Looking forward to teammate Mary Baldwin sharing her purple and gold nail polish with the rest of the team before the big event on Saturday. As far as i can tell, my two other male teammates are also in touch with their feminine side so we should have a complete, team effort, all 7 of us (The Magnificent Seven) pointing the way to the top with glittering digits. Purple & Gold - For Honor and Glory!

Since my good friend Tom had expressed an interest in getting some elevation at least one more time before he did the Ascent, I shot him an e-mail asking if he wanted to go to the summit and do an A Frame and back. He responded with a phone call. “Better idea,” sez he. “Let’s go do the Democrat group and we can spend more time above 13,800." Splendid. Capital idea. As Bill Murray said in Ghostbusters, “I’m excited about this plan, I’m glad to be a part of it.”…

Continue

Our trip to visit family in upstate NY and VT continued this week. We typically venture east to see family once per year. While I was going through chemotherapy, it became critically important to me to make the trip this year. I wanted to see my family and to physically be able to hug and touch the people I love. I wanted to get away from all of the distractions of our day to day lives so we could just focus on one another. I needed to take care of my…

Continue

My third year racing this race and finally I laid claim to one of the coveted gold pan awards. All it took was a 1:15:55 to get 9th overall and 3d in my age group...crazy amount of talented runners that show up to this race year-in, year-out.

Drove up to Georgetown last night so I could avoid a stupid early wake-up and deal with the traffic this morning. It also allowed me to have dinner with Leah and Brent in Silverthorne last…

Continue

As the Ascent is now just a week away, CJ and I decided to get some more high altitude training in before the big day.

CJ heard the Rocky Mountain Mennonite Camp offered an A-frame you could rent near the Crags.  He booked us a night there last night.  It was rustic but nicer than we…

Continue

That mountain can be as unforgiving as it is beautiful. Anything that can make its own weather, on a moments notice, to include snow in August, deserves our respect. Maybe because I see Pikes Peak every day, I somehow think it a trusted and old friend.



But it's not.



It's a force; a powerful and mighty foe, that is almost deserving of our worship, kind of like Mordor, I suppose.



I had my last long-ish training run on 'the mountain' this past Wednesday afternoon.… Continue

It feels like I have been training for the Pikes Peak Ascent since last Fall.  

Oh...it's because I have. :)

First, I had to qualify by running a half marathon.  I trained last fall and ran the Denver Rock 'n' Roll Half Marathon last October.  

From there, I have had my eyes fixed on one main goal....finishing the Pikes Peak Ascent August 16, 2014.  I can't believe race day is just a week from tomorrow!  Wow!

When training for a big…

Continue

This year marks the fifth 200-mile relay team I have organized in the last six years. Typically funded by our generous supporters at the Schriever Air Force Base Fitness Center, we’ve only had to take one year off due to last year’s budget cuts, which was actually a blessing in disguise because the organization of such an event can sometimes be very frustrating and…

Continue

The last couple of weeks I really wanted to pick up my training.  I wanted to increase my mileage and continue getting some altitude training in.  Mission accomplished!

Three of my training runs went something like this:  I took the cog to Mountain View and ran to the summit.  It was a first for me as I have never rode the cog and ran from there.  As I started running I was thinking this is a small trail.  Then suddenly there was no trail.  I stopped looked around and luckily there…

Continue

Relays are increasingly popular and interesting beasts. Last weekend I ran the Wild West Relay which covered 200 miles from Fort Collins to Steamboat Springs. This was my first relay so had no idea what to expect. Vanessa, purple and gold alum, was our fearless team captain and did a great job organizing 10 friends and a couple strangers to run 36 legs. The legs varied from easy to "very hard". I'm not really sure how the…

Continue

I’ve always had lousy posture, even standing still. Jogging up hills I find myself really leaning into the hill, bent at the hips. Not good. So I work on this constantly.

I work on keeping my head up. It only makes sense to keep your airway as open as possible right?   I also try to throw my shoulders back, push them back, whatever it takes. I’m not a physiologist but it only makes sense that you give your lungs as much room to work efficiently as…

Continue

Pikes Peak is a happenin' place right now. For myself and I'm sure many others, the last four-ish weeks have been largely comprised of adventures on Pikes Peak, prepping for the WMRA Long Distance Challenge, which this year will coincide with the Pikes Peak Ascent, so it'll be cool to have an international race in there too, I'm guessing this will be a pretty deep year.

In previous years, the Long Distance Challenge has been featured in other way cool places like Switzerland…

Continue

Yesterday morning brought us under the two weeks till Ascent day marker.  At 13 days away (less than 312 hours for anyone who's interested), I decided to spend some time pushing hard at altitude.  With running still out of the equation this left me with only one option - biking to the summit.  Sounds like misery, right?  Not really.  There were some seriously steep…

Continue

I started hearing it a few weeks ago. An incessant, gradual, then rapidly accelerating ticking. Worse than Captain Hook’s croc tracking him. That nagging, nauseating feeling that time was slipping away. Like many things in life you can’t expect to put off training for a long run until the last few ticks of the clock and expect to get the job done. So July 22 I drove to the summit of Pikes with teammate Shelley Hitz. We jogged down to the A Frame at treeline and back up, a six…

Continue

Victory is so much easier to write about than defeat.  But it's from defeat where we learn to appreciate victory.  I can only hope my last outing to the Weminuche Wilderness teaches me something.  It has nothing to do with Pikes and little to do with Ascent training, but it is a window into what this whole pseudomountaineering thing is all about.

Jagged…

Continue

We visited family back east this week. The theme in my life most recently has been to expect the unexpected. The day before we flew out, I had planned to get up early and get in one last fairly long run on dirt before heading to the land of road running. The roads are not kind to my bones.

Continue