Journey to Leadville - Byrne - July 19, 2012

30 days until the 2012 Leadville Trail 100 Mile Run...

Rick and Curt

Rick and John

Thursday morning run with Curt and Rick. None of us felt like getting out of bed but we knew that feeling would change once we started into our run. Typically when we do our Thursday runs, there are about 3 hills on the way out where we take walk breaks and 1-2 where we take breaks on the way back. It's all Rick and Curt's fault - they started asking me about my talk yesterday and my meeting on Wednesday, I never shut up, and before you know it, we were within a mile of the finish and had passed all of the places where we normally walk. Someone said, "Hey, we didn't even walk today." The run seemed to go by really fast because we (i.e. I) were talking the entire time. I've noticed the runs that seem to go the best and the fastest are those where we talk a lot.Close to the end we passed a lady walking, said 'hello' to her, and she said, "Are you the guys running Leadville?" - she had seen the article in last week's Bettendorf News. She mentioned that her nephew ran Leadville last year, had completed the Western States ultramarathon recently, and was going to pace a runner at Leadville this year. We had about 2/3 of a mile left but I HAD to talk to this person. I told Rick and Curt to go on ahead and I would catch up. So we visited a bit and I'm going to try to connect with him in Colorado - what a small world. I visited a little longer than I originally thought and when I took off running again, I was not optimistic about catching up with my buddies. I took off on as fast a run as I thought I could muster for the remaining 1/2 mile. I had not run that fast for that long for quite some time. My lungs were searing a bit and when I came to the end, Rick and Curt were waiting there already. It was kind of different and fun to do that again. We walked a bit, sipped some water and gatorade, did 2 sets of 20 push ups and parted ways for the day. 

Tomorrow we plan to do Exterminator hills at 5 a.m. and on Saturday do a long run beginning at 4:30 a.m. at Crow Creek Park with a loop back to the park at 6 am, and maybe another loop at 7:30 am - am not committing to a 3rd loop at this point.

Until my next post, have a great day!  DIG DEEP!