Moab Biking and Half Marathon

I love quotes! I think I'll give a quote at the beginning of each post.

"No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Next Saturday (March 21st) is a pretty eventful day for us, it's my parents 50th wedding anniversary, and it's also the Moab Half Marathon in Southern Utah. We're driving down on Thursday to get some biking in before the run. We're renting mountain bikes on Thursday and biking Klondike Bluffs trail, and then on Friday we're going to bike the route for the half marathon (we're taking our road bikes for that ride). Both of these rides our somewhat short and not technical, so I don't think it will affect our run on Saturday.

As much as I love road cycling, I also love mountain biking. I went to Moab for the first time in the spring of 1995, biked Porcupine Rim and Slick Rock, and was hooked from the beginning. I have no idea how many times I've biked in Moab since then, but I think I've biked the majority of the trails, at least the well known ones quite a few times each. Some of the trails are half-day rides, some take all day, and others are multi-day trips (we've had support on those). Here's a picture of me on the Portal section of Poison Spider trail a few years ago.






There's a group of us that started going down together a few years ago. Although we had a lot of crashes on every trip, we had never had a serious injury. A couple of years ago we must have jinxed ourselves because we came home from that trip with a broken leg, a broken arm, and more skin on the rocks than on our bodies. We've all been back; it was all worth it!

I love Southern Utah, and I am so excited to spend a couple of days down there again. I'm also very proud to have the parents that I have, and I'm excited to come home right after the run to celebrate their anniversary with them and all my siblings. It's going to be a great day!