DAY 17: CROSS COUNTRY

Day 17: It's been yet another interesting day.

We have been able to run the entire time, primarily until we got to the trails. We actually literally ran into a cross-country team this morning, so that was pretty funny. All the kids were a little shocked at what they were seeing go by.

But then we ended up on a bunch of trails again. We had over 5,000 feet of straight (not counting the up and down) of climb. We're currently at 9,500 feet. That was also unexpected.

The trails—well I wouldn't call them trails. We had to follow our blue dot on our little blue dotted line on the mobile app because there was nothing on the ground. We were walking in grass neck high, sometimes hands on the ground because it was so steep and trying to climb up the side of this mountain. I'm not sure who created this route, but I'm not sure I would recommend it to anybody else.

We were hunted by some coyotes this morning. We had a pack of six, and if you know anything about the coyotes, what they'll do is when they're hunting an animal down, they're actually going to split the pack up and start to surround you. So we had a little bit of excitement this morning.

This material called Reflectix on our windows is meant to keep the heat out specifically when it was super sunny in the desert, but we had to get creative and create basically an orthotic for my one leg and it's actually working. So it's been really fun and dynamic. I think that's ultimately what we're in on as we're trying to make this as enjoyable as possible, because why shouldn't it be? We're going to do this once, get to Baltimore, and call it a day.