Antelope Canyon 50 Miler Recap Part 1

I am terribly late on this recap, but I have been so lazy after coming back from the race. My daughter has been asking me weekly on whether or not I had written my recap, as I think she may be the only one who reads this blog :)

The Antelope Canyon 50 Miler happened to fall on the start of Spring Break for the kids, so it was a crazy week or preparation to get the house in order before leaving as well as packing up for the race. It was all a blur.

My buddy had come over earlier on the week and we were able to prepare all our nutrition packets that we would have in the drop bags as well as planning on what we would need to have in each drop bag during the race.  We had to have all this prepared as we were flying in the day before packet pickup and would not have time to set up as if we were at home.

We flew out Thursday morning to Phoenix.  My original plan was to fly into Las Vegas, but the night before,   I checked the flight loads and the flight to Las Vegas was now oversold, but the flight to Phoenix had seats open.  We were travelling standby on my passes, so our seating would based on whatever plane had seats available.   The problem was that it was leaving earlier than our Las Vegas flight.  I frantically messaged my girlfriends and hoped they would get my message because I would be showing up earlier to pick them up.  Luckily, when I showed up to their homes, they were up and ready to go. I drove quite fast to the airport and we made it to our flight with minutes to spare.

I was able to rent a car in Phoenix while waiting for board the flight, thank goodness for technology.  We arrived in Phoenix, picked up our rental car and I started the four and a half hour drive up to Page, Arizona.  The view are stunning, but we ended up driving into the sunset and arrived to our hotel in the dark.

We woke up to beautiful views from our hotel.  Since we had arrived in the dark, we had no idea what was around us. It was incredible to see the views before us. It was stunning.

After a lovely local breakfast, we headed out to find to expo. The location had been changed, but we had no idea as were were not emailed. We showed up to the expo which was where the start and finish line of the race would be and saw no one. We saw that people were setting up the area for the race but no expo. Thankfully, we found another racer/volunteer to directed us to the new location.  They had changed it because of how windy the area was.  We decided to get out and take some photos, as I figured we would be staring and finishing in the dark.

Can you hear that wind? It was so windy that our car and clothes were full of sand from it just blowing around.

Goofing around at the Race Start

Thankfully,  Page is a tiny town and the race expo had been moved to the local community centre which was 5 minutes away.  

We got there just in time to catch one of the Navajo elders doing a welcome.  We picked up our bibs, dropped off our bags and did some souvenir shopping and headed back to our hotel to relax. We stopped into a local grocery store to pick up some breakfast items and we each got a pint of ice cream for a treat.  

Can you See Our Drop Bag? 

Course Map

On our drive back we found a lovely look out and drove out the check it out. Once again, amazing views. I couldn't believe all the beauty around us.

When we finally made it back to the hotel, we each dug into our ice cream containers and ended up being so stuffed that we didn't even have dinner that evening.  I'm not sure if it was a good idea, but we would find out soon enough.