Rainbow Falls

We had another good group for our Saturday morning run yesterday.  I knew it was going to be hot and humid so I started early, but I was surprised by the cool breeze that continued most of the morning.  I caught up with Fred and Jennifer, who had just completed Peachtree on Tuesday but were nevertheless setting a good pace.  It is easy to get sucked into a faster pace than planned when you are having fun and laughing and talking.  I circled back at 9:00 and was pleased to have Martha join us and six or seven more.  It was an amiable group.

One of our newer runners is Curtis, who lives in Tucson but stays up here in the summer in a house he bought on Satulah Mountain.  I discovered completely by accident that he had been a professional cyclist who rode in the Tour of California in 2009 against Lance Armstrong and others.  So we had a good conversation about the Tour de France which is now underway, about doping (very prevalent, always wrong), the Peters Sagan-Mark Cavendish accident in Stage Three (totally unfair that Sagan was disqualified), and the world of professional cycling.  It is always good to hear about it first-hand from an insider!  But we were enjoying talking so much that I again found myself running faster than I wanted to for an LSD (long slow distance) run.

But sometimes it may be good to do that.  When I returned, I checked the history on my GPS watch and compared my ten-mile run of exactly a week ago with the same distance this week, and found that my pace had been nearly a minute per mile faster.  Yet, remarkably, I felt very strong in the last mile.  That is a good feeling as my training season progresses!

This morning, we awoke to a gorgeous day, cooler drier air and no chance of rain.  So we decided to pick up lunch in Cashiers and go hiking in Gorges State Park.  We started out on the Rainbow Falls Trail, which was rated "strenuous" but, we both thought, was moderately difficult.  But soon it began to climb, higher and higher, and by the time we had reached the falls we agreed with the rating.  Or perhaps it was the ten miles yesterday?

It is always nice to go on a hike that has a destination, a summit or a waterfall, and this was one of the most beautiful waterfalls I have seen in this area, taller than Looking Glass Falls but not as well known (because of the strenuous access, I suppose).  We stood watching this tall, bright cascade for a long time.  There were plenty of people standing along the handrail at the top and also down below, most of them young, swimming in the waterfall pool and sunning on the rocks, and we noticed that a half-dozen were creeping out on a ledge to the left of the falls.  Suddenly one of them jumped, and then the others, one at a time.

"I hope that water is deep enough!" a man to my left said.  A young, fit-looking man in a swim suit to his left assured him that it was.  "I couldn't touch the bottom," he said.

I struck up a conversation then, and he said two generations of his family were down below, swimming and climbing on the rocks.  "I did that back when I was a younger man," he said.   And he told me that when he was 50 years old he had jumped off a 35-foot waterfall in Jamaica in front of his son and grandson.  "I was a diver in college, and I did a full gainer on the way down!  Now I don't due stupid things anymore."  I told him that I ran my first marathon at the age of 50, and had run many more after that, so I must not have learned my lesson in stupidity.  We agreed in the end that it is good to do stupid things, to be able to look back and say, "Yes!  What a thing to do!"  And to carry that memory with you for the rest of your life.

I have jumped off many starting lines, but I have never jumped off a waterfall like this.