The Running Falcon: Playing around in the Collegiate Peaks

Looking down Browns Pass towards Princeton

Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to have my Mom's side of the family come out to Buena Vista, CO, for a week-long reunion. I had been excited about this for a long time, since the Collegiate Peaks are prime running territory, and the trip might afford me some great training for the Pikes Peak Marathon (now coming up in under two weeks!).

While I was excited, I also knew that, this being a reunion, family was first priority, and whatever good runs (beyond my normal daily routine) I could fit in would be an added bonus.

So, losing no time, the first morning I was there, while everybody was still settling in, I headed up to the Denny Creek Trailhead outside of BV, and up Browns Pass. This trailhead also leads to the trail up Mt Yale, one of Colorado's 14ers, but I decided to leave that for a later day. To my surprise and delight, the trail, after an initial, steep, half mile uphill, proved reasonably mellow and soft, save for a few technical sections. Five miles and 2200 feet or so later, I was halfway through a near-perfect run.

Marmot

I had, the weekend before, had probably the worst run of my life. A trip up James Peak, a lost, and eventually returned, camera, and poor nutritional choices had led to a 16 mile run taking 4:15, including some walked downhills. A quick, sub two-hour, beautiful run was exactly what I needed to come back from the disappointment that was the James Peak run.

The next day, my sister and her husband arrived, and we quickly headed back up to the same trail (at 3:30PM). My sister wanted to get some running and quiet reading in, and my brother-n-law and I decided to see what we could do on Yale in a reasonable amount of time. 3300 feet and a couple hours later, we realized there was no chance to make the summit, turned around, and headed back down the mountain to find my sister finishing Kara Goucher's book on running. This stands as one of my favorite hikes ever.

The sky near Yale was stunning

My brother-in-law would return to Yale a few days later to summit. That day, I headed over to the North Cottonwood Trailhead for a 2.5-hr run, to see what I could do on Harvard. Once again, I did not summit due to time constraints. I had a ziplining appointment at 2PM that I didn't want to miss. But once again, I had a fantastic run, putting in a tempo effort up the trail, and then flying down it at, according to my watch, 5:40 mile pace.

All in all, an excellent week in the mountains. Part of me was inclined to be annoyed that I did not get to summit any peaks during the week, but I realized that, summits or not, I was getting great training in at altitude.

And the training paid off. Less than a week after I got back, I headed back to Longs Peak to get a final, big mountain training run in before Pikes. Despite again not feeling fresh, I took a full 18 minutes off my ascent time, bounding up the homestretch to reach the top in 2:18. And I did so in front of no other than Andy Anderson, Park Ranger and holder of the Longs Peak RT FKT. I descended in a lazy 1:55 for a 23 minute PR on Longs.