Sunday, June 15, 2008

Why I'm Not Running the Garden of the Gods 10 Miler Next Year.

1. Course is brutal - there's not a flat section in the entire 10 miles. See following elevation profile. (Blue shaded is the elevation, red line is my heart rate and green line is our pace/speed. You can see where we slowed for water with the spikes in green. Yes, I am a nerd. My gps watch/HR monitor along with a 3rd party training program for mac lets me analyze my workouts with a mind boggling amount of data.)




2. Race t-shirts are not only ugly, but they don't fit! Argh.

In all seriousness, I probably won't run it next year. B and I discussed that during the race. We really did chit chat pretty much the entire 10 miles, stopped for a bathroom break around mile 5, stopped at every water point, made conversation with random people around us. It is a beautiful place to run - you'd think after twice weekly training runs along the course for 2 and a half months I'd be sick of the Garden. But no, I went running there yesterday!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Wow! I figure that is not the 6k altitude that the Garden is, it's the added hill elevation on the run that is kicking butt! As they say, "go figger".

Armour Craig said...

I think it's awesome that you log that stuff! I do the same thing! My sister considers me a total geek about tracking my training. You gotta do it though...

Carol said...

Embrace your nerdiness!

North Texas said...

I agree with you. The shirt issue was a major hang-up for me. I really do love the Garden of the Gods and I love the race but I think the logistics could have been handled a little better. Despite all that was wrong with this race, I'll continue to show up just for the shear beauty of the course.

I have a blog about this race as well.

http://run10k.blogspot.com/