New Heights on the 4th of July

On a side note, I ran a quick 2.8 miles on Sat. 7/1 in 23 minutes; 1.4 miles downhill and 1.4 miles uphill...a very steep hill!

I hit both 200 miles trained and 2000 minutes trained on the same day, the 4th of July!

So for the 4th I started my day out at 3:30am getting up to do some high altitude training. I left my house at 3:45am with my friend Carl, picked up another friend Matt, and we headed off towards Grays and Torreys Peaks just outside of Keystone, CO. Carl is also running on Pikes Peak in August. Matt is just up for a challenge. This was my first training for The Ascent above 10,000' elevation. It was a beautiful day, nice cool temperature, sunny, and not a cloud in the sky!

It took us just under 2 hours to get to the top of Grays Peak first. We didn't push too hard, but we also didn't go slow by any means. It was a fast but not grueling pace. I was very happy that I was not too winded. The view at the top was of course amazing! We took a small break at the top and then headed down the very rocky trail to the saddle between Grays and Torreys Peaks. About 2/3 of the way up Torreys Peak I kicked it into the next gear from what we'd been at for Grays and plodded to the top...FELT GREAT! We again took in the view for a little while at the top of Torreys Peak and felt blessed to live in such a beautiful area.

As we began our descent off the mountain, the guys that we had been talking to at the top of Torreys yelled down to us, "Goat!" So we ran back to the top of Torreys and found a mountain goat just feet from the top! He was obviously not affraid of us (sure seemed like someone had been feeding him...) and walked very close to us. I took a small film of him climbing around on the loose rock hanging on the edge. It was pretty neat to see such a nimble creature at the top of a 14,000'+ mountain! We hung out with him for a little bit then made our way back down, running off and on. This was a great training to get more used to the higher altitudes that I'll be racing at.