Pikes Peak Marathon this weekend ... Injury update

On Friday morning Kim and I will board a flight and head out to Colorado Springs for some Mountain Madness. On Saturday Kim will take on the Pikes Peak Ascent and then on Sunday I will run (I use that word lightly) the Pikes Peak Marathon.

I might have to pack some adult diapers because at this point I am on the verge of crapping in my pants. This seemed like a great idea when I first signed up. What an awesome idea, start at 6000 feet, climb 13 miles to 14,115 feet and then turn around and run back down. I mean how hard could that be there is only one uphill and one downhill on the entire course. So the one hill is the entire thing but I just ignored that part.

Then I ran Bear Mountain which is a speed bump compared to Pikes and that was kind of hard with no where near the sustained and constant elevation gain. Oh and just to make it all the more interesting there is that whole above the tree line, at altitude, 40 percent less oxygen thing that I will be experiencing for the first time. For those of you that dont live near Toronto that means my altitude training takes place at 100 ft. above sea level. There are no mountains here although I did lots of hill running. The closest thing I did to high altitude training was sitting in the cheap seats at the Skydome. I didnt even bother to go up to the top of the CN Tower.



So why did I pick this race. Am I crazy ... well yeah kind of but that wasn't it. I got it into my head that someday I wanted to run some of the more well know US 100 milers. Leadville and Wasatch are two that immediately come to mind but besides the running 100 miles they have another component that adds to the difficulty level for a flatland runner like me. They are run at high altitudes. Now I am not stupid (stop laughing), just crazy so I figured I would run something shorter at altitude first and see what that feels like. Running the shorter marathon distance seemed like just the ticket. Worse yet I have dragged Kim into this kamikaze mission as well.

At this point my biggest worry is not the climb its actually the 13 miles of downhill on shared single track trail with runners going in each direction. The downhill is always the running that beats the legs up badly and this downhill is going to be a quad buster for sure.



Injury Update
My run at Pikes Peak will be made even more difficult as I am currently nursing a bad ankle. As some of you already know I turned my ankle at the Limberlost 56km run a month ago. It gave me some issues at the Burning River 100 but felt okay a few days after. The next weekend I ran at Dirty Girls with a plan to put in 40 -80km but stopped at 40 when the ankle began to hurt. Last week it felt great even during some hard hill work but then on Saturday I aggravated it at Canada's Wonderland. Apparently it didn't like all the roller coasters and water park.



I was forced to shut my sunday run down after just 3km as a precaution. That is not good. Its feeling better but not healed yet. I will not run this week and hope that it feels better before Sunday. Just to be clear I could run right now but I want to get this thing as close to 100% as I can.

The original plan was then to run something at the Lean Horse in South Dakota the following weekend but right now the distance is up in the air. Whether I attempt 100, 50m or 50km will all depend on how the ankle fares this sunday.

Stay tuned.