This is just one reason I love living in Durango: 'Chicken' interrupts council meeting

(Watch the video, too - it's only 2 minutes long. I was HOWLING with laughter.)

Well, okay, not really both ways. But on Saturday I ran the inaugural Rim Rock Marathon, and it was most definitely uphill and through the snow. I had wanted to run this race back when it was the 22.6 mile Rim Rock Run, gate to gate through the Colorado National Monument in Grand Junction, but never managed to get there. This year they extended it by a little bit at the beginning and end to make it into a full marathon. And not your run-of-the-mill marathon, either; the course switchbacks up a brutal climb, rolls a little along a ridge, and then plunges down the other side. (You can see the elevation chart and the course map if you are curious!)



My primary goal was to run a faster time than my PR from last year's Baltimore Marathon, 3:54:36. Despite the significantly harder course, I am in much better shape this fall and I thought it would be amusing to have a ridiculous mountain marathon be my PR course. I thought I could probably run about 3:50; my magic pixie-dust time was 3:45, and I would be content to get under 4 hours.

( Race report )

I crossed the line with a chip time of 3:46:51, 30th overall out of 184 finishers, 6th out of 76 women, and second in the female masters (over 40) category (they didn't do age group awards). But as at the Other Half, the second overall woman was also over 40, which moved me up to get the first place award - a gift certificate for a pair of trail running shoes.

( Analysis )

In conclusion, this was an awesomely fun race, and I look forward to running it again. Maybe without the snow, though.

( Closeup of trophy )

As some of you know, I ran a half marathon in Moab on Sunday. This race - the "Other Half" - was to be a goal race for me; I figured that with the training I had been doing and the 2500-foot elevation difference from here, I had a good shot at 1:42, which would be a 2+ minute PR, and with magic pixie dust I might be able to get closer to 1:40. As it was, no pixie dust was to be had, but I ran a solid race and came in at 1:41:44, which was enough for third place in my age group - and as the AG winner was also second overall, and the AG second place was first Master (over 40) woman (after #1 was moved to an OA award), they were both knocked out of the age group placings and I got the first place AG award!

( Details )

I took the camera with me on Friday's easy trail run because the scrub oak is brilliant this year. Colorado doesn't get the colors that the northeast does, but it's still very pretty:



Six here on my Flickr page.

I have a traveller42! He is on a road trip and stopping here for the purpose of buying me beer and giving the guest room a dry run before my parents arrive on Thursday. But this is not why I am posting. Rather, Britt and I hiked up Silver Mountain (12,450') in the La Platas yesterday. Gorgeous, gorgeous day, the kind of crisp blue-sky day which is why autumn is my favorite season. We hung out on the summit for a long time (us and the flying ants, WTF?) and then merrily traipsed along the connecting ridge to Deadwood Mountain (12,285') and then down via the west ridge to the Neptune Creek jeep road, which, meh, and then along the La Plata Canyon road back to our truck, which, double meh. But! This kind of scenery only a half-hour's drive from our house!



That moon is rising RIGHT OVER the peak we climbed. (It's the highest one in that group; the others are just closer.) Photo taken on the way back to the truck. ( More pictures from the actual hike: )

All 7 photos at Flickr.

Sunday was the last race of the "Town Series" which I entered for the first time this year - three trail races, one on each of the major in-town trail systems. They are all individual races but if you enter them all as a series it's quite cheap (as a member of the local running club, only $36 for all three) and you get a t-shirt in addition to the various minor goodies for each race. The final race, though, the Animas Mountain Mug Run, has the best goodies of all: an after-race party with free Mexican food (and beer!) and this lovely ceramic coffee mug:



(The handle's in the back where you can't see it.) You have to earn it on the course, though, which is the same route where I took these pictures when I ran it for practice last month: basically, 1500 feet up in 3 miles, a little rolling trail at the top, and then the same back down. The official distance is 6.6 but I suspect it might be a little shorter than that. Anyway, it was a tough run, I came in at the bottom of the top third of women, 1:11:45, just behind the woman who has been just beating me at trail races all summer. Incidentally, she won the series on points, so I think that means I came in second!

The Imogene Pass Run is one of those idiosyncratic races that you either sign up for again and again each year - or you shudder at the mere thought and never consider it. I am clearly in the first category, as I did it again this year. There is something irresistible (at least to me) about running from one mountain town to another over a high mountain pass.

The cool thing about running a race for a second time is that not only do you know what to expect; you also have a mark to compare yourself against. My last year's time was 4:11; this year, I wanted to get under 4 hours, with a backup goal of simply beating that time, and a magic pixie dust goal of 3:45. I've been running a lot more this year, and running more hilly trail miles as well, although I have spent less time hiking or at altitude. I had analyzed my mile splits versus the terrain, and made some crazy assumptions as to how much better I might be able to do.

I had put together a pace card with guesses as to where I thought I would be each mile, mostly using the most pessimistic assumptions, and came up with a total time of 3:54. In fact, I ran 3:55, which looks like I hit it right on, except in reality I was about right on the first 6 miles (the reasonably steep part), way slower than I expected on the next 4 miles (the unreasonably steep part), spent too much time on the summit (and, er, in the portapotty just below the summit), and was much faster than I expected on the descent.

One of the joys of doing this was meeting up with a bunch of women I knew from a running forum. Two who live about 4 hours north of me I had met (Deltarose and Kazz - Kazz and I had met at Imogene last year, and the two of them had come down for the Steamworks Half in June) and two (Cara and Jana) live in Nebraska and had somehow let Kazz and me talk them into signing up. Jana made awesome t-shirts that we each wore at least part of the time during the race.

( Details... )

The funniest thing happened at the finish line. At the end, the course turns right onto a paved road and goes a block or so to the finish line, and that's where most of the spectators are. As I approached the line, a woman passed me on the right. I thought, well, hmmph! and sped up and sprinted past her. JUST as I got to the finish line, she passed me again, and I turned on the afterburners and we ran shoulder to shoulder across the line in a photo finish. (Although according to the official time, she edged me by 0.2 seconds!) Then we looked at each other - and it was Deltarose! We had both been so focused we hadn't realized who each other was.

Eventually our whole group met up in the finish area. The storm finally hit, with periodic rain and even one really impressive stretch of 15 minutes with huge, soft hailstones, but hey, we were done. Deltarose got a lift back to Ouray and then to her home with someone else; the rest of us got lunch and beer and then took the bus back, rested and hot-tubbed, then went out for dinner and too many margaritas...

...which is probably why we all agreed to sign up again next year.

In reverse order:

1) I changed my journal style on LJ, mostly because I upgraded to Firefox 3.5 and thus lost the NoSquint extension, and my old style wouldn't let me change the font sizes. Also I wanted to have tags on the main page, so, might as well change. Note that I still have a paid LJ account but once it runs out, I will not renew, and therefore non-LJ users will see ads (yuck) and so you might want to read me over at Dreamwidth instead.

(Also, I have tons of DW invite codes, if anyone would like.)

2) OMG IMOGENE ON SATURDAY EEPS YAY YIKES WOO! My excitement cannot be textually rendered. I'm leaving tomorrow mid-afternoon and meeting up with my running buddies from the Runner's World Online forums for dinner and outhanging. And then Saturday morning it's race time! EEEEEEE!

3) We were going to go backpacking on an obscure and trail-less route in the Weminuche over the long weekend, but the forecast was for rain (and it rained) so we went to Utah instead and did a bunch of dayhiking. 12 photos here which don't really do justice to the trip, as we forgot to bring the camera along during the hike in Hovenweep (amazing pre-Puebloan ruins) and the Dark Canyon pictures didn't turn out so great. But there are some nifty ones of the Valley of the Gods near Monument Valley, and Sportsmobile photos especially for Eric. :-)

The Imogene Pass Run is two weeks away. (I did it last year. It was the most fun I have ever had while wanting to throw up.) With this kind of a race, it's hard to estimate how one is going to do, but I'll put my goals out here now:

I am going to aim for 3:45.
I will be happy with anything under 4 hours.
I will be not entirely unhappy as long as I beat last year's time of 4:11.

( In which I pull some numbers out of the air. )

In preparation for the Imogene Pass Run (September 12th, OMIGOD ALMOST HERE) I have been doing a lot of trail running. And of course I have been taking my camera!



That's the trail on Animas City Mountain, looking south. I had hiked it (catbear, did we do this with you? I'm trying to remember who we brought up here!) and mountain biked it (that is, hiked it while carrying my bicycle) but not run it before. ( Two more. )

Then this morning I decided to get some altitude running practice in and drove (I know! I feel guilty driving to go run!) to La Plata Canyon, where I did the trail race last month. I parked a bit more than a mile farther up, ran to the Kennebec Pass notch which is the first high point (not quite 6 miles, and about 2600 vertical feet, topping out right at 12,000) and then turned around and ran back. I think I'm in slightly better shape now as my heart rate was lower than it was during the race, and my pace compared directly in the same spots was in most cases slightly faster, at least on the uphill. Downhill I was slower, but pushing it downhill in a training run is a bit more risky - I think I can run faster downhill at Imogene. Looking back from the notch at the jeep road I'd just run up:



( One more. )

All the guitars play
"One more angel in heaven"
And that's one Les Paul.

So, I ran a 5K on Friday night.

Before I whine (and I am going to whine, so consider this a Whine Warning) I feel obliged to acknowledge that most of you reading this are not competitive runners. Some of you have run 5Ks and would be very happy indeed to run them as fast as I do. And yes, my time is a course PR for me. So I should not complain. But complain I shall.

I plugged the time of my awesome half-marathon into the McMillan calculator (Warning: the site plays music but it goes away when you hit "calculate") and it told me that my equivalent performance in a 5K would be 22:34. Now, I had run this particular course twice before, both times around 24:25, and I am far more of an endurance runner than a speed runner, and some recent workouts had confirmed for me that there was no way I could possibly keep a 7:16 per mile pace going, so I wasn't really aiming at that. But I thought a 23:30 would be reasonable, and my pixie dust goal was to break 23 minutes.

5Ks are popular because most people who are capable of walking can usually finish them in an hour or so, and most beginning runners can run them continuously, as a first race. To really race them well, though, means running at basically top speed, just sub-barfing. I don't enjoy running 5Ks. It's too painful.

I did not break 23 minutes. I barely broke 24, coming in at 23:57, miserable and breathless, and passed by another woman in the last 100 yards. But worst of all, I was beaten by a woman pushing two kids in a double stroller. She came in 4th, with the beautifully symmetric time of 22:22 (which is why I remembered it). I came in 7th.

Strollered by a doublewide. I am mortified.

( Five more photos. )

I am so lucky that this is right outside my back door! *hearts Colorado*

Britt's birthday was on Saturday, and as is our custom we headed out of town to spend it in the wilderness. Along with us were our friends Kristen and Rolfe; Rolfe wanted to hike up Hossick Peak, in the eastern part of the Weminuche Wilderness (near Pagosa Springs; we live closer to the west side and tend to hike that part of the Weminuche) and it is very easy to talk us into things that involve hiking and wilderness.



( Read more! See pictures! Click links! )

17 photos without annoying commentary!

The person who took pictures at the Kennebec Challenge put them up on Facebook here; if you can't see them (you can't see them if you're not on FB; I don't know if you can see them if you are, but aren't her FBF) you can look at a small selection I snagged and put on Flickr here: Kennebec Challenge. Um, yeah, I look kind of sweaty and zoned-out. I have an excuse. :-)

Last night was the Lyle Lovett concert up at the football field of our small local college, and it was a total blast. Durango's pretty small, so we only get a big-name concert maybe once every few years, and the whole town showed up, or so it seemed, because we ran into about a dozen people we knew. We went up with two other couples; it was one guy's birthday, so we had a little potluck party here and drank bunches of wine before heading up to the concert, which had been going since 5 in the afternoon with local musicians as opening acts.

Rain earlier had given way to beautiful clear skies. We had lawn tickets and sprawled in our camp chairs just behind the reserved section, and most of the time we could see pretty well, as long as the excitable women in front of us weren't jumping to their feet. Lyle Lovett had his Large Band with him, which lived up to its name (we counted 13 people), and they were all awesome. At one point they brought up and played a couple of songs with one of our local musicians, who is apparently a bluegrass legend despite living in Dove Creek, a tiny agricultural town about an hour and a half west of here.

It was just so pleasant and relaxing. The stars were clear and shining above our heads; we were looking straight at Scorpio over the stage. Great music. Lovely evening. Happy Ilana.

So, I ran another crazy trail race yesterday. This one, the Kennebec Challenge, was touted as being "approximately 14 miles" although my Garmin registered 14.75 and other people reported numbers over 15 miles. Elevation gain was about 3000 feet, topping out at 12,147 feet (and then back down), but there were dips and descents and one long nasty descent just before the final climb (which, to add some excitement, was not actually on a trail but simply a scramble up a steep tundra hillside), and the total ascent, Garmin tells me, was around 3400 feet. Oog.

I finished in 3:19:20, 10th place among the 27 women, not exactly stellar, but not too sucky. (The female winner came in just under 2:45; the male winner set a course record at 1:59.xx, but he is 22, so. The DFL made it in just under 5 hours, although because they allowed people who thought they might need extra time to start 30 minutes early, she wasn't all that far behind.) I didn't carry a camera but one of the people I carpooled with did, and she started early and I caught up with her at a really cool spot and she took my picture, so when I get hold of her I will have some nifty photos to share!

Oh, actually, here is not a photo but my GPS track overlaid on Google Earth with a little tilt, so you can "see" the terrain: medium | large (much better for viewing)

( Blow-by-blow )

The wildflowers were awesome. The weather was lovely. The creek at the end was very cold but I soaked my legs in it anyway, which I think is part of the reason I don't hurt too terribly much today. Then we went to lunch at a very nice restaurant at the mouth of the canyon, and then I went home and took a nap. \o/

Um, yeah, that would be ME.



Britt and I had heard a lot about Phil's World, a newly-created trail system near Cortez (about 45 minutes west of here) and so despite 1) getting a late start and 2) it shaping up to be an insanely hot day, we headed out this morning to ride. It turned out to be great fun, although each of us crashed once, and there were several spots where each of us shook our heads and said, "Uh-uh, me not doing that." Still, I rode a lot more than I walked, which I count as a win. I also managed to not expire of the heat, although toward the end you could probably have fried an egg on my skin.

I will do it again. In October or November.

More photos here. For some reason I look oddly rotund in them.

I am in Boulder, where I am pretending to be a grownup again, staying in a hotel by my very own self. I'm taking a class, which is useful and important and all that, but it's really hard for me to focus for a whole day on using a computer for work-related stuff. As opposed to, you know.

The flight was rather exciting, or rather, the landing was. There was terrible clear-air turbulence and wind shear warnings, due to storms off in the distance, and the plane (the Durango-Denver plane is a tiny turboprop) lurched around for a while above DIA before the pilot retracted the wheels and circled around. He tried again, gave up again, circled some more (apparently the airport shut down all landings and take-offs at that point) and then finally we landed way late, which meant I got to my hotel way way late, which meant that I got to sleep way way way late. It would almost have taken less time to drive.

It's weird being back in Boulder, where I lived from 1989-1999, and was last here for work stuff in, hmm. 2004, maybe? The mall, which was failing when I lived here and torn down in preparation for remodeling when I was here last, is now OMG HUGE HIGH-END COMMERCIAL CHAIN FRANCHISE RETAIL PARADISE. Terrifying, actually, at least to a shopophobe like me. When I ran west on the creek path and looked north, I couldn't even see the Pearl Street pedestrian mall I remembered due to all the OMG HUGE BLOCKY BUILDINGS. My little hotel is surrounded by gleaming new boxes, and every business appears to be a chain. It's more than a little depressing. You'd have to pay me a lot for me to move back.

OMGDEAD. 7-mile trail race was seriously brutal, not least because I didn't sleep but 3 hours last night for some reason. Hot, although about half the course was shaded. And crazy steep like you wouldn't believe. Total ascent/descent was 1042 feet (according to my GPS watch, post-elevation correction which usually makes the numbers smaller but made these bigger) and there were a couple of stretches of ridiculously steep grades. Like, one spot went up 120 feet in .2 mile. Just brutal even to walk. And the trail wound around all these little curves and switchbacks, up and down, and at one point the marker had apparently gotten knocked down, so we all got lost (later we were told that just about everybody ran a short course - maybe 6.5 miles - but I don't know for sure because my GPS lost signal a few times) and just followed the people in front of us.

Even though I do lots of hilly training runs, I am apparently not so good at steep hills because I always end up walking when they get really steep and my heart rate hits the roof. But I am pretty fast going down them, and catch up again there. One woman in pink and I passed each other a few times, me passing her going down and her passing me going up, and then finally she just refused to pass me on the uphills because we were both walking - and then there was a long downhill toward the end and I thought I had lost her but no, coming up to the finish she is right behind me and starts yelling at me to hustle, and we crossed the finish line simultaneously, tying for 6th place (dunno out of how many, maybe 20 or so), and just fell into each other's arms, laughing.

Anyway, official time 1:18:31, and considering that the fastest woman did 1:17:05 I don't think that's too bad. No prizes other than for "best mud" and "best blood". My HR pretty much just hit threshold, 88-92% HRR (heart rate reserve = max HR - resting HR) and stayed there, although at the very end I hit 181 which is the highest real HR I have seen on my monitor (my max calculation of 183 is based on 180 during a 5K). UGH. Why do I do these races, again?

Two down in the series, one to go on September 20, incidentally 2 days after my 46th birthday. There will be a huge party after the race. I am going to eat so much food and drink so much beer, oh, YES.

*collapses*

I decided that my post yesterday was so boring that I really needed to bring the camera along on my next trail run. Which was this morning. And I saw wildlife! (You know, in addition to the usual spectacular desert scenery, blah blah blah, don't you wish you lived here?)

( Pitchas! )

It is looking like I only post when I have photos or want to ramble about running. But actually, I do other things, really! (Although running is my passion these days. I am not sure why. I suspect it's because Britt is waist-deep in his own passion, which involves solar panels and windmills and federal funding requests and tax benefits, so we are not going hiking or backpacking much these days.)

But Britt was lured away from his work by our friend Jim, who tempted him with fly-fishing from his dory on the Rio Grande near South Fork, so we drove out in our Sportsmobile on Friday night and on Saturday Britt and Jim floated and fished, while I paddled my Fat Cat (which I bought last year after borrowing one to float the Dolores) behind them. Nice and relaxing, and now I really want to get out on the rivers some more.

Then on Sunday we drove back as far as Vallecito where we went to a friend's wedding up on his family ranch at the edge of the wilderness, and we drank a lot of very good beer and ate more food than we really should have and took some home with us. Leftover wedding cake = breakfast of champions!

A Charlie's Angel
Gets harp and wings; hair today
And gone tomorrow.

I ran the Steamworks Half Marathon this morning. It was my third time running this race, but my first time actually managing to train for it, and so I had high hopes for doing far better than the slightly more than 2-hour times I had run before. I always have multiple goals, and as I posted over at runners, these were mine:

Fallback goal: better than 1:56 (my current half marathon PR, which was actually the first half of the Baltimore Marathon)
Stated goal: better than 1:50
Seekrit goal: 1:48:xx
All the stars align and someone throws magic pixie dust on me: better than 1:48

Well, the pixie dust was flying, apparently: I ran 1:44:19, third place among Masters women (40-59) out of 37, and 8/140 women overall. I am, to put it mildly, stunned. Especially since that works out to be just under an 8 minute mile - and I ran maybe a total of 4 miles during training at that speed. Even my speed miles were mostly in the range 8:05-8:20, which I found it hard to sustain for the full interval distance of 1-4 miles - so how come I managed to do slightly better than that for 13.1?

I started out running at what I thought was a comfortable pace, and kept sneaking glances at my Garmin, thinking, oh, it must be reading off, there is no way I am running that fast. And then I hit the first mile marker and it still told me I was running too fast. Yet my heart rate was well within what I had laid out as my "don't run faster than this or you will suffer" level. It was downhill, so I reasoned, hey, I'm just getting a boost from the hill Same thing happened the second mile. And the third. And by then I just figured I would roll with it, keep the pace, see how I felt, and much to my surprise I felt pretty good until about mile 12, when I just wanted it to be over, damn it, but talked myself into finishing by promising my body it could keel over after the finish line. (Which it did.)

Then I drank three beers. \o/

Oh, I did, by the way, blow off the Wednesday afternoon sessions and go mountain biking. Took the Peaks Trail to Frisco, 8 miles of singletrack, and yes, I was by myself, and so I very much erred on the side of caution. Still, I rode bits that I am pretty sure I got off and walked before (I rode about 1/3 of it with a group last year; we turned around at a nasty river crossing which is now bridged) and did not actually fall off the bike at any time, although I possibly came close. Then I rode back on the paved path directly into the howling wind, which was extremely not fun. A total of just under 20 miles of riding, averaging the same average speed at which I ran the Baltimore Marathon. :-)

I also ran 7 miles on Tuesday morning, and about 4 this morning. I pretend that living at 6600 feet makes me impervious to altitude, but all it takes is a tiny uphill here at 9600 feet and I am gasping and miserable. Clearly I need to get more altitude training before the Imogene Pass Run in September. I wanted to go biking again tonight, or running tomorrow morning before driving home, but I'm running the Steamworks Half Marathon on Saturday and must conserve glycogen. To that end I am carboloading a bomber of Switchback Amber from the Backcountry Brewery in Frisco, and have polished off most of a bag of Rold Gold Honey Wheat Braided Twist pretzels. La la la.

I did make it back for the Wednesday evening special session, which was James Balog of the Extreme Ice Survey showing all sorts of nifty time-lapse photography of glacier faces falling into the ocean. As soon as I got back to my room I put his NOVA/PBS documentary on Netflix. REALLY COOL, folks. After his presentation he made a heartfelt plea for scientists interested in using his images to extract land-ice data to help him get funding, because he really needs $600,000 to keep going, and all I could think of was, wow, in the world of scientific projects that is such a tiny little amount. I actually don't know how useful his stuff is in the world of glaciology - we are just starting to fold glaciology into our models, so it's a kind of climate science I'm only barely conversant with - but wow, it's science in action!

Tomorrow morning I shall drive home. Whee.

This morning I rose early, ran 4 miles, took a shower, had breakfast, and drove 5+ hours to Breckenridge for a conference. This group I work with does it every year about this time, and it's a boondoggle I adore. I get to see all the people I work with face to face instead of via Skype. I get to see the people I used to know when I worked physically at NCAR, and those at other institutions I only see once a year at this conference. There are plenary talks about What The Climate Model Tells Us About How Very Doomed We Are, and there are the working group meetings that are relevant to my interests; and then there are the meetings of other working groups that I don't have to go to, and so those of us who don't have to go to them get together and go mountain biking instead. I am looking forward to going mountain biking!

I have a hotel room all by myself. I'm sprawled on the sofa with my laptop. I feel like I'm pretending to be grown up.

Hiked again. It snowed again. Only flurries this time, fortunately.

Then we went to Steamworks and got drunk.

That 10-miler I did last Sunday? I DID WIN. Well, I came in first in my age group (women 40-49) and okay, there were only 8 of us, but I WON. (I came in 17/56 of all women.)

I should have stuck around for the awards ceremony! I emailed the race director but haven't heard back yet, but I think I should be getting some goodies, woo!

So, remember how last week I said it seemed to be an early summer all over the Southwest?

( Ha bloody ha. )

That's my friend Kristen and me. We and our husbands decided to climb Engineer Mountain. (Here is another photo taken in September several years ago that shows the area we were hiking in, in the foreground.) In retrospect, it was probably a leetle too early in the season. I swear it looked like this when we started.

A pleasant enough hike (well, most of it) anyway, to the shoulder of the mountain not too far below treeline when we sensibly decided to turn around. And if you're curious, yeah, my legs were kind of tired, but the worst part was the downhill. I thought my quadriceps were going to melt.

Okay, I didn't, like, win, or anything. But I came in at 1:24:20, which is a big PR over my time 3 years ago in this race (1:30:33) and beat not only my publicly stated goal of 1:26 but my seekrit goal of 1:25. I also made my goal of "not walking up the big hill." Also of "not feeling like I want to throw up."

It rained all night - I woke up at 5 and it was still pouring, went back to sleep, woke up again at 7 and realized I had to scramble to get to the race which started at 8. Had a cup of coffee and a couple of fig bars - it had quit raining but was still beautifully overcast and cool, yay. Jogged to the start, did a couple of strides, said hi to the people I knew, and it was time to run!

I felt really good - no cramps, no aches. The only issue I had was that I started getting a sort of asthmatic wheeze going around mile 3.5, and looked forward to the aid station - and they didn't have water, just this red sticky Powerade, and I drank a little, and ICK. So I kind of wheezed my way up the big hill and the next water stop they had water, thank GOD, and I drank it and felt a lot better.

The other sort of amusing thing is that the course crosses the tracks for the tourist train to Silverton right around mile 2.5, and it parallels the tracks for a mile or so before that, so I could see the train coming and it looked like we might get to the crossing at the same time! Fortunately it worked out (and I adjusted my stride) that the train just finished the crossing as I got there, with all the tourists waving at us - I ran right behind the caboose! (Two runners got caught and had to stop and wait.)

Also it started raining around mile 8.5 but by then I didn't care, it was fine.

So, let's play the game of "guess the course profile"! Here are my splits: 8:10, 8:15, 8:28, 8:36, 8:42, 9:44, 8:29, 8:06, 8:01, 7:48. I guess you can see the big hill, huh? My pace on the steepest half-mile of the hill averaged 10:32, not bad considering the 7.7% grade! The total elevation gain/loss was around 500 feet.

Anyway, I am totally thrilled with this result. I wanted to average 8:20-8:30 without the big hill (up or down) and I think I got it. That 8:06 is actually for a pretty flat mile, and overall I averaged a little better than 8:30, which gives me a lot of confidence for the much-flatter half marathon in another four weeks.

Back from a weekend trip to Road Canyon, which is in the Cedar Mesa area of Utah. (I love living so close to such cool stuff! It's only about 3.5 hours away.) We had a great time camping in our Sportsmobile, hanging out, reading, drinking beer, and hiking down into the canyon and looking for ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings. (We found some nice ones!)

Only problem was that I got bitten to death by gnats, which we weren't expecting to have hatched out quite yet - it seems to be an early summer all over the southwest, what with our snowpack level and river levels about what we normally get in mid-June. Alas. The bites itch like a %$#@!, too.

Ten photos here on my Flickr page.