Even though it was nearing the end of the day, the intense sun burned my bare back around the edges of my running bra. I paced myself due to the heat, stopping frequently to give the wolf water from the tube of my CamelBak, and varying my speed when I felt myself overheating. We had a fairly set route that went out about a mile and a half on open ground, at which point we always cut across the high rim of the gorge, and went back along the narrow rim trail another mile to the starting point. As I ran the open part of the path, sweat streamed down my forehead and stung the lacerations on my face.From the rim of the gorge, which carved through a high mesa above the Taos Valley, I could see a beautiful panorama of mountain ranges as I ran, the high desert floor beneath the mountains, and the small town of Taos nestled against the Sangre de Cristos in a low basin nearly fifteen miles away. Deep below me, in a slender canyon lined with sheer rock, was the Rio Grande. The turquoise sky held only a few puffy white clouds, and the bright sun cast an elongated twenty-foot shadow of my figure before me as I went.
