The Upside of Penance

In my last post i described my busy fall.  What i didn't mention is that i failed to clean up after myself.  Well, i didn't clean up well enough.  Some 50 tires from one of the mud run obstacles had been left on a   somewhat out of the way trail on the greenway in grand forks.  The volunteer help and vehicles i'd been using to clear the course were no longer available (or i was unwilling to ask - these folks do SO much!) and wet conditions made access difficult even were I able to get a truck.  Combined with a busy schedule and, well, my own mental exhaustion, i just kind of blew it and hoped it would be ok for me to get to it when i got to it.

But it wasn't.  Turns out the trail wasn't quite so far out of the way and regular Greenway users were tired of seeing my mess.  The city was getting calls - it was public space after all.  I'd already decided that next year better planning was in order to ensure things got taken care of more quickly after the event but that was next year... and those tires weren't going to move themselves.  The city had offered to contract with a company to get in and remove them and charge the race for the labor.  And they would graciously forgive me as well - it's not a 'one strike' kind of city which is one of the reasons it is such a great place to live.  It was tempting.

But it was my mess.  I borrowed a truck and enlisted one more volunteer to help with the removal yesterday morning.  10 minutes before I left the house it started raining.  It kept raining.  The trail became too difficult to access, the closest i could get to the tires was about 50 yards away, up a slight rise.  The volunteer got lost and never showed.  Fair enough.  It was my mess.  So spent two hours carrying mud and water filled tires,  four at a time, up to the truck.  My forearms became jelly and my traps burned. Then there was the tractor tire that weighed over 100 pounds.  I became sisyphus rolling it up the slick path.  The final hill was too steep as there was no tread against which to leverage, so i had to resort to tire flipping it up.  I can't even remember how i got it into the truck.   By the time i finished i was soaked to the bone and coated with mud.  It was awesome.

When i made it to the gym for my scheduled 10 minutes on the bike late in the afternoon i pushed hard as usual and failed definitively half way through.  I had nothing left.  A good day of training.