Story originally printed in the Holmen Courier or online at www.holmencourier.com
Published - Friday, April 02, 2004
SKOL: Extreme efforts by some put things in perspective
My son, Jeff, who is visiting from Colorado, punched a few buttons on his watch, gazed intently at his wrist and announced that we had just covered 400 vertical feet in our run on the ridge behind the house.
Jeff and my daughter-in-law, Nicole, enjoy running, climbing and skiing in the San Juan mountains where they live, so his high-tech watch that includes an altimeter is not as much overkill as it might seem to those of us who don't have that much "vertical" to deal with other than the bluffs.
As the three of us chugged up a logging trail to the ridge I was reminded that the River to Ridge Run is coming up in May. The five-mile R to R is about 600 feet of elevation gain in the route from Riverside Park in La Crosse to the top of Granddad Bluff. Based on having run it a couple times I can say that the finish line provides a welcome sight as well as a feeling of accomplishment.
But I have to put that in perspective when I'm running with Jeff and Nicole, both of whom have run the Imogene race from Ouray to Telluride, a 17.1-mile race from Ouray, elevation about 8,000 feet, to Telluride, elevation about 8,500, over Imogene pass, elevation 13,000 feet.
So when Jeff checks his watch at the end of the Imogene Run he finds that they have covered about 5,000 vertical feet.
And if I ever get the faintest notion that I am being adventurous in my kayak, I think of one of Jeff's contemporaries, Eric Larsen, son of our friends from Cedarburg, who is kayaking across the top of the world starting in May 2005.
Eric with Lonnie Dupre make up the One World Expedition, the first-ever summer crossing of the Arctic Ocean paddling and dragging their kayaks through the broken sea ice. They will travel from Cape Arctichesky, Siberia, to the geographic North Pole and then on to Ellesemere Island, Canada. Along the way they will take snow samples as part of the project to highlight the growing crisis of world climate change.
And if I had any notion that we endured any cold weather this winter, I have the book "Winterdance" to put it all in perspective. It's the story about a musher's rookie run of the Iditarod, the 1,180-mile dogsled race in Alaska. The chapter on running up the frozen Yukon River with temperatures that fell to 60 degrees below zero at night was particularly interesting.
So it's nice to know in these days of concern about couch potatoes and paunches that there are people out there exerting themselves so the average isn't as bad as it might be.
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