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I woke up to pouring rain at 6:00 AM on a Sunday morning in July. It didn’t take much to get me out of bed, because on this day I was leaving rainy Portland to spend a week at Steens Mountain in Southeast Oregon for a high altitude training camp for high school runners. Going to Steens had been a dream of mine since I first heard about it in as a college athlete. I lamented the fact that I hadn’t learned about it in high school and knew I had to find a way to experience it! Finally my opportunity came, and I was asked to serve as a coach for a tent of twenty high school girls.

I approached the week with anxiety. I had heard rumors about the difficulty of the camp and the big day in particular, but didn’t know what to expect other than that I would get really, really dirty. I helped the campers from Portland load onto a yellow school bus and eight hours later we descended a 1 mile long dirt road with a series of switchbacks into camp.

The first day consisted primarily of getting to know everyone and getting ready for the big day on Tuesday. Finally, at 4:00 A.M. it arrived. 177 drowsy campers and 30 or so staff arose to make sack lunches, eat a quick breakfast and load the buses. By this time the medical team had learned I had some experience as a student athletic trainer so I became a part of the medical staff for the day.

Thanks to an excessively wet spring (the whole camp was flooded the week before we arrived!) the first part of the big day course had to be altered. We hiked with our tent mates five miles up a dirt road, ascending from 7,500 to 9,000 feet. The combination of cold early morning temperatures, wind and the change in altitude made these first miles more difficult in some ways than the traditional route. I found myself running back and forth as some campers began to panic. Finally we reached the top and were rewarded with a very welcome break. Little did we know our day was just beginning!

After the first five miles we followed a side road down towards the gorge. On the way down one of the girls from my tent stopped to tie her shoe. While we jogged to catch up, she took a hard fall and hurt her knee and ankle. I radioed for help from the head trainer, and after a quick tape job she and I walked the remainder of the eight miles down. We caught up with the group and 13 miles in, were allowed another break before setting out again. We were all very happy to see Jeff, the other coach for our tent (and also the father of one of our campers) who brought us sour gummy worms.

The break was short-lived, and soon we were off. Less than a mile later we came across what is normally a small creek, but this season had swelled to a small river! There was no way to cross it except to go straight though. One by one we waded thigh-deep in the water, using a fallen tree to stabilize against the current. Two of the male staff members waited at the other side of the bank to pull us out safely. Once everyone got through, the campers were reorganized into four groups by ability level. We then set out for eight miles of 60-60s (60 seconds of running/60 seconds of walking continuously). In the back of Group 3, I was running pretty much the whole time, stopping only to make sure that campers were alright when they stopped to move back to Group 4. Just when we felt like we may have lost the trail, I heard a sweet voice come out of my radio “Group three is arriving at the waterfall.” I couldn’t see the waterfall from the back of the group, but I knew the longest part of the day was over, but probably not the hardest.

There at the bottom of the canyon, the only way out is to hike the 1.5 mile straight uphill. A lot of campers struggled with this and I might have too if I was thinking about myself but at this point it was about getting everybody out safely. Finally, we saw one of the most beautiful things we had seen all day: at the top of the canyon was the young granddaughter of the camp founder, Ella handing out the most delicious lemon drop candy we ever had or ever will taste. Steps later we shook the hand of camp founder Harland, who congratulated everyone by name for completing the big day… almost (we still had a 6 mile run back to camp)!

Safely back at camp, the general mood was hungry, tired, sore but most importantly, proud. We had accomplished something that very few people ever could or would. We had conquered the big day, and now we knew we could conquer anything.

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