Leadville 2014: Take 2
Let’s start off with facts & numbers; those are the first things most humans want to know in order to understand an event.
Exercise
Leadville, 2014
Bare chested, cold, running up overgrown single track at 8,000 feet on a mountainside in Colorado. Teardrops of hail hammer down through an aspen forest as the cloud gods grumble overhead. No sunlight peaks through, the wilds are draped only in cold grey light.
Leadville 2013 race report
Just attempted the Leadville 100. It’s 100 miles all above 9,000′, climbs to 12,500 at the highest. It’s got single track, dirt roads, and paved highway. I got to mile 75 and missed the time cutoff so was pulled from the race, but at that point I was happy; I was in a fair amount …
Long & flat, something new
I’ve been building my run training around hard stuff. You know, hills, sprints, uneven terrain, even ruck runs. It never occurred to me to add some long and flat distance in, so I was interested when Lauren brought up a Mission Bay/Fiesta Island run.
Laying out the Leadville Plan
I’ve been casting about for a goal for the last year or so, something physical, something hard, something worth doing for the experience of doing it. It began to coalesce in November as some kind of long distance running race, gained clarity on a Rim-River-Rim push at the Grand Canyon in mid-December, and was finally …