#319: Dimity + Her Pals Share Rim-to-Rim Hike of Grand Canyon
Sarah and Dimity join forces for this special episode in which Dimity, along with her two Minnesota-based friends Jo and Jess, share their recent grand adventure: hiking the Grand Canyon rim to rim! The three amigos recount the highs and lows of their 12-hour trek (time in motion: 10 hours, 15 minutes), including the “magic” of Ribbon Falls and the odor on the trail “that can burn nostril hair!”). Discover what “The Box” is, and why it was particularly tough for Jess; learn why Dimity chased down a squirrel. Be surprised by what was the toughest part of the day for Dimity. Marvel as the trio discusses the joy of a communal endeavor—and share the somewhat-surprising post-hike blues. Hear about their pre-trip training, and find out what these friends’ next adventure might be.
Reminder: Later this month, Sarah + Dimity plan to launch a bi-weekly “call-in” show. But to kick it off, they need your questions! Please leave message of 90 seconds or less at 470-BADASS1 (470-223-2771)
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American Runs: The Places You’ll Go
During this week of July 4th, we thought we’d take a little time to reflect on runs that are distinctly American, including Running in Suburbia and The Hometown Run.
When I started running less than a decade ago, I spent all of my time on the treadmill at the YMCA. I told myself I stuck to the treadmill because it was easier to control the walk-run intervals of the Couch-to-5K program I was using. Once I graduated from that 12-week training and ran a 5K, I stuck to the treadmill out of habit.
The view from the treadmill only changed when the seasons did. I spent hours staring at the same slice of lawn, which would be green, then covered in leaves, then snow, then mud, then green again. I watched a posse of squirrels meet, hook up, have babies, and move on. I stared at the same stone retaining wall that remained unchanged.
I felt safe on that treadmill. A limited audience saw my jiggly thighs and wobbly belly. I never had to deal with weather or hills or dogs. I didn’t have to put myself out there.
It was fine. Until, of course, it wasn’t.
There was no big breakup. The Y and I had no blow-out fight. One morning, I just decided to run in my neighborhood because I saw so many other runners doing it. Then months passed and I realized how amazing it is out there, even in a place I swore I knew everything about. You experience so much more when you cover the distance one step at a time.
One thing led to another and I started running in other places, too.
A view of Pittsburgh you never get to enjoy from a car window.
Like my hometown, where I ran my very first half marathon.
Or a random lake in Southern New Jersey, where I got some miles in on a vacation.
Or in Florida, with my BRF.
Or with her again in Austin (and a random dog, who was a very good boy).
And out west in Spokane, where I discovered how fun it is to run on trails.
Or in San Antonio for a work conference where I went for a running tour with three women I’d never met before.
Or, most recently, in Ogden, where I experienced the Rocky Mountains and their sweeping vistas.
To say nothing of all of the runs out there where I didn’t take pictures, like around Sarah’s neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, in the morning dark. Or through the cranberry bogs on Cape Cod. Or with my husband near my sister-in-law’s house in Seattle.
As much as I love ending a run on my own front porch, even when it is sticky and humid and gross, I love even more running in parts of America I haven’t yet seen. It’s a big, beautiful country out there and I can think of no better way to experience it.
American Runs: The Hometown Run
During this week of July 4th, we thought we’d take a little time to reflect on runs that are distinctly American, including Running in Suburbia.
If you’re like me, you didn’t run as a child or through most of your teenage years. The idea of willingly going for a run ranked far below getting my braces tightened, being unprepared for my period to randomly show up in biology class, sitting through my older sister’s (clarinet) or younger sister’s (drums) band concerts.
I knew one marathoner—the dad of young girls for whom I babysat. I liked the had a leaf-centric poster of the Twin Cities marathon that was in their basement, where I spent a lot of time, but that was about the extent of my marathon knowledge.
In college, I became a runner through cross-training for rowing. So when I returned home to suburban Minnesota for holiday and summer breaks, I ran on the roads on which I learned to drive. I had a few routes I liked, but my favorite was The Big Block: a series of seven left turns—and about three miles, although I’m not sure I ever tracked it on the my mom’s Dodge Caravan odometer.
When I wanted to slow to a walk on humid, summer mornings, I pretended that former high school classmates were driving by and thinking to themselves, “Oh my gosh, when did Dimity start running?” (Never mind that nobody ever honked at me to acknowledge me, and even if a classmate would have, they would maybe wave…and not get all inquisitive about what I was doing. The things you tell yourself to keep going, right?)
Wanting to urgently escape from everything Midwestern, I went to college on the east coast. Why was I so anxious to flee? My then reasons feel trite and superficial now: I wanted to start fresh and I wanted to be where the action was. (Um, in upstate New York? Where, exactly, did you do your research, Dimity?).
What I didn’t know at that time: Four years on the east coast would turn into never living in Minnesota again.
As I unpacked boxes and assembled IKEA furniture around the country, my runs at home, when I got there for breaks and birthday celebrations, weren’t just workouts. They were soothing salves I needed while living Chattanooga, New York City, Santa Fe. All amazing places, but also places where I didn’t immediately—or sometimes ever—connect with the local mindset, customs, pace.
You don’t realize how much physical and mental energy you put into integrating into an unfamiliar setting until you return to a familiar one: Home.
On The Big Block, I noticed everything. I loved the Land of 10,000 Lakes license plates, especially when one was on a trailer hauling a fishing boat. I loved the wide, wide shoulders, and the drivers that still nearly gave me a full lane’s worth of space. I loved the “no, no, you go” waves that make stop signs take longer than necessary. I loved the ample shade, especially on one rolling road, the longest of the Big Block. I loved crossing the train tracks—and smelling creosote in the summer— and crossing paths with dogs and their owners, even though I didn’t know them any more.
I didn’t even mind the mosquitoes when I had to stop to tie my shoe.
When I wasn’t looking outward, I was flooded with memories. Running past a restaurant where I had lunch with a boy friend I so wished would be my boyfriend. (He never was.) Being so obsessed with the size of my thighs one summer, I did the Big Block after going out to dinner with my grandmother, who convinced me to have a hot fudge sundae—and finish her’s too. Watching my shadow loping by in the window of the salon where I got my hair done before my wedding day. Seeing the last name of a friend from camp on her parent’s mailbox and remembering us laughing in our bunks until we were in tears. Remembering a drive my sisters and I took one night on Christmas Eve to see holiday lights and collect ourselves after a particularly rough Eve at our Dad’s house. Driving home on the same road with another boy friend after a Timberwolves game. (I wanted him to be my boyfriend too, but he never was either.)
My Minnesota license plates could be your red barn on a country road or your turnaround point at the Burger King. My Big Block could be a bike path you can’t believe you actually run now.
My memories, of course, are mine—but I’m willing to bet you get flooded with your own if you loop around your childhood neighborhood and, simultaneously, revisit past friendships, highlights, heartbreaks, moments in life that have shaped you into the person you are today. It’s a route that’s worth revisiting as often as possible.
I haven’t run the Big Block in at least five years; my mom and stepdad live in Colorado now. I’m not sure when I’ll get there again, but it is still as vivid in my mind as the route I ran this morning—a fact that’s almost as comforting as the miles themselves.
American Runs: Running in Suburbia
During this week of July 4th, we thought we’d take a little time to reflect on runs that are distinctly American: running in suburbia, in your childhood hometown, in unknown cities, among others. Up first: suburbia, a place with which many of us #motherrunners are intimately familiar.
One thing I swore I would never, ever do is move to the suburbs.
Nosiree. Not me. No way. No how. I was not a suburban girl. I was cool. Keewwlll.
Well, you know where this is going. (All my stories have such obvious endings!)
I got up this morning, walked outside, and ran a 5-mile loop around the neighborhood where my daughter and I live … in the suburbs!
I grew up in Atlanta, in artsy-fartsy Ansley Park in the 1960s and 70s. (Today, the only artsy fart who could afford to live in what is now called “Midtown” is the one whose work sells for $1 million. Hence, no artists.)
My Atlanta home, 1970s. The Ansley Park association told us to mow our lawn. You see my hippie brother’s response. (And our dog Alfie!)
Gut-renovated by new owners in 1996, now worth $1.5 million according to Zillow. Wow.
My first run was around Winn Park—all the way around the park! After I took a nap on the couch, I drove the family VW convertible bug around to measure the distance. Nine-tenths of a mile!
I trained for the famous Peachtree Road Race 10K, held on the Fourth of July. Back then, you only got the race T-shirt after you crossed the finish line, and they gave it only to folks who broke 55 minutes. It took me 10 years from that first run around the park to actually make it to the starting line of the Peachtree Road Race.
(Wednesday’s Peachtree Road Race is the largest race in the country. With more than 50,000 competitors, the wave start means the winners have gone home before the last wave has even begun the race. Everyone gets a T-shirt.)
I went to college in New York City, got a job, and lived there for about a decade, circling Central Park, doing intervals on a track on the Lower East Side, running across the Brooklyn Bridge. No suburbs!
After the L’eggs Mini Marathon 10K in Central Park, NYC, 1986-ish. Not pictured: Porn shops and drug addicts.
Which all sounds very romantic, except New York City in the 1980s was not the cleaned-up theme park that it is today. Times Square was lined with porn shops. Drug addicts passed out on stoops. The Harlem Hills in Central Park were nervous-making: You always kept your eye out for other runners—safety in numbers.
On a magazine-editor salary, I could afford a tiny box in the sketchiest of neighborhoods. That’s when my boyfriend and I discovered—like so many young people before and after us—that if we combined what we paid in rent, we could afford a two-bedroom apartment with a balcony! In New Jersey. New Jersey!
Oh no!
Northern New Jersey is essentially a road map of endless, interconnected suburbs built around train lines and highways between roughly 1910 and 1950.
In Hoboken, we had a beautiful two-bedroom apartment with a balcony in a renovated slide-rule factory. We were still cool! (If marginally.)
We ran with other 20- and 30-somethings in the Hoboken Harriers at night after work and went out afterward for beers and pizza. Which seems like so many lifetimes ago.
When our apartment building went co-op, we discovered that the money we’d have to pay to buy it would get us a house 15 miles further west … in South Orange.
But it was urban suburban! I swear!
My then-husband, who grew up surrounded by 11 acres and a private pool, wanted a bigger YARD, so we moved further west to Chatham, and joined a new running club, Amazing Feet.
And as IVF failed to take, we collected first one, then two, then three GREAT DANES. So you know what we needed, right?
MORE YARD. Westward ho!
That was 2003: Buy a king-size bed for your house on 3 acres and the Great Danes STILL take over!
Today, I live with my daughter, Nina, who’ll be 14 in August, in Bernardsville, the suburb where her dad and I landed 15 years ago—55 miles from New York City, near the end of the train line.
After her dad and I got divorced, she and I moved from the big fancy house with three acres up on the mountain into a tiny house in the center of town. The idea was to keep her in the same school system to minimize disruption; he moved even farther west. The Italian craftsmen who did the woodwork in the mountain mansions lived in our ‘hood in the 1930s; today many of my neighbors hail from Paraguay.
This is now: In our tiny house, Nina and I have two tiny(ish) dogs, Xena the Devil (blond) and Aiko the Angel (black boy).
When Nina starts 9th grade in September, she will walk to the high school, less than a mile away. Hallelujah!
And me? I have a handful of runner friends who live nearby. I know which streets are well-lit for the dark winter mornings. I know the hill that’s particularly beautiful when the moon is bright. I know to avoid the Swamp Loop in July because of dive-bombing deer flies. I can cobble together a route for pretty much any distance between 3 and 23 miles. I bet you can too.
And then there’s the #foundchange, the convenience stores that are so dang…convenient (especially when you need a bathroom STAT or a handful of ice to stuff in your sports bra), the paved paths, the (mostly) lit streets, traffic that feels a bit more orderly than urban venues, the fact that Strava or Google Maps pretty much always knows where you are—and can take you home when you’ve become lost in your thoughts. Or truly lost.
As a #motherrunner, you make your peace with wherever you live. You find your people, you find your routes, you make it work. And you remember to be grateful for the privilege of running freely, safely right outside your door. Even if you’re trying really hard to pretend like you’re still cool after all these years … in suburbia!
Nina at local Fourth of July parade, 2009. Ain’t life grand?