Run Through Time Marathon Reace Report

For some reason I’ve kind of been enjoying not posting in my blog. It’s not that I have a giant readership or anything but sometimes it starts feeling more like an obligation than a fun thing to do. However, I do enjoy going back and reading my race reports. I’ve never kept a diary and now that I’ve been keeping the blog I wish I had. Anyway, a couple weeks ago the GeekGrl and I went north to Salida, CO to run the Run Through Time trail marathon. We went up there in celebration of the GeekGrl’s B-day.

Neither of us knew why the race was called the run through time and I don’t recall ever seeing anything that would give an indication of why it was called that except maybe the fact that the packet pickup was in a modern building, the race start was on a gravel road in what appeared to be an abandoned industrial mining area and it then proceeded though the wilderness thereby giving you a taste of various points in time. Ok, that’s a pretty big stretch. Actually what I came to believe is that the race name was just a cryptic way of letting you know that by the time you finish you will feel like several years of your life has passed because you will definitely be the worse for wear after this bad boy.

It occurs to me that I don’t sound all that flattering but I should back up and say that Salida is a perfectly wonderful little community and the race was both well run and worth the trek up from Albuquerque. However, I would stop short in suggesting that you should come do it as your Colorado marathon if you are a 50-stater, that is unless you like an ass beating then by all means…

The run starts with about 8 miles of steady climbing followed by about a mile of extremely steep and rocky climbing. You then proceed along a series of long rollers that you can’t really discern as such, it just mostly feels like more climbing. Somewhere around mile 20 your climbing legs are pretty much toast and then you hit another seriously steep climb that extends for maybe a half mile and looks quite a lot like a wall. Beyond that there is some winding single track that empties out onto some exceedingly rocky ATV trail, which finally, thankfully, ends at about 3 miles of nice easy single track that descends all the way to the abandonded mining area looking place and then on to the finish.

At one point I rolled my ankle pretty badly and spent the next minute or so yelling out enough that a couple people in front of me turned around and asked if I was ok. During the last 5 miles of the race I also seemed to get caught up in the fight that was occurring between the top four women. This kind of sucked because I was REALLY looking forward just cursing into the finish but with the air of competition surrounding me I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t get in their way or anything it’s just that I didn’t give myself the break that I was longing for.
Just to give you some perspective on how hard this race is I ran it is 4:32:24. I ran the Mt. Si 50K a month later in 4:18:47 and it had 1000 feet of climbing. I don’t know how much climbing Run Through Time had but it was substantial. Oh, and this race also seems to draw the best ultrarunners in Colorado out of their winter hibernation. It was crazy.