Despite a departure postponed by a good 6 hours, I managed to make good time getting to Aspen by 7PM on Friday despite taking the long route (the pass I planned to take was getting snow, so I opted to go around instead). My runner friend I stayed with all weekend was busy making us a steak, salad, and pasta dinner. Perfect pre-race food, in other words. She'd had opted not to run the race this year, so I had my own support crew/car and cheering section (at the finish line).
The race itself went far better than I could have ever hoped. The course itself is 13.3 miles. It starts out for 1.5 miles and 1000 vertical feet up a ski hill access road. From there, it traverses the ski hills from Snowmass Villiage to Aspen. Despite the first few miles, the race ends up 400 feet lower than it starts, so there is a great deal of downhill. While I wasn't as strong on the uphill this year as I had been last year when I ran the same race, I had practiced running downhill this summer, and so ended up doing much better on that section. The aptly-named "Golden Leaf Half" mostly winds through aspen groves, which at this time of year at 9000 feet are a bright gold. I came in at 1:53:20, 2.5 minutes slower than last year, for 47th place and 7th place in my age group (19-29).
And I can't tell you how nice it was to have somebody waiting at the finish. My friend had dropped me off at the start, gone for her own run, and was waiting right at the finish chute. I had absolutely nothing left by the end, and one person I had wanted to beat passed me in the last mile, ending one place ahead of me. Oddly enough, a friend of mine from Boulder came in 8 seconds and 1 place behind me. Suffice to say, I basically collapsed through the finish chute. But it was an excellent race for me.
The rest of the weekend was alternately fun, relaxing, and stressful. Since I was in Aspen, and I didn't want my legs to tighten up after the race, my friend and I went for an easy hike a few hours after the race. I realized after we were a ways in that, though I had been careful to charge my camera's battery before I left, I forgot to put it back in the camera. The only pics I have are from the drive back, where I used my somewhat nicer, larger camera. After the hike, we chilled out for about 4 hours (of Discovery Channel) before heading out for a prime rib dinner and a relaxing night at a pub.
On Sunday I set myself up in a coffee shop and worked on my research for my Masters Thesis.
At about 4, we took a short run from the house where I was staying, up to an aspen-filled valley. I again regretted the missing battery for my camera. It would have made some excellent pictures. But it was the perfect "shakeout" run for the day after a race.
This morning I drove back to Boulder via Independence Pass. This was the route I'd planned to take Friday when the weather did not cooperate. It shaves about 40 miles off the overall trip, bud doesn't save all that much time, since it's a twisting, switchback-filled road up to the continental divide and back down again. I do have some pictures (that help show why Lance Armstrong has been training in Aspen while prepping for his return to the Tour next July. No, I didn't see him) and I'll post those as soon as I get them onto my computer.
Any way, I'm back in Boulder, sore after some significant mileage this weekend, but feeling a lot better about pretty much everything than I was when I left. A good race will do that.
And I've caught an entirely different kind of running bug from any I've had before. There may be evidence of that later in this blog.
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