Gear Test

I have felt very professional lately while writing this blog. I recently commissioned a desk for myself, made from reclaimed red oak to my own specifications, and I now feel both professional, and in some sense like I have to live up to the gorgeous desk on which I write these posts. Mostly, however, I just love having a giant, mostly empty desk where I can put my computer. It seems to ooze potential.

But all that and the more that I was thinking is beside the point at the moment. This is about running.

It was windy yesterday here in Boulder, enough so that I threw out any idea of a long, flat run, and headed, as I am wont to do, into the foothills and the Chautauqua area for a long, hilly run. In preparation for the Leadville Marathon this summer, I had several times run the three most prominent peaks of Boulder: South Boulder Peak, Bear Peak, and Green Mountain. I had also often run Flagstaff, since it was convenient to my office.  I opted yesterday for the previously untried (by me) combo of Flagstaff and Green, with the possibility of adding the other two as a bonus.

This was both a test of me and a test of my new gear. I had visited the GoLite sale earlier that morning, an institution here in Boulder, and picked up a few necessaries for my running adventures. Among other things, I had left my old windshirt at Leadville, and needed a new one. I also took the opportunity to grab myself a new hydration pack, since the design has definitely improved in the years since I got my trusty Mule.

To my great surprise, heading up Crown Rock to the Flagstaff trail, my legs felt strong and the, reasonably severe, slope felt easy. I quickly topped off Flagstaff and headed down Ute to hit Green. Here again, my legs felt great and, aside from slipping a few times on icy sections of trail, I made it up Green no problem.

The view to the west from the top of Green. All the little peaks on the plaque should be there somewhere in the background. The view to the east was clear and sunny.

From there, I took off down Green-Bear for the next shot to the legs. I think this is my favorite downhill in the area. It is fairly gradual, and much less crowded than most of the trails in the area, so you can bomb down it without too much worry about knees or collisions. 

Up till this point, I had entertained thoughts of hitting Bear and South Boulder, but decided that, since I had not run that far in a long time (read: other than the Leadville Marathon) I would do better to leave it at two peaks for the day. 

I took off down Bear Canyon and promptly managed to almost brain myself on a tree that had fallen across the path. This was one of only two points on the run where there was significant snow on the trail. It didn't last long, and I quickly zig-zagged my way down the series of tight switchbacks and back to Mesa trail. 

From there it was a quick couple miles back to where my car was (alas) waiting in the parking lot. 

How long was the run? I have no real idea. I rarely run with a watch, since when I do I obsessively check it and compare myself to prior runs on the same route, and I forgot to check the time in my car before I left and after I got back. I'm guessing, though, it was a bit over two hours. 

The good news: I felt great the whole time. Even when I was moving at a good clip, I never felt like I was straining. My new gear worked like a charm. The backpack, which I will admit was not really necessary for that short a run, fit like a glove and didn't bounce or bother me in the least. The windshirt did its job. And the shorts I picked up as an afterthought, well they will take some breaking in. 

I had the chance on this run to muse on what races and runs might be in store for the next year, but I'll save those for another post.

Musings

There are a few questions I am asked regularly when people find out both that I am a runner and how often and far I run. In the interest of clearing a few of these up, I thought I'd write about them over the next several posts. They might be short, and they might go far too long. I am not sure quite how it will work yet.

FAQ #1: What do you think about when you run?

This is probably the most common question I get asked. The answer depends entirely on the day.

The simple answer is: anything and everything. On my runs, my mind generally wanders a fair amount. I good portion of the time I am actually coming up with ideas. Running is far and away my most creative period.

The number one topic is this blog. I consider not only what I will write about in this blog, but how I will write it. I gather experiences that I want to share, and I take pictures that I subsequently post here. I also have come up with business ideas, song lyrics (yes, I occasionally write songs too), story ideas (much more common than song lyrics), and just about everything else you can think of.

I always, always have a song running through my head. Sometimes it is the same song for the entire run. More often I bounce from song to song via melodies. I tend to start with the last song I heard before heading out on the run, and from there progress to songs that either sound like it or have a similar theme. Like a game of "telephone," often the song I am singing, in my head or out loud, at the end of a particular run seems to have nothing to do with what was going though my head when I started out.

The other thing I often do on my runs is process whatever is going on in my life at the time. I use running as therapy, where I can really focus on a topic with few distractions (other than the occasional other runner or hiker) and really process where I am. If I have a problem in my life, I go out for a run, and usually by the time I come back, even if I don't have a solution, I have a new way to approach the issue.

The one thing I never am on my runs is bored. To be  a successful distance runner, I think it's safe to say that you have to be fairly comfortable in your own head. If you were anything but, there is no possible way you could go out for a four hour run by yourself and come back sane.

When I race, though, everything else goes out the window, and the only thing on my mind is the race.

This only just scratches the surface of what I think of when I run, but it gives at least some idea. I have a whole philosophy around running, that I will touch on throughout my posts in this blog, but I think that is good enough for today.

Oh, and of course, the other thing I think about quite a bit is the run itself. With trails like these it's required.

And just for the fun of it, I'll leave you with a picture from a run I went on back in June, while I was training for the Leadville Marathon. 

Tour de Lakes

As usual, I am posting this several weeks after the actual run in question. As much as I try to avoid working this way, it always seems to happen. This time, I have not actually had much time between that day and this in which to write a post. Between helping a friend move, getting shipped out to Chicago for a week for company training, and, naturally, running quite a bit, I have not found the time.

On October 2, I took advantage of a little spare time and a gorgeous day to head up to Rocky Mountain National Park for a run that I had taken with a friend some years earlier. I recalled it being a long, arduous run with a hard initial climb, and an additional several mile-long, 3000 foot climb in the middle. The loop was listed at about 11 miles, but given the time it took last time, we estimated it was closer to 13 or 14. Called the “Tour de Lakes,” it skirts a path around and past four separate lakes.

This was the peak aspen season, so I anticipated large crowds. I was not disappointed. There was a snarl of traffic through Estes Park, and a long line to get into the Park proper as well.  Since I had to wait in line in any case, I took the opportunity and renewed my National Parks pass for another year.

By the time I finally made it to the Bierstadt Lake parking lot, I was worried about finding a parking spot with all the traffic I had seen on the way in. Fortunately for me, though, this trailhead is far less well-known than Bear Lake, which is a few miles farther up the road, and I was able to pull into the last spot in the lot.

I remembered the initial climb up to the first ridgeline being tortuous the last time, so I was surprised when I found myself cruising up the switchbacks without much trouble. I stopped to snap a few pictures of the Longs Peak diamond rising behind me through the golden aspen, something quite a few other people were doing with much larger cameras, and cruised on over the ridge and around Bierstadt lake.

A classic autumn view of Longs Peak, from the first climb of the day.

This little guy was sitting in the middle of the trail. (S)he did not particularly like me getting this close, and curled up defensively.

After Bierstadt, the trail gets significantly less crowded as it heads for Cub Lake. The last time I ran this steep and rocky downhill section, my friend Mark had a GPS watch on, and clocked us in at a 4:30 mile for one stretch. I do not think I equaled that this time, but I’ve been wrong before.

After the descent, the trail crosses a small stream, and takes you out into a small meadow. I looked up, and saw the picture of a lifetime. I snapped a quick shot, knowing that I would probably not be able to capture the sheer stunning beauty of the scene, but the picture itself turned out pretty well.

 

I think this is one of the better pictures I have managed to capture. It's hard to beat the scene I had to work with, though.

As the picture shows, at this point the trail starts to head up again, for a long, long time.

A mile or two on from this picture, the trail crosses another, larger stream before heading up a long valley. At this crossing I met a couple other runners heading the opposite direction around the loop. They had just moved to Boulder from Texas and Tennessee, and three days after moving here went for this run. Hats off to them, that takes guts.

A little farther on, after  passing a group of CU students out for a weekend backpacking trip, the trail goes by Fern Falls.  I took the opportunity to grab a profile pic for my Facebook account, as well as a picture without me messing up the foreground. 

Fern Falls

My legs were starting to feel the climb a bit here. As I continued on, and the climb just kept coming and coming, I began to suffer a bit. There is no part of this climb that is particularly steep. It’s just relentless. It only lets up briefly to skirt the edge of the third (and fourth) lake of the day: Fern (and Odessa)

Looking over Fern Lake, at Flattop Mountain and the Little Matterhorn. 

At this point the trail is more accessible from the Bear Lake trailhead, and thus more crowded. Where I had gone miles without seeing people earlier in the day, now I saw groups every quarter mile or so. For the moment, this helped give me a little boost to get me up and over the last climb ridge of the day, from which point it is all downhill.

While I was definitely feeling the run by this point, I still was not as tired as I might have expected to be. I must have had some residual fitness from a summer of runner that decided to poke its head out during the end of the run.

That being the case, I started cruising the downhill, letting my legs go knowing that the hardest, longest portion of the run was over and it was, nearly, all downhill from this point.

Unfortunately, this also meant that I had to dodge the ubiquitous photographers on the way down. In general, they were courteous and stepped to the side of the trail, letting me burn by them, and often even cheering me on. However, as is always the case, there were exceptions to this rule. I started to get exasperated by the fifth time I came around a bend to find a tripod supporting a several thousand-dollar camera set up in the middle of the trail. I am all for getting a great shot, but it is still a trail, and people run.

This annoyance was not nearly enough to spoil my day however. I was out on a gorgeous day, running through groves of evergreens and golden aspen, with my legs still feeling good even after 12 or so miles.

I came back to Bierstadt Lake with enough left in my legs to give it a good push over the last, short uphill before cruising back down to the parking lot with, again, stunning views of Longs Peak to the south.

I ended up coming in at three hours on the dot, about 35 minutes faster than I took this loop the last time, even with all the photography breaks. All in all, a fantastic way to close out a serious summer of running.

The First Snow

It has been my tradition as long as I have been a runner, or even close to a runner, that I run during the first snow. Whenever it occurs (usually sometime in October out here in Colorado), whether it's in the middle of the day or the middle of the night, when those first flakes start falling, you can find me out on the roads, trails, or paths running my heart out.

And usually singing.

Today was the first snow in Boulder this year. My plan had been to head up to Indian Peaks today to get in a High Lonesome Loop before the snow closed that route down. Unfortunately I may have left that a bit late this year. The forecast for Nederland today was for 4 to 8 inches of snow to fall in 31 degree weather. While I don't really mind running in that much snow, and in fact regularly find it quite invigorating, I had zero desire to drive up the Canyon this morning with a cadre of other, less experienced snow drivers. The first snow of the year almost always causes a bit of a Charlie Fox up the Canyon, and I avoid it if I can.

Thus this morning found me heading up to Chautauqua to get in a run up Green Mountain. The parking lot was wet, but with rain, not snow. In a tiny bit of cosmic irony as I pulled into my parking spot, "Knee Deep" by the Zac Brown Band, with Jimmy Buffett, started playing on the radio. So I took off up the Amphitheater Trail with the words "only worry in the world 'is the tide going to reach my chair'" bouncing around in my head.

To my great surprise, the initial stair-climbing up Amphitheater felt rather easy today. Whatever shape I'm in, this section tends to hurt, but today I just felt smooth and easy, bounding up the rocks and stairs past the various groups of people coming down. And that sense of ease continued as I followed Saddle Rock trail up across the snow-line, where the soft susurrus of snow falling on the still-golden leaves provided a soothing background to a difficult climb. I had to pick my way across some of the rock-fields on the higher reaches of Greenman, when I got there, since I don't know the trail as well as some other runners. But much to my surprise I felt great even as I got to the summit. I have always remembered this last stretch being a bit of a haul, but today I was still cruising.

That's the magic of the first snow for me: I always feel invincible on my runs. My legs don't get as tired. My lungs don't gasp. On the way down, after stopping and talking to a ranger for a minute, the people I passed kept looking at me strangely. I wondered why, until I realized that, true to form, the words from "Knee Deep" that I thought were merely going through my head were in fact coming out my mouth. Thinking about it now, I must have made quite the picture, running down the mountain at a decent clip, signing "left a note said I'll be back in a minute, bought a boat and I sailed off in it. Don't think anybody's gonna miss me any way" while my feet came down in several inches of snow. The first snow: every year, it pushes me just to the other side of sanity. And I love it.

A few pics from a summer of running

The first set is from a run I did up in Indian Peaks on June 26 this year. This was to be my last long(ish) run before running the Leadville Marathon the next week. I felt good, despite coming back from a week in Baltimore just the day before. Unfortunately, before I managed to get much of a run in, the snow on the trail got too deep and I ended up turning back. I did, though, get a up high and get some good altitude time in.

Very much out of order, this is a picture of the only lake I'd managed to get to that day. I had meant to go to king, but the snow was too much.

This was the first stretch of snow on the trail. It only got deeper from here. Since I was in shorts, post-holing through the icy crust of this quickly cut up my shins, and I soon decided to turn around.

The water was still really high for June. Down in Boulder around this time, the Creek was in full flood, and closed to tubing.

Again, the water was high. But as ever, high water makes for great pictures.


Skipping a bit, the next are from a run, again in Indian Peaks, up the Arapahoe Pass trail. i didn't get pics of it, but I got caught out a bit by a thunderstorm this day, and ended up having to hightail it back down the trail a ways.

From the Arapahoe Glacier trail.

Looking back down the trail. At about this time the clouds were building a bit behind me, but I wasn't too concerned as it was still pretty early. Oops . . .

My turnaround point. My legs were just not feeling good this day, so I opted not to continue on either to Caribou Pass or further along the Arapahoe Pass trail. Also, shortly after I took this picture, the sky opened up an the lightning started, so I decided to head back down, somewhat recklessly it must be said.

More pics to come.

Pics from the run below

Again, it has been a while since I posted here. Not due to me not running, but more that I have not yet set up internet in my new(ish) apartment. Had I done so before now, I probably would have posted these earlier. However, since I didn't, here are a few.


A look at the trail ahead for the day. Belford is on the left, Missouri looms to the right of the picture. Missouri was intimidating to me that day, despite being a relatively easy mountain, as it is where a friend of mine's girlfriend had died in a mountaineering accident earlier in the year.

At the top of Belford.

I am no longer sure where this picture was taken from. I believe, though, that it is looking south from Oxford.

Summit of Oxford.

On the saddle between Belford and Missouri. It was about here that I decided not to go for the summit of Missouri as well, but leave it for another trip.

More pics from the summer and fall of running to come in the next several posts.

The High Country

It has been quite a long time since I have written here, which is fair, because it took me quite a bit longer than I ever would have expected to recover from Leadville.

It was most likely a combination of physical and mental recovery, combined. I was running again two days after the marathon itself, but for a long time I could not physically run much more than three miles a day. And when my legs started to finally recover, I found myself with much less motivation to run than I had felt in a long time. This, or so I hear, is fairly common after your first significantly long and difficult race.

However, in due time, I got my fire back, and started running longer and more often. This weekend, I headed southwest to Leadville and the Sawatch range to get some serious mountain running in. I had a grand plan to do Belford, Oxford, and Missouri mountains. The fact that the Leadville 100 was this weekend did not influence my plans at all, it's safe to say, since I had completely forgotten that the race was this weekend, if indeed I had ever really known.

I took advantage of the runner's edge on timing, and didn't hit the trailhead until between 8:30 and 9AM. As I often do, I ran without a watch. I can always estimate noon from the position of the sun, and if I can't, because of cloud cover, I know I probably shouldn't be on the mountain any more in any case. Besides, as with most Fourteeners on summer weekends, there were hordes of people out to knock a couple out.

I equipped myself for three mountains' worth of running, and headed up the trail. The guidebook had mentioned a "memorable series of switchbacks" as the trail headed up into Missouri Gulch, and I immediately realized why they can be described as such. The trail itself is nice, soft dirt, but it climbs. Steeply.

I found myself power-hiking much sooner than I thought I would, thinking to myself that if I had three mountains on the schedule for the day, I should probably take it easier rather than push myself at all. Still, before I was beyond the initial pitch, I started picking off hikers.

As the trail emerged into the treeline area, it leveled off to the point where I could start running more without worrying too much about fatiguing my legs too early. And the hikers started coming thick and fast.

When I pass people on 14ers, there are several reactions I get over and over. Most often, people are simply impressed and wish me good luck, or say "Nice work." Others seem somewhat resigned and a little discouraged that I can pass them with seeming ease. The third reaction is the one I don't understand: some people get angry at me. There's a reaction like "Oh, here comes a fast one," in a very sarcastic tone of voice. Or they refuse to move aside.

Fortunately, this day I only encountered the first two types, and it sped me up the mountain yet faster. My legs didn't feel great, but they were plenty strong enough to run the flatter bits and hike the steep pitches quickly, and soon enough I was at the top of Belford, feeling good as I looked down at the traverse over to Oxford.

And so I started to run again, across the ridge of Belford and down the steep pitch to the saddle between Belford and Oxford. I met a guy from Kansas here, who was also running down the steeper pitch. We chatted for a while until he ran out of gas and had to stop, while I ran on. I began to realize at this point that my plan to hit Missouri as well might be more than a little ambitious. My legs began to tire as I ran the trail up the last stretch of Oxford and hit the summit.

Here I finally encountered the third type of hiker: those who seem annoyed at you and consider you a showoff for running on a 14er. To you, I apologize that, because of the endless hours of hard work and training that I put in, I am in better shape than you and therefore can run faster. I assure you, it is not to make you feel out of shape or slow that I run. It is merely so that I can challenge myself and see what I can do. You normally do not even blip on my radar when considering these runs.

That said, I tanked on the way back up the side of Belford. Anybody who has been on these mountains will tell you how much harder the run back up to Belford is than either the original climb up Belford or the climb up Oxford.

I couldn't even think of running here. My legs were protesting every step of the way. When I ran into a couple I had seen on the way up, and they asked whether I was planning on Missouri as well, since I clearly had time, I could only grimace and say "Not today."

I hit the ridge of Belford again, and paused to rest and gnaw on a couple strips of dried mango (a favorite of mine on longer runs and hikes). Looking at my options, I headed north for the the easier, longer descent via Elkhead (I think?) Pass, rather than heading down the steeper route I came up.

As I came down from the pass, I passed in turn the trail up Missouri, and briefly, very briefly, considered running that as well. But again, I realized that it was not in the cards this particular day, and I continued to run down Missouri Gulch to the trailhead.

I think, over all, that this was my favorite day above 14000 feet. I met more nice, engaging people on this run than on any two prior runs or hikes, which meant as well that I stopped running more often. I can only say thanks to the people who were so nice, and (almost) unfailingly encouraging.

You remind me why I love this state.