Later, and for most of the race, I am so focused on the task at hand – breathing, battling demons, looking for a rhythm – that I find it hard to chat very much. I cherish this part of the Leadville Trail 100, the first half marathon, because the miles flow by so effortlessly and it’s the only section where I have the energy to carry on a conversation. But this was where I wanted to be, in the chase pack, and I looked around at the other runners as our treads left the pavement of 6th Street and scraped against the dirt road known as The Boulevard. The lead pack, which included Anton Krupicka, Tim Parr, Duncan Callahan, and a few others immediately opened a gap. The shotgun fired into the clear night sky and I settled into a chase pack of several runners. I even taped the splits to my water bottles and burned them into my brain: Given the five-year gap since my last LT100 run – a timespan that included a fractured fibula in the spring of 2008 and the plate, pins, and screws that still reside around my ankle region – I had very serious doubts that I could click off the same time this year.Īnd, yet, I wanted to beat that previous time by 80 minutes.
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It was such a distant memory that the iron-on letters had almost completely worn off. The right arm sported my name and finishing time: 21:20. I stood there at 3:50 a.m., posing for pictures with my wife and friends, wearing the sweatshirt I received from my previous LT100 finish in 2004. Where the Road Ends: A Guide to Trail RunningĪt the starting line of this year’s Leadville Trail 100, doubt occupied the same rarified air as nervousness.Ultramarathon Training: A Guide to Everything.
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