Santaquin, UT

Cedar Hollow Loop

Running Time: 56:53 + 2-minute kick

I have been dreading this run for nearly a year – my last run in Santaquin. The blue dot on the photo above was our home for nearly a year. My wife, youngest son, and I moved in with our daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter in late September, 2021. We all moved out in August. My son is headed to college in Corvallis, OR. Our daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter moved to Rochester, NY. And now my wife and I have a house in Wyoming, MI.

It took me awhile to find my “home” run after we moved to Utah. I ran on the neighborhood sidewalks at first. I tried some trails up on the hill above the neighborhood. In the winter I ran at a local high school track. My home track in Oregon had been the middle school near our home. For some reason they chained the gates at the track I was using in Payson, so I settled on a loop around some wetlands across the railroads tracks from our house.

To get to the loop, I would run through the neighborhood, past the church to the main drive, then cut around the north end of the development on an access road that ran to the railroad tracks. I would cut across the tracks where goats and ATVs crossed, and then up and onto a road that ran north-south along the tracks on top of a dike.

At the south end of the wetlands, a road forked off to the east and ran around the south and east end of the wetlands. This was the easiest part of the run, because the ground was soft and relatively rock-free. The dike road had a lot of large rocks that could turn an ankle or bruise the bottom of your foot. The soft road was lower, so the south end was subject to flooding in the spring as the waters in the small lake rose, and my run would get wider and wider to stay out of the mud.

On the east side, the road snaked around a quarry, and then wound through some wonderful trees and bushes that were aromatic and cool. In the spring and early summer, hundreds of dragonflies would come out of the bushes and fly along with me, new ones joining in as others peeled off and returned to their shelter.

At the north end was a gravel road that was hard and dusty and would take me back to the railroad tracks. The loop was about a mile and a quarter. When my running paced peaked in early spring, I could get to the loop and make it three full times around in my 54-56 minute run + kick. I did some Prefontaine circuits on a few runs, with a first loop around 19 minutes, and second loop around 18 minutes, and a third loop around 17 minutes. I had been working my way back to that pace in August.

Occasionally I would have to step aside for a motorcycle or ATV, but I didn’t mind. They kept the loop flat and unfettered by vegetation. There is always room for shared use. A local goat herd sometimes would be feeding, tended by a goatherder in an orange vest. Last fall I saw the same feral cat a few times, with cockleburrs stuck in his fur. I never saw any deer, though I sometimes saw tracks. The geese and ducks were in and around the lake all spring and summer. I saw nests of eggs in spring, followed by families of mother and baby geese. I saw a few snakes, and evidence of more in the dust of the road.

I have been dreading this run because it would be my last, signifying a separation from my daughter and granddaughter. A few nights before this run, my wife and I drove them to the airport, where they embarked on a flight to Rochester, with a connection in Detroit, to meet our son-in-law, who had driven with the dog a few days earlier.

Three generations in one house was not all wine and roses. Some days it was rockier than the dike road. I don’t mind running through the rocks. It teaches you agility and balance. Yes, it can be painful, but you come through it feeling like you just had an adventure, and one with a little bit more variety than a high school track.

I was on the road a lot, and I was never at home for more than two weeks at a time, so I guess I had less opportunity to get on anyone’s nerves, but I loved sharing a house with everyone. I loved seeing my daughter and my granddaughter every day. I knew almost as soon as we moved there that parting from them would be one of the saddest days of my life.

Being away from my kids has been the worst part of being a parent, by far. My older son now lives in North Carolina, and when we moved away from Oregon and our old home, we left him to return to college to finish up his final term, and that was heartbreaking. A few weeks before this last move, we drove the youngest back to Oregon to stay with friends until school starts later this month, and that was heartbreaking. And then watching my girl and her girl go through airport security and disappear into the terminal – well, there aren’t enough wetlands loops in the world to erase that memory.

I feel very lucky to have gotten to spend so much time with our granddaughter this past year. Being with her, playing with her, holding her, watching her, laughing with her, fearing for her safety – all of it has flooded me with memories of our daughter as a one-year-old. I was not the type of guy who held babies. Having kids really changed my perspective on life, in the best ways possible. Taking care of a baby and a toddler is hard work, but man is it rewarding.

When you exercise, you get sore. When you lift weights, your muscles grow. How does that happen? I do not know all of the physiological details, but what I have been told is that small fibers in the muscle break and then heal. That is how the muscle grows bigger and stronger. It is painful, but the result makes it worth it.

Maybe heartbreak works in the same way. Why does my heart hurt right now? Because I have been exercising it. What is that exercise doing? It is breaking little fibers in my heart, so that they can heal and make the muscle bigger and stronger. Well, maybe just stronger – we do not need an enlarged heart.

I know I will see my daughter and my granddaughter again someday, probably someday soon. I know I will see my sons again as well. My wife and I are going to have a blast in our new home, in a new city, in a new chapter of our lives together. I am not going to have all of them together in the same home except for a few holidays and maybe some family vacations. That is heartbreaking to me. But I knew this day was coming. I was dreading it, and for good reason.

I just had no idea how much harder it was going to be after I got to be with my granddaughter, day-in day-out, reviving that protective instinct that I’ve been able to relax a little as our kids grew up and became relatively self-sufficient. I really had come to look forward to that early morning greeting in the kitchen, sharing my food with her, making goofy faces, chasing her around the island counter, sitting by her on the floor to read books or watch TV, helping her terrorize the cats, and all the fun stuff we did together all carefree like it was going to last forever.

What a great year we had, Santaquin! I am always going to remember you as the home where I got to live with my first grandchild and where I got to run with the dragonflies.