· Date: Thursday July 4, 2019
· Rest Day: Rapid City, South Dakota
It was now the halfway point of the summer where Rebecca Eddy, our program coordinator from the Ulman Foundation, visited Team Boston. Becca had made a surprise visit to us for the evening of our fifth day in Reno, Nevada. However, now she would be spending a few days with us, running with us, and making sure that the team was operating to Ulman’s standards. Although we all loved Becca and appreciated her perspective as a 4K for Cancer alumni, I think some of the team was a little apprehensive to have her join us again. After our bumpy interactions back in Reno, there was some apprehension about similar things occurring. I was hopeful this was not the case and I tried to have an open mind about Becca joining our team for a few days.
Despite this, part of me also hoped that Becca would change a few things we were doing. What I hoped for the most was no longer running in groups of four. I’ve explained this before, but I’ll briefly explain what I wrote about in the blog from our sixth day. Essentially, Ulman did not want any of us running in heat hotter than one hundred and ten degrees. Regardless if we had finished our miles, or could finish them after the heat went down, we were not allowed to run once the temperatures reached this high. Thus, the foundation recommended running in groups of four to avoid the heat on days we knew would be hotter than usual. I did not like this at all. It cut our time running on the roads in half. Although this was intended and helped to avoid the heat, it broke up our paths we ran across the country. Between the mandatory shuttling, the running in groups of four, and the rerouting we had experienced, some of us on the team were already having feelings of doubt. We were already thinking quietly amongst ourselves that some areas of our route that Ulman had laid out for us were hard to connect where we had been. It baffled me why Ulman would choose to send their running teams to roads they knew we would not be able to run on. The solution of running in pairs of four to avoid heat baffled me even more. If someone could survive and battle cancer, the treatments, and the psychological stress, couldn’t we run a few miles in the heat? This aspect of the 4K for Cancer still troubles me even now, a year later. It still makes a lot of us on the team uneasy and doubt what we did. Regardless, in the first few weeks of the summer, these thoughts and feelings were already forming. I was hopeful Becca could offer a solution for us. Deep down though, I knew that these rules came from Ulman and couldn’t be changed, even by the Program Coordinator.
Even with the amount I slept last night, I was still one of the last people up in the morning. I think combined with last night, I slept almost fifteen hours. I had that sluggish, foggy feeling when you’ve slept too much and I was not used to it! I hadn’t felt this way since the weeks before leaving for San Francisco.
Rizwan was last to get up though. Rizwan has a record of sleeping as much as possible on rest days. Back in Yellowstone, he slept for twenty hours straight. No one knew how he did it! We knew that if we didn’t wake up Rizwan, he would sleep for the entire day. Since it was his birthday, we waited for everyone to get up and then sang him a happy birthday as a group next to his sleeping bag. He woke up in the middle of us singing with a huge smile on his face. At the end of the song, he blew out a candle someone had scavenged from somewhere. His birthday cake was one of our left-over cinnamon buns. I think we made his day.
Seeing this reminded me of our family traditions at home. Every morning on the first day of summer vacation, my mom would make my siblings and I Belgian waffles with ice cream and all the works. What made it even more special is that she would wake us up with them in our rooms and we would eat our breakfast in bed. This was the only time this was allowed, and it was a special tradition. Seeing Rizwan eat his cinnamon bun in bed reminded me of this. It made me miss home even more so than when I woke up.
As my siblings and I grew older and have started to go our separate ways, my mom made one rule. You must be home for the Fourth of July. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, you must be home. She knew as we got older, we would go our separate ways. But this is the one holiday she asked us all to be together. It’s not that we don’t spend time together on the holidays, but this rule ensures that we see each other and are all together. Last year during 4K, I was the first one in my family to break this rule. My brother Kevin had flown from California back home, and everyone was together except for me. I was still in South Dakota. I missed everyone and wished that I could be running in the road race that everyone was running. I wished I could join the backyard barbecue and visit with all our family. Although the 4K for Cancer was special and I think it was already helping me along my personal journey, I was missing a lot of family gatherings because of it. These were the first times I had missed Father’s Day, my dad’s birthday, my mom’s birthday, and now the Fourth of July. I was homesick. And despite these feelings, we would have an extremely busy day today and I would not be able to talk to my family as much as I would have liked to.
Rapid City was only a short drive from Mount Rushmore, and we all figured there couldn’t be a more perfect day to visit such a monument than our nation’s birthday. After breakfast, we decided to head over and look around the National Park. In the beginning, it was drizzling and there weren’t a lot of people. The park had been having some technical difficulties with the front gate and the parking meter due to a lightning strike during the thunderstorm the night before. So, we seemed to be part of some of the first groups into the park even though it was late morning. We walked along the main path and looked over at the four presidential faces carved into the rock face. If I’m honest, the experience was a little underwhelming. We didn’t realize that most pictures you see of Mount Rushmore, are extremely zoomed in. Although the faces themselves tower sixty feet in height and are carved into the top of the mountain, they seemed small from the viewing platform. We took some team pictures and continued to wander around some of the trails that were placed around the base of the mountain. Each trail offered a different viewing point that we could access. As we spent more time in the park, the sun came out, the humidity went up, and the crowds grew. The increase in the size of the crowds and the different paths we were on reminded me of the movie National Treasure. I never realized just how much of the park the scenes in this movie show. Maybe this is another one of the reasons that the park felt so underwhelming for me. I felt like I had already seen everything here before.
We wandered into the gift shop and the information center to have a look around. Just to even get into the shop, there was about a fifteen-minute wait now. This park was so busy on July Fourth! Once inside, all the usual and expected tourist items were being sold. Everyone was crowding around racks of clothes and collectibles. The cashiers were beyond crowded and the lines to check out extended throughout the length of the store. All alone in the middle, sat one man and his wife. Next to the man, a sign read “Original Mount Rushmore Driller Nick Clifford.” Rob and I decided to go talk with him and see what he had to say.
Nick Clifford talked briefly to Rob and I about what it was like to live in the park and drill every day. He seemed tired and his aged and weathered skin had all the signs of old age and manual labor.
The carving and drilling of the mountain started in 1927 and lasted until 1941. Clifford boasted how there were no fatalities during the entire process and talked briefly about what he had to as a driller. He also talked about some facts about the park. For instance, the carvings remain unfinished. Mount Rushmore has the four heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln each of which represents the birth, growth, development, and representation of the nation respectively. Originally, the concept included the bodies of the presidents and not just the heads. Due to the size of the project and the length of time it took to finish carving just the heads of the four presidents, the project lost funding and was stopped. Talking with Clifford was interesting, and Rob and I didn’t understand why no one else was talking with him or his wife. People were too distracted with the lines, the crowds, and purchasing their souvenirs. Rob and I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were extremely fortunate to talk with Nick Clifford. In November, only a few months later, Nick Clifford passed away.
Although I found Mount Rushmore itself a little underwhelming and eerily familiar to the pictures and films I had seen before, I enjoyed visiting this monument on July Fourth. We were disappointed that we would not be able to see fireworks or the night’s festivities that were planned late into the night. We had an early start in the morning. However, talking with Nick Clifford made the experience so much more memorable. I wished my family could have experienced this with me and I found myself wondering what they were doing.
Later, we restocked some essentials at Walmart while we did laundry at the laundromat. Then we ate leftover wraps, granola bars, and other odds and ends that had been donated. Leah’s family was visiting today as well as Ally’s. Both families had donated some food to our team since today was another day that we were running low. We were all so appreciative!
Somehow, a few of us had missed the window to take showers at the local YMCA. Rob, Caroline, Tyler B., Regi, and I went to a Planet Fitness to use their showers. Luckily, Planet Fitness had a flaw in their system that we were hopeful they wouldn’t figure out before 4K was over. Each location offers you a one-time free trial to see if you like their facilities, amenities, and environment before purchasing a membership. Since not all host sights had a shower to provide to the team, we would track down a planet fitness and feign some interest in membership. Then we would shower! Most managers figured out what we were up to and after hearing what the 4K for Cancer was all about, let us utilize their facilities anyway. But this was a good system to fall back on to. Today, it was worth it.
Overall, today was a good day and I was glad that we were able to experience what we did. Not everyone can experience such a powerful monument on July Fourth, and we were lucky to do so. I was still feeling homesick and was looking forward to talking with and seeing my family again though! I was also a little disappointed that there was no service event today. This was especially the case since Becca was here. I thought that whichever foundation or organization we could have volunteered at in Rapid City, they would have been very appreciative to have an Ulman Foundation employee present. However, since Ulman didn’t plan a service event for today, we were left to explore the area. This was another time where I wished we were making more of an impact in the cancer community and if given the opportunity to, we very easily could have.
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