I am in love...

...with the Barr Trail. That's the trail that runs up Pike's Peak. I am racing on it August 15, just in case anyone forgot. Debbie (my running buddy) and I went there today to test out how prepared we are.

The answer: pretty good!

I actually think that if we ran the race today we could beat all of the cutoff times and make it to the top. That means I've got 2 months almost exactly to work on my speed. I was pleasantly surprised at how much better I've gotten at running on the ups. There is no way I will run this whole race (no one does), but I will be able to post a decent time. I am sure of that now.

We got to the start of the trail at about 10:30 today because Debbie had to drop off her kids. This is a really late start and we paid for it later. It was overcast and about 55 degrees. You couldn't even see the tops of the nearby hills because the cloud ceiling was so low.

We started at a pretty decent pace up the part called the W's. They call it that because the switchbacks literally look like W's. That means it's pretty steep. The average grade of the section we did today was 13.4%. Ouch! We stopped every 1/2 mile or so for about a minute to stay hydrated. It was beautiful! About 45 minutes into our ascent, we were literally in the clouds.

The bummer was when we started to hear thunder when we were 3 miles up the trail. I didn't want to stop, so we did another 1/2 mile. Then it started to rain and lightning so we bolted back down to the trailhead. All told, we did 7 miles, which was a bummer because we were shooting for 12. Oh well, we'll just go back in a couple of weeks and try again. Next time we will get an earlier start so that we can avoid the storms that get more common later in the day.

I would love to do a section that is higher on the mountain next time. But there is still a TON of snow up there and the trail is impassible farther up from what I have heard without special equipment. That might have to wait for late July.