The St. George Marathon is my “hometown marathon.” The finish line, in St. George, Utah, is just 45 minutes from my home in Cedar City. I’ve run the race for the past three years, and have gotten a Boston Marathon qualifying time for three years in a row. I knew I should’ve expected it, but when I got the email on August 11 that the St. George Marathon was cancelled for 2020, I was heartbroken.
Luckily, I live in Utah, so there are still races to run. I’ve known about the Escalante Canyons Marathon for a while, now, but it’s always the weekend after St. George, so it had never really been an option for me. Since my schedule was now clear, I jumped at the chance to run it. I’d actually driven the course back in May and my impression, as I imagined running Highway 12, was: “This would suck, but in the most epic way possible.”
(I actually ended up running the St. George course this year, as my Virtual Boston Marathon run.)
There were several Cedar runners at this race, some of us running the full and a few more running the half. Here’s the smiling “before” photo of Melchora, Brandon and me, just minutes before this course would chew us up and spit us out. (Melchora is kind of amazing. She ran the Beaver Canyon Marathon the Saturday before this race, and she would run the Thunderbird 25K the Saturday after.)
The Escalante Canyon Marathon has a gun start, and I really mean gun start. After everyone gathered at the starting line in Boulder, this guy held up this gigantic six-shooter and fired. Boom! That was it—off we all ran.
One thing about this race: it’s not a closed course. Highway 12 is the only road between Boulder and Escalante, so they can’t exactly close it down for the morning. The race directors ask the runners to stay to the right (which feels unnatural and uncomfortable), and they have sheriff’s trucks and side-by-sides constantly patrolling up and down the course. It was a bit scary at first, but I got used to it. Most of the drivers were extremely courteous, which was helpful.
I took as many photos as I could during the race. Here are some of the best.
Mile 1.5: The first two miles of the course are a steady climb up to the ridge. I started off running alongside my friend Bethany—a super-strong runner who I fully expected to smoke me in this race. (Like Melchora, she had run the Beaver Canyon Marathon the weekend before. Unlike Melchora, she’d run Beaver in about 3 hours.) She wanted to go faster than I did at that point, so I encouraged her to run ahead. After that first mile, I was pretty much by myself for the entire marathon.
Mile 6.2: After cresting the summit, there’s a long stretch of gentle downhill through juniper and piñon trees. It was tempting to give my legs a rest. Instead, I took advantage of the easy miles and got some relatively good times (between 7:00s and 7:30s). By this point, everyone was spread out to the point where I could only see a few runners in the far distance, and nobody behind me. It was a beautiful morning, though, and I enjoyed these miles immensely.
Mile 6.4: Coming up on the Hogback. This is a famous stretch of Highway 12 that goes right along the ridgeline before descending down into the canyon below. It’s less than a mile long, but on either side of the road there are precipitous drops down to Calf Creek on the right and Boulder Creek on the left. I probably lost a few seconds taking so many pictures here, but it was worth it.
Mile 6.4: A quick look down toward Calf Creek to the southwest of the Hogback.
Mile 6.5: When they say 25 miles per hour, they mean 25 miles per hour. Because it’s a long way down. There’s a school bus that makes this trip twice a day, ferrying high school students to and from Escalante High School. That bus driver has got to have nerves (and ‘nads) of steel!
Mile 6.5: Imagine creeping along this stretch in a school bus in the dead of winter, with snow and ice on the road. That would be terrifying. But in early October, running it in a brisk morning, the trip is exhilarating! I have to admit, though, that running it with traffic creeping around me was a little unsettling.
Mile 6.5: Another photo of the ravine below. I would hike that canyon the next day on my way to Lower Calf Creek Falls.
Mile 6.5: A preview of coming attractions. Miles 7 through 11 of this course get steeper and steeper the further you get to the bottom. We’ll end up in the canyon right in the middle of the photo, before climbing back out in miles 12 through 17.
Mile 7.5: And here we go. We’re not quite off to the races, yet, but you can definitely feel the pull of gravity. The grade is still gentle-ish here; mile 7 only drops about 100 feet from start to finish. But at this point, we’re just beginning. Time to use the downhill to bank some time for later.
Mile 8.0: The road descends 235 feet over the course of this mile. Driving it is harrowing because the south side of the road has a 1,000-foot drop. Still, it’s pretty as hell.
Mile 8.7: I ran behind this young woman, who I thought of as “Pink Socks Girl,” for the entire middle of the race. (Later, I’d find out her name is Chloe.) I would gain on her for a while, and then she would pull ahead. Pink Socks Girl had two friends in a PT Cruiser who leapfrogged her the whole way. They would stop at a pull-out, cheer her as they passed, cheer me on as I passed, then drive ahead and wait some more. Even though I knew they weren’t there to support me, it felt good to see a friendly face every couple of miles.
Mile 8.9: Now we’re heading into the steepest downhill section of the race. Mile 9 drops 152 feet, and the red rocks get a deeper color the further down you go. Luckily, the road is great shape and well maintained. No tripping hazards—just smooth, uncracked asphalt almost all the way down
Mile 9.2: I was glad I had my sunglasses on, because the sun lit up those cliffs until they were blindingly bright.
Mile 10.2: As the cliff walls get higher and higher, the scenery gets even more breathtaking. I knew this would be my last stretch of running in the shade, so I really tried to enjoy the cool of the morning as the road tilted more steeply downhill. With a descent of 312 feet (with some rollers for variety), I opened it up and took this section nice and fast, because I knew what was coming up.
Mile 10.4: This campground is also the trailhead that leads to Lower Calf Creek Falls. I was already planning to hike the 6-mile out-and-back trail the next day.
Mile 10.4: This is about as close as you come to “spectators” on this course. Aside from the folks supporting specific runners, gawkers are hard to come by. It was fun watching the shadows creep lower and lower on the opposite cliffs as the sun continued to rise.
Mile 10.6: This is it, the last little flat section before the first of the big climbs. Just around this corner, I had to run around a truck pulling a trailer that had blown a tire. There’s no shoulder, so two vehicles were just parked in the middle of the road, blind curves on either side. Kind of scary actually. I ran across the bridge over Calf Creek, and then the sucky part began.
Mile 12.3: I was walking when I took this photo. The road was just so steep. Way up ahead, Pink Socks Girl was doing the same thing. We alternated walking and running, walking and running, I’d get closer, then she’d pull ahead. It was obviously a strategy we both chose to use.
Mile 12.4: Right above Calf Creek is a place called the Kiva Koffeehouse. It’s literally the only business on the road between Escalante and Boulder. There were some folks standing in the parking lot, coffee cups (koffee kups?) in hand. As I passed, one of the guys shouted out to me: “What the hell are you doing?” I said, “Running a marathon!” He said, “You can’t run a marathon on this road … it’s too steep!” Well yeah, but we were still doing it. That was kind of the point.
Mile 12.6: This was the hardest section of the entire course. The road climbed 402 feet during mile 13 alone. I got my slowest mile in the race right here: 11:23 vs. the 7:20 average I’d maintained up until this point. While you’re struggling up out of the canyon, you get one last glimpse of the red rocks and then move into an entirely different landscape. It’s like crossing the border into another country.
Mile 13.4: Between the climb in mile 13 and the even longer slog from 14.5 to the summit at about 16.8, you get a short section of rolling hills. It was nice to not be climbing, but I took it a bit slower to give my legs a chance to recover a bit. The high desert here was rugged and beautiful.
Mile 14.1: And this is where you finally see what’s coming: over two miles of climbing, with switchbacks and a giant S-curve, rising over 500 feet in one awesome, awful stretch. Suck it up, Buttercup. It’s on.
Mile 14.1: Here’s a bit of detail from the photo above. I knew this was gonna be a slog, but I felt like I’d prepared myself for it.
Mile 14.8: The Escalante Canyons Half Marathon starts 90 minutes after the full and goes along the second half of the full marathon course. Right around mile 15, I began passing the slowest of the half marathoners, who were almost casually trudging up the incline. At this point, I noticed I was gaining on Pink Socks Girl as well as my friend Brandon. Brandon was still maintaining a running pace, but taking tiny strides. Even with my walk-running, I was closing the gap.
Mile 16.1: This was the last section of climbing before we hit the summit. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel jelly-legged or completely spent. I ran mile 16 at an 11:15 pace, so obviously, it wasn’t fast. But I’d saved some strength for the end of the race. Toward the end of this section, maybe a quarter mile from this point, I passed both Pink Socks Girl and Brandon. They both looked pretty beat.
Mile 16.3: I took this panorama the day after the race. It shows the same climb, only from the top. That is some wild, beautiful country down there!
Mile 18.5: After the summit, we got another long stretch of gentle downhill. You can’t see any in this photo, but the half marathoners were spread out along this whole stretch. It was fun to pass them—mostly because it gave me something to think about during this really boring section of road.
After mile 22, the miles and climbing started to take their toll. Those final miles were pretty brutal, and I didn’t take any photos. It was hard enough just to keep my feet moving. My calves started cramping, but I forced myself to keep going. At about mile 23, I overtook another marathoner who looked like she was completely cramping up. A little further along, I passed Bethany, who seemed to be struggling pretty badly. (Marathons on consecutive weekends will do that to you.) I gave her some encouragement, then continued on. Because after all, it was a race.
Mile 26.2: They say every mile after mile 18 is twice as hard as the the mile before it. That was definitely the case on this course. I was watching for the gas station before the final turn, and got really excited when I saw it. Then I realized it was the wrong gas station. I finally reached town, and finally rounded the final turn. The clock was incorrect in this finish line photo; my official time was 3:38:02. I placed 7th overall out of 56 total runners, 4th in the men’s division. First in my age group. Boo-yah.
Going into this race, my main goal was to finish in under four hours, and hopefully place in my age group. My “stretch goal” was 3:45:00, which I figured was doable given how my training had been going in the months leading up to the race. I was pretty pleased to hit my goal time and then some, coming in seven minutes under the time I’d thought was a “stretch.”
For the record, I printed that shirt myself a few days before the race. Here’s what it says:
Because, of course, I ran this one in a kilt.
All in all, the Escalante Canyon Marathon was a challenging, beautiful course. The uphills were tough, but runnable. The race director said the number of runners this year was “about average,” which surprised me. In a year when St. George is cancelled, I would’ve expected more runners to jump at the chance to tackle this difficult race.