Mile High Club

Last weekend I was in Denver, CO with Tim visiting our friends Mike and Lucy. They're a fun couple we met in Chicago a few years ago and bonded over beer and good food. Aside from hanging out with them and their adorable dog Maya, we also went to a craft beer festival (read: carbo-loading), did some good eating, some hiking, watched the Olympics, and I went for an 8 mile run. This was my fifth state training for the marathon. (For those of you counting, that's Indiana, Illinois, Georgia, Nevada, and now Colorado. And I have a business trip planned in North Carolina next week. Maybe I should sneak up to Wisconsin before the end of the summer...) We spent a lot of the weekend giggling and playing fetch with Maya, she is the most fun dog I've ever met. Here's her and Tim, sadly I didn't take any pictures of our friends, just scenery and the dog. 

Tim and Maya the Bulldog. 

The trail I had picked out for my run was a 2.7 mile loop in the Bluffs Regional Park marked "easy", 2.5 miles away from our friends' house. Perfect! The weather was gorgeous on Sunday and I set out in the morning. I didn't anticipate much of a pace, since this was supposed to be a recovery week and the air is much thinner a mile up. A few days before, we went for a 3 mile hike in Golden Gate Canyon that felt pretty good, so I was expecting to be able to complete my miles with no problems. 

The Denver scenery: much different than Chicago. 

Things were going great, the roads are more hilly than I'm used to but I tackled my first big one and kept going. Once I hit the trail though...major incline, with switchbacks. There was no way I could run up these hills. At first I was semi-frustrated, but I decided to appreciate the change in scenery (literally) and consider this a hike/jog/walk, where I'd hike the inclines, jog the flat parts and descents, and just walk when I needed to. "Easy" must mean "easy for hikers or trail runners who are used to this air and incline" in Denver. If I lived there I would feel hugely accomplished if I could run that trail. I really enjoyed the hike and the views, even if it took me a longer to cover the miles. It seemed like an adventure, although it was difficult. The overall elevation and the elevation gains were pretty challenging. Let's just compare my Garmin (GPS watch) data for this 8 miler with the one I completed a month ago:

Garmin data comparison. Chicago on the top, Denver on the bottom. 

Quite the difference! You can see how the elevation in Chicago hovers around 600 ft and there's little change overall. But in Denver the overall elevation is 6000 ft, with some pretty significant climbs. No wonder it was difficult!  I don't even think it was the thin air everyone warned me about, it was the hills. I have very very little training on hills and Chicago is a notoriously flat course, so I haven't really been concerned about integrating them into my training. My main obstacle (aside from the mileage) is the heat, which thankfully didn't come into play this weekend. I still had a great time, got my miles in at an acceptable pace, and soaked in some great scenery. I was pretty sore afterwards (more on that later), but I think that's mostly because hiking and running down steep inclines is not something my regular muscles are used to. I have a huge appreciation for people who live at high altitudes, trail runners, and people who have no choice but to train on hills. But for now, I am back in the flatlands.