Barr Trail Mountain Race

Up early again on Saturday for the Barr Trail Mountain Race. Great warm-up and fitness gauge for the Pikes Peak Ascent/Marathon coming up. Lots of Austinites, well over 20, came up for the race. At 12 miles long, it's a bit short for me, but I was over there looking to have some fun and get a cool shirt.

The race starts at the Cog railway in Manitou Springs and runs six miles up to Barr Camp. You then turn around and bomb back down those six miles.

I'm not much of a downhill runner, so my entire race was focused on the first six miles. My goal was to start slow and just keep running, which I knew would put me ahead of the vast majority of the field. This plan worked well. Despite my Elbert trip the day before, I ran well. Set PR's to No Name Creek (40:10), the 7.8 sign (57:44) and Barr Camp (1:17:05). These were big PR's too, by several minutes. The even but hard pace I set put me in the top 50 of the race, pretty decent considering it was a world class field.

Hell, I had done so well up to that point I decided to try to run down too. Hammered down with no regard to my own safety, and got back to the Cog in 44:52, over ten minutes faster than the average descent time.

Put me at the finish line in a time of 2:01:57. Really happy with my time, and especially with my 42nd overall place (out of 333 finishers). Beat a lot of local runners that I had no business competing with over such a short distance. And I even picked up some hardware, grabbing 5th place in the 30-35 age group! Pretty sweet plaque for my collection!

Great to see so many Austinites make this trip! My hat goes off to all of them, it's incredibly tough to train for a race up a mountain while living in flatland Texas. Not a single one of them DNF'd or finished over the 3.5 hour cutoff! Gutsy performances by all!