When he crawled out of bed on Friday morning with a pumpkin pie hangover, Joe Gray didn’t expect to run the fastest time ever recorded by GPS on the Manitou Incline.

“I told my wife (Christy), I don’t know how I’m going to run after all of that pie,” Gray said. “My stomach wasn’t doing so good last night. But I said I’m going to the Incline and I’m going to run faster than the last time. I got half way up and thought, I might as well see what I can do.”

When Gray, 31, stopped his watch (he has the data recorded on Strava), it read 17:45.

There are no official Incline records, but most of the area’s elite athletes have recognized 12-time Pikes Peak Marathon winner Matt Carpenter’s hand-timed Incline FKT of 18:31 as the time to beat. 

Gray has finished the Incline in under 20 minutes several times and was confident.

“I knew I could climb with Carpenter,” Gray said. “I know what he did and what I can do, but I’ve never really climbed the Incline when I’m fresh. This week I’ve been resting a little.”

He said he came close to Carpenter’s mark a couple of times, but would run out of gas on the last stretch.

“I did an 18:43 the last time, so I knew with some rest I could go faster,” he said.

He started at about 9 a.m. on a day when there were few other climbers there. He ran through the tough middle section, but backed off when his heart rate thumped to 90 percent maximum. He saved enough energy to run about half of the distance on the top section, where the grade flattens a bit before kicking up at the end.

“There is a lot of time to be gained there,” he said.

Gray knows about running up mountains. He is one of the world’s best mountain runners – he finished fifth at the World Mountain Running Championships on Saturday - and has represented the U.S. 19 times in international competitions.

Still, the Incline, which ascends about 2,000 feet over a 1-mile distance, delivered some punishment. Not even Joe Gray is immune to that.

“I reached the top and it was kind of embarrassing, I was wheezing and breathing so hard,” he said. “There were some other people there. I’m sure they wondered what in the hell was wrong with me.”