How I Spent my Spring Vacation in Arizona

Several times in the last several years, I’ve hosted friends from faraway places who have wanted to sign up for gym memberships or Zumba classes during their brief visits. Each time this happens, I try (unsuccessfully) to talk them out of it. What sort of vacationing person in their right mind wants to engage in high-intensity workouts? Throughout high school and college, I maintained a rigorous vacation schedule that went like this: Wake up. Eat. Proceed to the couch. Watch as much Buffy the Vampire Slayer as possible until a parent shows concern. Open a textbook, fall asleep immediately. Repeat until bedtime. So yes, what you’ve long suspected really is true. I know how to have fun.

This year, my sister and her husband invited me on a trip to Arizona to introduce their new baby to our Southwestern relatives. Given that there’s nothing much to do at my grandmother’s house in Lake Montezuma except drink tea and look at scrapbooks, I enthusiastically accepted and ran to the store for some Real Simple magazines and sunglasses. Then a friend, let’s call her Debbie Downer, asked if I was planning to keep up with marathon training.

Oh, that. Shoot. It’s not that I’m tired of training to run a marathon, but I believe so fervently that vacation time equals treat myself time that I wasn’t sure how I could pull this off. I decided to pack a pair of running shoes and use them if I felt like it.

As it turns out, running is the best invention for family vacations since wheeled luggage. Here’s why:

Scenery like this:

Actual running terrain like this:

And then this afterwords:

The only real me-time I got all week (although of course I would have rather been changing baby diapers or washing dishes. You know that, family.)
The short-lived admiration I earned for waking up before everyone else to run. (In my family, being the first to rise is the highest point on the virtuousity spectrum.) I lost my status as soon as people remembered that I was still operating on Vermont time, which meant I was actually getting three extra hours of sleep.
Unfamiliarity with my surroundings is exciting! Imagining rattlesnakes and coyotes lurking in the sage brush helped me set a good pace and set the scene for several Western-themed fantasies during my runs, in which I played the lead alongside John Wayne and a cute red squirrel.
Being on top of the world (or higher up than usual), at 4,000 feet above sea level. Compared to Montpelier’s 500 feet, this made running feel like pushing a wheelbarrow full of gravel uphill through knee-deep water. According to my grandparents, the high altitude makes the area around Flagstaff a great place to train for the Olympics and 100-mile races through the desert. And the Vermont City Marathon, too, I hope.