In a recent ongoing effort to sample the growing number of Gravel Races throughout Colorado, I was successfully able to convince Ben and my brother to sign up for the Salida 76 this year, along with Gaper Kevin who has slogged up a number of races with me over the years. Salida 76 seemed like a great compromise. Of course, it fell on a weekend that saw the most precipitation of the summer, after what seemed like 40-50 straight days of sun and dry. But that’s all part of the experience right? It was a torrential downpour on me on the entire drive down there and I got stuck behind an excavator around Fairplay and could no longer see the road, much less a place to pass, all the way until arriving in Salida. Keep Reading…
Leadville’s Silver Rush 50 is a run and bike race series that was first held in 2008. The races act as a qualifier for the Leadville 100 and seems to become more and more popular every year.
Several years ago I completed the Silver Rush 50 Run and I’d always wanted to head back and try the MTB version someday. This year wound up being the year, as Parker pitched the idea to me over the winter that we should both sign up.
Parker and I are usually pretty evenly matched on bikes so we were able to stick together for nearly the entire race. With a significant portion of the field on lightweight XC bikes and hard tails, we knew neither of us were going to be breaking any speed records. The main goal was to finish the race, not crash, and enjoy the day. One of the reasons I had interest in this particular race on the bike is that nearly all of it entails fire roads. This makes it much easier to pass people, and perhaps much more pertinently, be passed. Keep Reading….
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…
