Part XI: Maggie Gulch to Cunningham

Melissa had been on some crazy mission to leave me at Cunningham able to speed along at 1mph and still finish. So she shooshed me out of Maggie pretty quickly, though I would have loved to sat around and chatted with the aid station volunteers for a lot longer.

Leaving Maggie you do another heartbreaker of a hill, having done so many already I had long lost count. After what seemed like forever, we finally crest a hill and come up to a jeep road. There’s a pack of several runners and we’re all dead on our feet, thankful that we’ll just take the jeep road all the way down to the final aid station.

But the folks who put this race on aren’t gonna make things that easy on us. To our horror, we cross right over the jeep road and keep heading up. “No way they’re gonna make us go up there” says one runner as Green Mountain looms. But of course, we soon veer left and head straight up the motherfucker, hitting 13,000 feet for the last time in the race.

Finally, atop Green Mountain, it’s all downhill to the next aid station. But for those who don’t have access to the kind of hills we have in Colorado, running steep downhills for long distances beats your legs up just as much as running up the long hills. So I’m already not looking forward to the final section, but things would soon get ridiculous.

“Exposure. Acrophobia.” That’s how the powers that be describe the next part of the race, and they weren’t kidding. Felt like I was going straight down, and there were times were a fall could have been fatal. Melissa was having the time of her life, as she loves bombing the downhills, but I was scared shitless.

To make things worse, as I was talking to another runner he said to me, “well, you’ve done Leadville, you remember Hope Pass? The final hill we have to climb is a lot worse than that.”

“Thanks, asshole.” That’s what I wanted to say, but I was too busy not dying on the cliff ledges I was running on.

On the way down the hill I could see the aid station way below me. Rising above the station was a beautiful waterfall, probably the longest one I've ever seen. Just some more amazing scenery of the race, for the bulk of the past 90 miles I felt like I was running through a post card or a nature calendar.
Soon enough, the nightmare downhill ends and it’s a short jog up a jeep road to Cunningham Gulch, the final aid station. Melissa’s plan paid off, as I arrive with slightly less than nine miles to go and almost ten hours ‘till cutoff.