Sunday, August 3, 2008 [8]

We were planning to spend the day at the Grand Canyon and decided to head out from Vegas around 1AM. It was about a 4 hour drive and I drove half of it but I doubt I got more than half an hour of sleep during the rest of the drive. We made it there just in time to watch the most beautiful sunrise I've ever seen in my life. We went on a 3 mile hike afterwards on the South Kaibab trail to Cedar Ridge. The trailhead was at around 7200ft of altitude and dropped 1200 feet in a mile and a half. I'm not sure if I could count this as altitude training but the climbing could probably substitute a lower leg lifting session. We spent the rest of the day driving around a few vista points and headed back to Vegas. We were back around 9PM and I was tempted to call it a day but eventually decided to drag myself out for a few miles. I wasn't very excited about getting out for a run and not just because I was tired from travelling and the lack of sleep. Vegas is just about the worst place to run. It's impossible to run during the day, when it's like a thousand degrees, and even at night it was in the high 90s. That was the least of the problems, though. I headed north on the strip, which is ridiculously crowded. I was weaving in and out of the crowds, getting down on the street from time to time and running close to incomming traffic . I was pretty much running like a maniac and almost got hit by a couple of cars. I turned back after a couple of miles and tried to avoid the strip on the way back but I didn't have much luck and almost ended up in one of the freeways. I made it back to New York New York and did another out and back going south on the strip. It was a lot less croweded after Tropicana Ave and I actually had enough space to run without dodging people. I finished the run in 51 minutes, which I'm sure should be close enough to 8 since I was hammering most of the time. Not the greatest start to the week but taking everything into account, getting any kind of mileage in today was a huge win.