Mountain Photos, We Gots Em, and Wow I Have a Race This Weekend

Summer is in full swing and this means lots of time in the mountains.

Buffalo Creek

Red Tail Hawk barely batted an eye at us.

Gashouse Gulch Trail, part of the Xterra course

The one super technical part of the Xterra course that everyone has to walk.

But it's mostly stuff like this.

Then Saturday was Jonny's birthday hike up near Indian Peaks Wilderness though on a fairly remote, quiet stretch of trail so we saw only a handful of people.

Beaver Reservoir, our starting point

Pretty meadow.  Sometimes there's a moose but not today.

I know you're all jealous of my groovy purple shorts.

Then Sunday started off with my master's group's Bare Bones swim race.

SO many people.  Ironman Boulder is in 2 weeks so people flocked to the race to get some swim practice in at the Rez where the swim will take place.  These are the 2-milers.  I only did the 1-mile race because that's closest to the swim portion of the triathlons I do and I wanted to practice going FAST without having to worry about a bike or run afterwards.  I ended up with a time of 32:16 mins. or 1:50/100 yards, not exactly the zippy pace I was hoping for but it felt like I was moving.  I did drift off course a bit but not too drastically.  I was 15/44 people overall (men and women, all ages) and 9/32 of the women.  The top 3 spots went to women and 2nd and 3rd went to women in their 50's.

Compare to a Stroke-n-Stride I did a little over a week ago:  14:53 for 750 m/820 yards or 1:49/100 yards then 28:47 for a 5k or 9:17 min/mile (2/5 age group, 15/30 women, 33/72 overall).  I guess about a 1:50 pace is what I can expect these days.  A little frustrating considering how much time and effort I've put into swimming but I guess we're still only at mid-season and Nationals isn't until September.

Then a trail run with hill repeats at Walker Ranch.  Sure beats the track.

Walker Ranch was my last hard effort before Xterra Aspen Valley this coming Saturday though today's swim/bike workout and tomorrow's swim/run workout are keeping me busy.  I'm feeling good for the race, fit and feisty and excited and ready to go.  Should be feeling even better after this taper week.  And how awesome does this course look?



I can't pre-ride the course until Friday and I was a little curious about what the wooden bridges/features would be like for the bike but they look o.k.  And how cool to run on the funky wooden bridges over all the ponds and marshes?  A very unique race.

It's the first year of the race and I won't be able to pre-ride until Friday since it's on private land so I have no idea of goals.  It's a relatively short race so my plan is to go hard.  Challenge myself.  Have fun.  Soak up every last bit of summer in the mountains.

Bike-o-rama - Hall Ranch, Buffalo Creek

I was supposed to be taking this weekend easy with a race next week but with Xterra Lory postponed until August and my first Xterra race 9 weeks away I decided to hit the trails.  First off was Hall Ranch.  It was a terrible day up there as you can see.

3 loops, 2 hours, 12.6 miles, 6.1 mph, about the same speed I was at this time last year.  Which is disappointing because it felt so much easier and I felt so much stronger.  Not sure if it's an illusion or I haven't figured out yet how to turn strength into speed.

The next day was Buffalo Creek to pre-ride part of the race course for my August Xterra there, just 2 weeks after Lory.  It's a long course, 22 miles (Nationals is 17.7 miles) with a lot of climbing, a great prep for Nationals.  I did 10 miles of the course 6 years ago when I did the sprint version of the full Xterra.  The company that owned the lake for the swim went under with the economy and it's taken all these years for someone to work out an agreement for the race to continue to use the lake.  Anyway, I was somewhat familiar with part of the course but wanted to check out the rest of it.

I didn't do the exact course, choosing to access the course from a different trailhead to avoid a long, boring, steep dirt road.  I will go back in August to ride the full course, the condition of that road is important to check out ahead of time.  It was heavily rutted when I did the race before and since I'd pre-ridden, I knew ahead of time which lines to take to avoid the ruts.  During the race a woman fell right near me because she didn't know and got stuck in a bad place and hit a rut.  But it's only May and ugh, that road is not fun so instead I opted to access the course via some other single track trails.  The trail was a steep, sandy, 3 mile climb through one of the burn areas.  Buffalo Creek has been impacted by several different wildfires.  This burn area is from the Buffalo Creek Fire started in 1996 by an unattended campfire in the campground that owned the lake where the swim portion of the race takes place.  These views are from the Strawberry Jack trail which is not part of the race at these locations.

It wasn't all dead trees though, there were plenty of nice foresty areas.  This is part of the race course.

The course does have a 2 mile climb through the same burn area and the soil is sandy and a bit deep in some places.  It also goes through a burn area caused by the Hi Meadows Fire in 2000 and the soil there is even worse, deep and sandy like riding through a sandbox.  That fire was caused by a cigarette and it burned 10,800 acres and destroyed 51 homes.  I didn't take any photos of that burn area but it looks much like the other photos above.  Jonny found some cool bones though.  Not sure what has a jaw that size, maybe a moose?

Overall this will be a long ride.  Nothing very technical but a couple of steep 3 mile climbs and another steep climb up a dirt road through the sandbox.  One of the 3 mile climbs is at the end of the course, up the dirt road with the ruts to get back to transition.  Some of the trails are awesome, fun downhills through the woods, but the dirt roads and steep, sandy climb through the burn area up Gashouse Gulch not so much.  I'll go one more time closer to the race to pre-ride the whole course but I can't see myself riding this all summer.  There are so many nicer trails in the Buffalo Creek area, if I'm going to drive an hour and twenty minutes I'd rather do those nicer trails.  But still, should be a fun course for a race.  Mostly.

I've had to completely re-think my training for the summer now that my races are clustered so close together and I don't have a 'real' race until end of July.  I still have a little road sprint at the end of June but that's designed to be a hard training day, not something I'm seriously tapering for.  So it looks like full speed ahead for the next 9 weeks then survival mode for a month of race-o-rama.  Should be an interesting experiment if nothing else.  Now if I can just figure out how to build up some speed.

Colorado Trail at Buffalo Creek

I forgot how much I love this trail and it's only a 1 1/2 hour drive.  It's mostly smooth single track, only one really hairy short technical rocky part that I have to walk and a few steepy bits with roots that I have to walk on the uphill because I can't quite muscle my way up but otherwise all ride-able.   Lots of uppy downy, some good steep lung busting climbs here and there.  Elevation goes from around 7200'-8100', not sure about total elevation gain.  It was fun though, such a perfect day.

Normally when I do this trail I turn around at the Green Mountain Loop but this time I was feeling good and decided to add it on.  It's another 4.3 miles or so for the Green Mountain loop and a climb that goes about 600' in about 1 3/4 miles plus some short locally steep climbs. 

And some nice views.

I didn't stop very often or take many pictures, didn't want to disturb the flow of the ride.  It's more exhausting to start and stop a lot then to keep on riding, for me anyway.

In all it was 17.7 miles in 2 hours, 45 minutes.  This is about the same distance and a little higher elevation than Nationals but not nearly as much climbing.  Still some good practice on a fun trail.  Will have to try to go back in the fall.  I noticed lots of aspen stands, I'll bet they're beautiful when the leaves are changing.