Today was my 365th consecutive day of running at least 30 minutes. (That’s a year for those of you who are calendarically challenged). It was a perfect day, 40 degrees and not a cloud in the sky.
I didn’t keep track of my mileage, so I don’t really know how far I ran this year. I would guess it is a little over 2000 miles. I had many weeks (November – March) where my mileage was in the low 20’s, but I also had a few weeks around 100 miles and many in the 50-60 mile range.
I guess the numbers don’t really matter since that wasn’t my goal, the real challenge was getting out every day. In many ways that made it easier to do. Knowing that I had to run, meant there was no point in procrastinating. Not that I didn’t procrastinate, there was more than one occasion when I headed out the door at 11:25 pm in order to get my run in. On those occasions I usually just ran for 1:10, that way I could count 1 run for two days .
The hottest temp I ran in was about 85, the coldest temp was -29. I ran in rain, snow, sleet, hail and many, many beautiful days. I’ve literally run at every hour of the day. When I started running I weighed 205 lbs. My current weight is ~180. (the lightest I’ve ever been for an Ironman was 183 (which is also what my weight was when I was a sophomore in high school)) The lightest I got during the big weeks was 172. It’s amazing how much easier running is when you’re skinny (especially when you’re running up a 14′er).
I don’t know that I would recommend running every day if you’re really trying to get faster, sometimes the body needs some recovery. I did some speed work, but most of my runs were at a slow pace and I think living at 10000 feet helped as well. Because of the lack of oxygen, even when I tried to run fast, I wasn’t going very fast, so the pounding on the body was much less than those same efforts would have produced at sea level.

This past weekend my parents came to visit. It was nice to see them and show them the area.

To the left of my parents is Mosquito pass. Please ignore the date at the bottom of the picture, my parents didn’t know how to set it on their camera, but I have since remedied that.
We had pretty nice weather, but it did snow 5-6 inches last night.

This past week I took a quick trip to Utah. I went biking in Snow Canyon just outside of St George. Swam outside in an outdoor pool (I miss that), and then headed back to Colorado through Zion park and Bryce Canyon.

There is a lot of beautiful scenery in Utah. The southern part was very warm (upper 80’s). It was quite a shock to come back to the cold of Leadville. I haven’t uploaded my pictures yet, but when I do, they will be here.

Today, for the first time in a long time I swam, biked, and ran (and even in that order). It was an absolutely beautiful day here today, mid 60’s with just a slight breeze and only a few clouds. I really enjoyed the bike, but I had forgotten how much biking impacts the running. That was one of my slower runs (and at 10,000 feet, they are all slow).

Today I ran up Mosquito pass again. Not sure how many more times that will happen this year, there was a fair amount of snow and it was very cold and windy. This past week was very cold. It never even made it to 40 a couple of days. There was a little snow in town, but yesterday was 65 and most of it melted. Today and tomorrow are supposed to be pretty nice, but it looks like it will be cold again by Wednesday.

Let me know what you think of the new look. Also, I have only tested this on a Mac, so if it looks funky on a PC, let me know.
Thanks!

Today I finished up a Wilderness First Responder (WFR, pronounced woofer) class. It’s somewhere between an EMT and Advanced First Aid. I’m a big proponent of the ignorance is bliss school of thought and this class only reinforced that. I was much happier going out into the mountains before I knew all the stuff that can wrong and how hard it can be to get people out of the backcountry. I think I’m going to spend my time reading at the library from now on (and no I do not want to hear about any diseases I can catch from all the germs on the books). Actually the class was really good, it was just a lot of information to absorb in 80 hours. Hopefully I’ll never have to use any of it, but hopefully I’ll remember at least some of it if I do need it. I didn’t learn anything that will change what I’ve been doing, but I probably will be spending a little more time indoors. Tomorrow there is a 40% chance of snow with a high of 39 and a low of 19. Sounds like winter is about to begin.

Sorry for the long delay in posting. The last 14ers I climbed were Mount Harvard and Mount Columbia.

I was initially just going to do Mount Harvard, but on the way up I met some people who said they were going to hike the ridge from Harvard to Columbia. That sounded like a good idea (it wasn’t) so I decided I would do that as well. It was definitely a challenging hike. I don’t know if it was any harder than hiking Columbia though, because going down the normal trail was really steep as well. The rest of my pictures can be found here.
Yesterday I had planned to hike another 14er, but when I woke up, it was so cloudy I couldn’t see the mountains near town, so I decided to wait. When the clouds finally cleared up around 10, everything above 12,000 feet was covered with snow, so I decided to go for a bike ride instead. I only rode about 22 miles, but it felt pretty good considering it was the first time on my bike in over 2 months. About 10 minutes after I got home, it started hailing, so I’m glad I didn’t ride any longer.