palo duro

Great trip, if not a great run, down to Palo Duro Canyon in Amarillo this weekend.

I know a lot of my regular readers hail from Texas, and unfortunately not a whole lot of 'em have ever visited a TX state park. Yunz need to get out there, they are some of the most beautiful places I've ever been to.

And Palo Duro was no exception. The second biggest canyon in the USA and a killer trail system to boot. Lots of colorful (red, white, green..) rocks. Lots of sweet singletrack. Unfortunately I didn't get to take too many pics.

The run was good and bad. The first 30 or so miles were great, the last 20 were hell. Hit the halfway point in 4 hours and the marathon mark well under 4:20. Just a few miles later I was done though. Had nothing in the tank. Was unable to keep any liquids or solids down. Kept pushing though, in hopes that the final lap would bring an adrenaline boost. But it never came. Around 42 miles I decided I had had enough and I decided to walk it in. Not sure what was more depressing, the fact that I had to walk or the fact that my pace didn't drop off much once I quit running.

Had enjoyed the incredible scenery the first three laps, but by lap four I was ready to fill the canyon with concrete and slap a wal-mart on it. Very painful. Walked for about three miles and then decided to get it over with and slowly jogged the remainder. Took me 90 minutes longer to do the second half than the first half. Ugh.

Still, it was a great weekend. Nice to get back to TX again, especially nice to see a bunch of my old HCTR buddies. Even had at least six Colo Springs folks head down, four of whom were hashers. And for the record, the Kimchi Ultrahashing team (myself and Long Hard One) greatly outperformed the Pikes Peak ultrarunners (NIPS and Strip Me). Just goes to show everyone who the real hash in the Springs is!

Anyways, the run took a lot out of me and I'm gonna hafta think long and hard about whether or not I wanna do Leadville. I'm mentally tough enough to push my body through fifty miles, but no way I'd be able to do that for 100 miles. I can honestly see me getting through about 70 miles and then running into serious medical issues I don't want to deal with. Maybe I'll look into some performance enhancing drugs, since they never test for those at ultras. We'll see.