January 15, 2007
In my quest to continue to seek out creative and interesting winter training runs, I embarked on a new unique adventure run on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. I live on the west shore of the largest freshwater lake in Utah — Utah Lake. It covers about 97,000 acres (151 square miles) and is 23 miles long (north-south) and a has a maximum width of 13 miles (east-west.) It is a shallow lake, with an average depth of 9.4 feet. With six straight days of below freezing temperatures, and an overnight low below zero, in the morning I ventured out on the frozen lake with my son. The lake appeared to be frozen solid. We walked out about a mile and visited three duck hunters who had set up about 100 decoys out on the lake trying to coax curious ducks to check out the phony duck colony. They had already bagged three ducks. As we returned to the shore, I recalled a conversation with a local woman in her 70s who told me that when she was a child, they used to ice skate all the way across Utah Lake during rare times of solid ice. The crazy thought entered my mind, “Could I run all the way across the lake?” I had no firm plans for the rest of the day so I decided to give it a try. Little did I know what an amazing adventure run it would be.