx of the kind of people who would actually watch a bouldering competition lends the town a kind of temporary charm.

            I pull in to my hotel at about 7Pm on Friday and meet my girlfriend (the lovely Emelie Frojen, an avid climber as well as a One Time in Moab staff writer), who is at the games to do serious journalism (she did a wonderful piece on climber Angie Payne) as opposed to dicking around for a weekend (more parenthesis). I unpacked, realizing that in my haste to get to Vail I had packed about none of the clothes I needed. It was okay because I had a free concert and expensive beer to look forward to. We walk down to a crowded square right before Tokyo Police Club goes on. The quality of the music is a nice surprise, not because of Tokyo Police Club (they were excellent), but because Vail Resorts has a reputation of booking abysmal acts. I suppose GoPro has hipper marketing people. The crowd is also packed with people who seem genuinely interested in being there, as opposed to a trickle of disinterested people going in and out of the venue.

            I wake up at about 8am after a few too many drinks at the concert and shuffle out of my hotel room. I have but two goals in mind: to watch the dogs and get free stuff. As I make my way across town, I notice that there are as many advertisements as people. The whole affair looks like the gypsy caravan version of times square. Dog jumping, known as Dock Dogs, is basically a competition where dog handlers can see whose adorable canine can jump the highest or the farthest. To do this, they have the dogs follow a toy into the water. The dog has no idea that it is competing- it’s just trying to get the toy. It’s the most entertaining spectator sport ever devised. It’s nine in the morning and the Dock Dogs already has a hundred or so spectators, plus people milling around the promotional booths. This is the qualifier for big air, where the dogs try to jump as far away from the dock as possible. I watch the dogs for a few minutes and make rounds of all the booths in search of free stuff (for science). I start talking to a blonde middle-aged woman with a grinning 5 year old black lab named Ranger. Lori Guay says she does this every year and that anyone can sign up. She just came from Boulder but she says that people travel from all over the country to enter to compete on the Dock Dogs circuit. I make a mental note to visit the booths to find out how serious these people really were about this competition.

            The distance jump is quite a spectacle. The dog is shown the toy, the handler sends the dog back and gets the dog excited. The handler throws the toy and the excited dog sprints and leaps after it, sometimes making it more than twenty feet away from the dock before hitting the water and making a huge splash. According to the announcer, Dock Dogs had to institute a ban on live toys after somebody at a state fair tried to use a raccoon as bait. A black lab named Molly does not want to jump in. She wants the toy though, so she takes a ramp that the dogs use to climb out of the water to swim in. Her performance elicits sympathetic awww-ing from the crowd. One dog jumps 22 feet 7 inches. The crowd goes nuts. I watch this for a while, go attend the bouldering competition, making sure to visit all the booths on the way on my quest for free stuff. I feed myself a snack of energy wafers and wash it down with 5 Hour Energy, both food and refreshment offered to me by marketing people at booths. I watch for a while and return to dock dogs. I was intrigued by the novelty of the competition, but now I am enthralled.

            While watching the dogs, it comes to my attention that I can still sign up for the 10k Trail Run. Obviously, as somebody has done no training, research or preparation whatsoever, such a difficult event appeals to me. I head over to the athlete and media building to sign up. After all, how hard can it be? I head back to Dock Dogs where a 15 year old dog named Tanner working himself up to jump in while the crowd cheers him on. His time is past, however, so his toy is retrieved for him to lots of applause. At 3:30 it is time for the extreme vertical competition, where the dogs try to jump as high as possible. I want to shy away from the word adorable, because the handlers and dogs have put so much time and effort into the sport, but watching dogs jump for a toy 5 feet off the ground is adorable. I snap some pictures and head back to the hotel.

            I am faced with a dilemma. I want to drink at the concert (so that I can experience it more fully and bring that excitement to my readers), but I also want to run in the 10k. I ponder it over beer and whiskey in a hot tub. I decide to have my cake and eat it too, as well as getting drunk. And running in a race that goes up and down a mountain the next morning. The Cold War Kids perform strapped to the gills in GoPros in a venue covered in GoPro logos. The show is bookended by exhortations to buy GoPros and GoPro giveaways. There’s a huge inflatable Bud Light can onstage. Is the concert little more than an advertising performance piece? Yes. Is it fun? The answer is also yes. I grab a few more beers from the beer tent, mindful of the fact that I am running up and down a mountain the next day.

            I take the shuttle back to my hotel. I calculate how many drinks I had. Eleven. That’s bad. It dawns on me that I am significantly more inebriated than I had planned on being. I talk to some athletes for O2X, a company that does adventure races. They are sober. I am not. They are amused by the fact that I am competing at 8am the next day and wish me luck. I go back to my hotel room and pass out. I set my alarm for 6am, knowing that waking up would be a struggle. I prepare for the race like the ancient Greeks prepared for the Olympics: by reheating pizza and ritually passing out fully clothed in my hotel bed, as an offering to Dionysus.

            I wake up hung over and apprehensive. The course of action is clear: to blast the Rocky IV soundtrack and cram yogurt into my mouth as quickly as possible. The cheesy lyrics of ‘Burning Heart’ wash over me, and convince me that I can do this. Because in the warrior’s code there’s no surrender. Though my body says stop my spirit cries never. Deep in my soul a quiet ember.

            I put on my running clothes and totally inadequate cross trainers (I forgot my trail runners), energized and ready to defeat Ivan Drago or run a really difficult 10k. I’ve forgotten which. I think the alcohol and eighties rock have conspired to melt my brain. I leave my hotel at 6:45 and walk along the river to the starting area for the race. It is good that I get there early, because the fact of the matter is that I am experiencing intestinal problems that I won’t describe here. I start to feel better at about 7:15, probably because I am still blasting the Rocky IV soundtrack over and over in a futile effort to convince myself that I am ready. The city square becomes more crowded as more athletes and spectators trickle in. The competition looks stiff. The large athletic crowd makes me feel like I have stumbled into a granola commercial directed by DW Griffith. One person next to me is talking about how he ran the half marathon the day before.

“Because of snow, we have altered the track.” The announcer’s words are intimidating. The town of Vail is thousands of feet below the snowline by June. I look at the clock. Ten minutes to go. Time to belt eighties music harder than ever. The clock winds down to 8 AM. With one minute to go I just have one goal- to not finish dead last. Five four three two one.

            I’m off, and so is everybody else. We wind through the town to a cheering crowd. I feel good. I am an athlete competing, not a person whose method of motivation is a series of self-imposed dares. I’m actually passing people. I guess my daily run is paying off. The first three minutes are pure self-affirmation. The cheering crowd and the fact I am keeping up keeps me in a happy place one footstep at a time. As I wind through the town, I feel like a serious person who does serious things. I hit the uphill section, and I become a weak blob of jelly. The trail winds up and up and my legs protest their current task. My hangover returns, as if waiting in a thicket of aspen trees to jump out and ambush me. The winding uphill trail, while unpleasant, gives way to something far worse. It’s a straight shot up a hill. I’ve done obstacles in adventure races before, but I’d so much rather crawl under barbed wire or climb a rope ladder than run in a straight line up a hill. It is both elegant in its simplicity and quite shitty. For the first time, I slow down to walking pace.

            At the top there is a flat section, followed by a downhill. I start running again and stop getting past. I suppose my training style helps. In high school, I lost eighty pounds and I am terrified of gaining that weight back. One the other hand, I despise moderation and love food, so I run about eight miles a day to offset the beer and the hamburgers. The last day of running I missed was in 2011. As a result, I run every day to keep from getting fat, but it is usually as slowly and as reluctantly as possible. I am often hung over. I may not be as athletic as my compatriots, but I am psychologically prepared to be miserable. I reach a series of uphill switchbacks and manage a slow run. Almost nobody runs the whole way up, but I am still getting passed. My truly inspiring mantra (don’t be dead last) runs through my head, as well as the training montage song from Rocky IV, which has been on repeat since the race started. What was once a mellow hiking trail becomes very difficult in the context of a foot race.

            I pass the two-mile marker. I think it was meant to be encouraging, but it is not. The scenery is encouraging. I force myself to reevaluate my situation. Despite my exhaustion, the trail run has all the elements of a pleasant day. The scenery is spectacular as well: there is still snow past tree line, the flowers are blooming, and it’s still sunny out. In addition, the flood of people passing me has become a trickle. An aid station, manned by what I assume are angels sent to earth to keep me alive, hands me golden nectar with incredible taste and healing powers (tap water and warm Gatorade), served in an ornate chalice (a Dixie cup). It strikes me that I’m having fun.

            A long downhill section awaits me. It is glorious. Running down a trail is not really running. It is a controlled fall. I wind down on a dirt trail through Aspen trees and roots. I am falling pretty fast, and I am actually gaining ground in my little pack of runners. After my ascent, which resembled sad plodding more than the effort of a serious athlete, the sense of speed is wonderful. I pray that the rest of the course is downhill.

            It is not. The next segment of the course is almost identical to the downhill section, except this time I’m going up. I can see the competition slow to a crawl as we climb what looks like a mountain biking trail. The trail opens up on a ski slope, and I estimate that I am about fifteen hundred feet above where I started. Having made my peace with my discomfort and making no pretense of running up the hill, I grin and bear it. My hangover is gone, having sweated it out along with the rest of the fluid in my body. At the top, someone informs me that everything from here on out is downhill.

            I finally get it. I run every day, but I rarely push myself, because I never get too much satisfaction from running. Few other sports have such a direct correlation between intensity and discomfort. The harder you run, the more it hurts. As I start running- really running downhill, I finally understand the appeal. You get out what you put in, and having made it this far is immensely satisfying. I am on the verge of throwing up, but my mind is in a totally different place from my body. As I run through a clearing, the entire Vail valley reveals itself. The green valley gives way to the dramatic white peaks of the Gore range. It smells like the mountains and the sky is blue. Today is a good day, hangovers and uphill sections be damned.

            I reach town and run through a sea of spectators and banner advertisements. Home stretch. I pick up the pace. I imagine that the crowd is cheering for me. With the last of my energy I sprint to the finish line, where Emilie has been running her own race after waking up late and trying to catch me finishing. I finish in one hour eighteen minutes, which is not bad but also not good. That’s ok. I abandon any shred of dignity and wolf down some complimentary oranges and Vitamin Water, because people who finished before me took all the good refreshments.

            I inhale a burger, spend the afternoon wandering around booths and collecting free stuff with Emelie, and head home, blasting the Rocky soundtrack. Did I accomplish anything? Sort of. Did I get a bunch of free stuff? Absolutely. Did I do anything worth writing about? I believe so, because One Time In Moab is founded on the principle that adventure is everywhere, from the bottom of a beer in your camping chair to the top of K2. Welcome, and I hope you stick around for even more questionable adventures.