Danielsesque

Up to Golden this past weekend for the Danielsesque Marathon. Wasn't expecting much, just using it as a good training run for my upcoming 50 miler at Palo Duro.

Seems I'm becoming somewhat of an altitude snob. Figured this would be an easy course. Elevation only went up to 7500 feet! Hell, my apartment in the Springs is almost that high!

What I failed to see was that the elevation profile had no flat sections.

And that was my day. I was either climbing a gnarly, technical, quad burning hill, or I was bombing down the other side, trying not to fall and break a bone or three.

But besides beating the tar out of my body for over six hours, I was treated to one of the better trails I've ever had the pleasure to run on. Reminded me a lot of Bandera, but with better scenery and without the heat. I'd be climbing some killer hill through a thick forest, then the top would clear out giving me an awesome view of the Denver skyline. Trail would then loop around and I'd get an eyefull of the continental divide, snow capped mountains as far as the eye could see.

So even though I beat myself up a little more than I wanted to, it was a pretty good run. Kinda pissed that I didn't wear a watch, as my official time was 6:00:23. I'm sure I coulda pushed it a little bit over the final two miles (all downhill) to get in under six hours. But for a low key race I had a great time. Ended up getting two technical t-shirts and a bunch of other crap for the entry fee of $35, not too shabby. Plus I did pretty well against the competition, which was pretty decent.