As silly as it may sound, one of my primary motivators for recently completing The 2024 Arizona Ironman was to see how it compared to a 100 mile ultramarathon. I had seen some discussion about this in various endurance communities online, but I was very curious to glean an understanding for myself. My hypothesis was that a 100 miler would be the bigger feat, but there was no way to know how it compared until I had completed both events for myself. In 2022 I ran The Bear 100 in Utah & Idaho. Now that I’ve added the Arizona race to my resume, I figure this would be a fun chance to compare and contrast the two events against one another. The results were a bit surprising. Keep Reading…
Swim. Bike. Run.
Triathlons are a pretty simple thing in concept, really. Get in the water. Ride a bike. Run a race. Doesn’t seem like it should be too complicated. In fact, it actually kind of sounds like fun.
Perhaps those were just some psychotic, ignorant musings of a long-time endurance athlete. But what did I know? Triathlons certainly had always been an intriguing goal of mine. The multi-sport aspect felt like the sort of fresh, interesting challenge I had always been up for. The only problem was it took a long time before I felt like I had the tools and skills necessary for all three sports. Keep Reading…
In the spring of 2021, Dylan and I completed the Grand Traverse Ski from Crested Butte to Aspen. It’s known one of those uber-classic Colorado events and being into it’s 25th year, is the longest running ski mountaineering race in North America. Around a decade ago race organizers decided to add Grand Traverse summer events, namely an ultramarathon from Crested Butte to Aspen which follows a very similar route as the ski race, along with a mountain bike race from Aspen back to CB the following day. Ever since finishing the ski I had wanted to go back for the run and bike races, and finally did so at the beginning of the month. Keep reading…
At the end of August Steve Cummins and I motored down south to participate in the ninth running of the Telluride Mountain Run. It’s a race that offers three different distances (13, 24 and 40 miles) which traverse the ridgelines and peaks above town. All three courses are pretty tough relative to most other races of the same lengths due to the elevation gain associated with each (5,000, 9,000 and 14,000 feet respectively). In fact it’s tough to find a race as steep as this one anywhere in the country in terms of vert-to-mileage ratio in addition to average elevation above sea level.
Saturday morning at 5:30am rolled around and those of us running the 24-miler were off from the Telluride Town Park (with Steve running the 13-miler, I wouldn’t see him until the end of the day as his race started at 8am). I didn’t get to the start line until 5:32 and thus set off a few minutes late behind the pack of runners, following the headlamps south from town into the mouth of the Bear Creek drainage. Keep Reading….
