Leadville Training Camp

Maybe you've heard that this was a very wet, snowy year in the Rockies? Turns out, those rumors are true. Turns out that the number one thing I took away from the Leadville 100 Training Camp was the meaning of the word "glissade." The meaning, based on the way it was used in reference to me, is when a guy loses his footing while trying to walk across a snow field and ends up sliding downhill on his butt until his descent is stopped by hitting a patch of bare rocks. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, "If it weren't for the honor of being complemented on my excellent glissade, I would have rather walked uninterrupted across the snow field."

My little snow-slide adventure didn't happen until the fifth day we were out in Colorado. Cory and I went out a few days early to start to acclimate to the altitude, and as a favor to all the people that were trying to improve the image of Indianapolis.

Our first full day out there, we walked and ran around Lake Turquoise and back. Yeah, I know. That doesn't mean anything to you. Just say, "ooh, aah, cool." It actually was all those things. The route is all trails around a 7-mile-long man-made recreational lake at 10,000 feet among the pines. It was slow, but it went better than we had expected, so we bit off a bigger chunk for the next day--going up the "Power Line", a 1400 foot climb over 2.5 miles, then another 10 miles of a mixture of trail and road. We also recruited another sucker, oops, I mean, runner to do the workout with us--a runner from San Diego who had also come out to Leadville early to acclimate.

Well, things went well on the way up. And by "well", I mean, better than what was to follow, because we first had to go through a pond about 100 yards across that normally doesn't exist but has been formed by runoff from the excessive amounts of snow. Then we realized that someone had forgotten her car keys, which we needed because we were running from my car to her car and then going to drive back. It would be wrong to point the finger at someone for making such a common mistake, so I won't. I'll only say that it was one of the people in this picture:

The solution to the forgotten car keys? Send someone back through the arctic pond to retrieve the keys. But who should we send? By a vote of two-to-one, the decision was made that the tallest person would be least inconvenienced by freezing his lower extremities. Yes, that would be me.

After those difficulties were surmounted, we were only left with the 1400 foot climb, in thin air and a bright sun. And that was going to turn out to be the easy part of the workout.

You see, once we got over Sugarloaf Pass at 11,200 feet (at which point I did not sing "Green Eyed Lady"--and if you understand what I'm referring to, then shame on you! You clearly spent your youth listening to the radio instead of doing your homework), you would have thought that everything would get easy. A nice long downhill in the shade.

Which would make sense except in this case, "in the shade" meant "where the snow hasn't melted yet." We hit an 8-foot pile of snow right away. We tried to circle around through the woods to meet back up with the trail. Instead we kept running into big piles of snow. This went on for 40 minutes as we kept working our way down the mountain but not making any progress at getting back to the trail, by which time one unnamed member of the party became very concerned that we were about to become chew toys for wild bears. I felt confident that there was little risk of that--we were near the Colorado Trail where there are large numbers of hikers and, hence, very few big animals. The bigger risk, in keeping with Colorado traditions, was a Donner-Party-type human sacrifice when we ran out of food, but I decided that it might not be all that calming to point that out to the concerned member of our group, especially since she was the smallest one in the group.

Anyway, everything turned out fine. Well, fine for Cory and me. And by the time those bones are found, no one will remember we were ever there.

The next day, Friday, we did a 5 mile run and otherwise rested up for the start of official Training Camp. Official training camp began on Saturday with breakfast and a 26 mile run. I did really well at one of the two. It wasn't the run. Cory and I did okay, I guess, but the distance and the altitude made us whimper like the big babies we really are. The main good thing about the run, other than the breakfast, was after the run on the bus back to Leadville we discovered that we weren't the most despicable, soulless people at the training camp. (Well, I knew I wasn't, but as for Cory, who's still a practicing lawyer, well, . . .) It turns out that one of the other runners was not only a lawyer, but a lawyer for ExxonMobil. Talk about your moral black hole, where no glimmer of conscience can ever escape! When Cory stood next to her, he literally glowed with virtue! Strangest damn thing I ever saw.

The next two days were more of the same--having our egos handed back to us after being pummeled into puddles of goop by altitude, heat, distance and reality. We eventually got the message--we need to buy more shoes, more clothing, more gear, and more drugs. (Or we could train better. Nah, that sounds too much like work.) I'll leave it to Cory, who is now our technology guru, to fill you in on our once and future acquisitions.