Celebrating Sam on Olympus

By Steve.

Mount Olympus map and stats.

Somewhat by necessity, and somewhat by choice, we have lately been doing more late night runs than early morning runs.  It has been a stark change for me, having always been more of a morning person.  And despite the tired eyes I get towards the end of each run, I have immensely enjoyed these runs that go as late as midnight or 1:00am.   Combining these new late night runs with a birthday tradition that Sam and I started several years ago resulted in the perfect storm of fun trail runs this week.

The tradition is that on or around our birthdays, we always try to summit Mount Olympus.  About 3 years ago on my own birthday, after having done several prior runs up Olympus, I brought my trail head to summit P.R. down to 93 minutes.  For whatever reason, despite three or four attempts per year since then, I have been unable to beat that.

We met at the trail head at 8:30, with just enough light to get us up the bulk of the runnable trail, but cool enough to not exhaust us.  Jeff, Matt, myself, and some beardless guy who claimed to be DJ showed up to celebrate with Sam.  The only OTM who couldn't make it was Jake.  We then began the quad burning, 90 minute redlining, exercise in insanity we call Mt. Olympus.



Matt and his ghosts of Trails past

Pushing as best as I could, we hit the first creek bed a minute fifty ahead of my PR.  At that point, I kept churning up the usually sun-exposed section.  Jeff, who is perhaps the best uphill climber of the group, left the rest of us behind.  He was going so fast he decided the normal trail was just too easy, and walked right past a switchback.  After another quarter mile he crawled out of the bush onto the trail behind Matt and myself.  Shaking the squirrel off his head, and with a look of determination in his eye,  he set out again to reach the summit in less than 90 minutes.

Trudging up the Stairway of the Gods, I found myself still a minute ahead of my PR.  Matt then pushed me up the final 600' scramble to the summit, finally breaking my PR to the peak by a full minute.  In fact, he pushed me so hard that he started coughing... then puking.  Ha!  Jeff finished the summit climb about 15 seconds ahead of Matt and Me.



Descending the scramble in the dark

Once Sam reached the summit, Jeff broke out a piece of cake and some candles.  We climbed down between some of the boulders and lit up the candles and sang the most tear-jerking rendition of Happy Birthday ever sung in the history of that mountain.  I believe in music theory the technical term for our style is called "Sucked with Vibrato."  With tears rolling down the cheeks of Sam and vomit rolling down the chin of Matt, we enjoyed a nice moment of OTM camaraderie while eating a few bites of cake by the light of our headlamps.