The past month has been a runners dream for me. My partner, Tyson, has been doing his rural rotation for medical school in Granby, Colorado a small town in the mountains between Winter Park and Steamboat Springs. While I had to stay in Denver during the week, somebody has to pay the bills, and even on most of the weekends so I could work summer outreach for work, I got to head up to stay with Tyson on my days off!
Tyson was housed in an over-the-garage apartment on a beautiful ranch with an amazing view of the resort in Winter park. Since I was mostly in the mountains on Mondays and Tuesdays while Tyson was at work I explored the ranch and neighboring towns and also got to run at an even higher altitude than normal. Denver's at a mile-high (5280 ft) but Granby is just below 8,000 feet above sea-level.
You don't really think about it when you're a Colorado native, but it is hard to exercise at that altitude. The first time I decided to take on the county road the ranch was built of off was the day after I ran the Bolder Boulder. Not really thinking about it I assumed that if I could run 6.2 miles in 1:01:17 (my goal was one hour even) then I could take on the five mile round trip no problem. This would be the point where someone should have smacked me across the face to knock some sense into me! But since Tyson was at work, I was by myself and started running on the side of the road.
I was doing pretty well, it was still really cool in the mountains so I wasn't too hot, and every single person I passed (read 3) waved and said hello! SO friendly! And the view was amazing, I felt like I had somehow found my way into Mary Poppins and was able to be a live person working my way through a piece of art, the only thing that proved to me that that was not the case was that Dick Van Dyke was no where to be found, and dancing penguins were out of the picture all together!
It's when you start to get comfortable that things start to go down hill! I started to feel really tired after what I thought was about 2 miles and maybe 20 minutes of running. So I turned around for what I thought would end up being a 4 mile run. On the way back home I started to see black spots blurring out my once picturesque view and it seemed like the way back was much longer than the way out!
By the time I got back to the ranch I was a wreck. So much so that the ranch dogs, Listo and Lacy, gave me one of those looks that says, "If I could actually speak I would tell you to sit down right now, because you are a hot mess!" So I went up to the apartment to find out that what I thought had been a quick 40 minute run was actually 1:15 run! Those four miles kicked my ass and left me with little other than the ability to sleep afterwards.
This was one of those tough running experiences, that would make a lesser woman curl up in a ball and cry for mom (which I did, at least once) but each time I went up to the mountains to visit Tyson, I got my run in, and each time it got a little easier!
My next challenge, a half marathon from Georgetown to Idaho Springs more than 8,000 above sea level the whole way! Yikes!
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