CO2011
Today was our earliest vacation morning yet. We dragged our butts out of bed around 5am and went over to Idaho Springs for a half marathon we signed up for last night. Ben had been eyeballing it all week and it looked interesting, so why not? There are so many races around here, you could literally run a half marathon every weekend if you wanted to. There are 2 going on within 5 miles of here tomorrow morning.
The Georgetown to Idaho Springs Half Marathon is a point-to-point race, and was pretty awesome because entry was only $55. Oh, and it's all a downhill race (therefore it should be easy, right?). Georgetown is 8500ft in elevation, and Idaho Springs at 7600ft.
Ok, so we parked at the tiny finish town - Idaho Springs - and got in line for the school buses that took us up to Georgetown. Idaho Springs is probably similar in size to Spencer, IN for those of you around Btown. Not huge. Georgetown is probably as big as Bowling Green, IN, says Ben. If you don't know anything about Bowling Green, IN or where it is, then we got the point across. This was like a small-town Colorado version of the bus-loading before the Boston Marathon! We waited for what seemed like forever and it was about 65 degrees the whole time. We spaced on bringing long pants/tights/anything warm, but I was able to shiver and freeze there in a long-sleeved pullover and Ben had a long-sleeved shirt.
The line for the buses- the Colorado small-town version of waiting for buses at the Boston Common.
Packet pick-up was at the start line, so we took care of that too. No race packets given here- they were actually distributed at the end so you didn't have to figure out what to do with it. Genius!!
Snapping a couple of photos while waiting for the race to start... fishermen were getting a little annoyed that runners were scaring off their fish!
45 minutes later... still waiting... a bunch of people were huddling in this enclosed picnic area/barn. Sidenote: I overheard a Denver woman telling another out-of-towner that there is a lot of peer pressure to be active when you live in Colorado. She said, "If you're not active and don't do anything outdoors, it's pretty much impossible to have a social life." Interesting!
Finally we took off all of our warm-ups and our gear bags were thrown onto a bus, where they'd be tarnsported and waiting for us at the finish.
The race actually started with a 2-mile loop that went around this house/barn in the distance before starting the actual downhill portion of the course. The phones went away during the race.
I'm not very good at race recaps, so I'll just leave you with some of my thoughts and vague memories -- I just tend to turn off the brain when I run. The course was relatively scenic and followed the Colorado River the majority of the time. Part paved, part fine gravel roads. Parts of the course were shaded if you ran on the far edge of the road, too. At the beginning, it was extremely cold. As we got going and as the sun started getting higher, it started to get pretty warm. By the finish, it was expected to be about 85 degrees (and again, at start time we were looking at something like 65 degrees - maybe?)
Ho-ly oxygen tanks was this a hard half! (Thanks Rachel N for the "I'd need an O2 tank" comment... that says it perfectly.) I fully expected to walk out of this race injured, because of all of the downhill. Remember - in Boston, my IT band flared up at the worst I've ever experienced at mile 4 because of the downhill grade; I couldn't walk for at least a week after the race. Today might've been my lucky day! That part went well. However, the downhill grade for 13 miles is KILLER. I don't care who you are, if you think that a downhill race is a good idea, you're crazy. Your quads will hate you. As I'm writing this right now, my legs feel as though I've just completed a full marathon!
Throw in also the lack of oxygen. I had a hard time with this race, and I want to believe it was because of the altitude. Ben put it in perspective like this: Denver is exactly a mile high, at 5280 feet. Idaho Springs is at 7600 feet, and Georgetown at 8500 feet. Our race ended at 1.5 times as high as Denver is! A full half mile higher at the finish! I definitely felt spent after a flat two miles at 8500ft.
In the last mile, I felt like I was able to pick off quite a few people and was so happy to see the "Idaho Springs - Elev. 7580" sign as we rounded an uphill corner. The crowd and the anticipating of not running in the near future pulled me through to a Steph-speed sprint to the end. I considered just poking along to the finish, but am proud of myself for finding that last gear, feeling as spent as I did! And thank you times a million to Ben for running with me the whole way and putting up with my crabby uphill-running mood swings!
Good race overall, obviously not my best work. Ben tells me the NCAA has altitude conversions for qualifying times (running), so it's only appropriate that a person has an altitude PR and a sea-level PR. This makes it even more mind-blowing that on
Thursday, the Pearl Street Mile winners ran 4:15 and 4:43. Well, as my only altitude race, technically it is a PR. Let's just say that I run much better at sea level. :)
Oh, so here's the insane part: if I had run a PR half today, I would have finished tenth in my age group, by last year's results. Tenth!! If Ben had run that exact same time, he would have been third. What?! Anyway, I was 24th in my age group. I know of some races in Bloomington that don't even HAVE 24 people running in them! Again, ridiculous... there are some serious runners in this place!
Here's a shot of the age group awards... the thing that the little mountain goat is mounted on is a piece of fake gold. It's a gold-mining town, you know? What's that rock called anyway?
Secretly thankful I didn't come close to winning one... this would not have been fun to pack in my suitcase!
The finish area was awesome! You'd expect something little, but it was a nice set-up for a 4,000-runner race. Chocolate milk as you finish, plenty of Powerade and water, and there were tents for Brooks, Runner's Roost (Denver running store), all sorts of sponsor food, yogurt, some kind of popcorn... it was like a mini expo after the race! It reminded me of the finish area at the Bayshore Marathon. Very community-heavy. On the football field. Cool mountain background, huh?
The finish area is also where you pick up your race packet, including your t-shirt (Ben pointed out that it was cotton, not a tech shirt. Only downside) and finisher "medal," in the form of a pint glass. I love this idea. Gimme something I can use, not another medal!
They were also doing some ART (think Mandy Smith at Bloomington Sports and Wellness) so I waited around and got a short session. We took these post-race pictures while we were waiting on the grass behind the ART tent.
Injury revelation! The PT told me that my IT bands are not tight anymore thanks to all of the foam-rolling I've been doing, but that my hip flexors are tight because they're attached to my super-tight quads. So I learned some quad stretches and we did them on my right side. Even after just that, my hip flexors felt so much looser!! This should also fix my tilted pelvis problem; the hip flexors keep pulling my pelvis forward, creating all of the SI joint and back issues I've been having, not to mention the countless running injuries. Cool guy. I'll have to remember to go to his practice's website, since he was also a race photographer today.
On the way home, in Golden, we got some lunch at On the Border where the server asked me if I was going to eat the plate... sheesh I was hungry! We also passed by a shopping center where we saw a GoLite store. It turned out to be a "pop-up store," sort of like the FIREWORKS and Halloween stores you see all over at certain times of year. The sleeping bags, tents, and packs were tempting, but I walked away with a sweatshirt jacket and Ben got a convertible rolling backpack (sounds less dorky that it is). :) We were rewarding ourselves for a good run, ok?! The stuff there was all 50% off retail, so very interesting. Based on what we saw, you probably won't be seeing GoLite at InRunCo anytime soon.
The celebration didn't stop there.... across the street was an outlet mall, where we each did some major damage at the Banana Republic outlet store. Well, actually, it started with an Orange Julius. Did you know those still exist? This was news to us too, although Ben polished off that whole thing himself and I'm guessing he might be ok if he never saw one again. :)
The outlet mall was so huge, we walked around for hours until we were so drained and tired that we went home. My legs still ache! Matt, I'm bringing you a
foam roller or the
Stick next time we come!
