We've been here in CO now for 4 days. In that time I have run The Incline and climbed Pike's Peak with a 40 lb pack on my back for some training and 411. What I can say after these first 4 days is that I am hugely intimidated and have no idea how I will find it in me to actually RUN up Pike's Peak in less than 4 hours.
When we arrived on Wednesday we drove over to Manitou Springs from our hotel before the rain came in that evening so that I could run up The Incline. For those who didn't read my earlier blog entry, the Incline is an abandoned incline railway route up the side of Mt Manitou. It used to run a car up what was considered the steepest incline railway in the world at a 45 degree incline. It is .9 miles in length and gains 2,000 feet in altitude in that short time. I ran it once and my legs were burning and my lungs were searing in the altitude at the top of 8,500 feet. I ran up it in just under 30 minutes which I think is respectable... the unofficial record is about 17 minutes. Olympic athletes from the US training center in Colorado Springs run it all the time for their training and they say it takes up to a week to recover from the workout since it is so hard on the body. I didn't know that but was glad to find that out because I was planning on running it again next Thursday when I got back into Manitou Springs for the race on Saturday. I'll post pictures from both the bottom and the top that I took that day... it is downright scary lokking down it from the top! As I was decending I tripped and almost fell down it forwards which would have been disasterous. Instead I sat back and landed on my butt just adding a few more scrapes to my already beaten up and bruised legs from many weeks of trail running :-)
I have decided to break this blog entry up since I felt it was rather long. There is now a new entry in here for our scouting mission up Pikes Peak so I know what insanity I'm in for :-(
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