Idaho Springs to Buena Vista, Colorado. 165 miles. No problem.
Right?
Except they picked the hardest three passes for our team to traverse.
Up the winding paved road to 11,669 feet over Guanella Pass. Then we hopped on the Colorado Trail’s single-track over Georgia Pass at 11,598 feet. A little overnight action to take Fremont Pass (11.318 feet) into Leadville. A loop around Turquoise Lake so we could touch the LT100 Ultramarathon Trail (we’re such pretenders) and then a straight shot down the Arkansas River valley to Buena Vista as the sun came up.
How did I get here? My niece works for a company up in Ft Collins and they’ve been running the Wild West Relay (Ft. Collins to Steamboat Springs) for a couple of years. With COVID this year, they were ‘running’ a little short for their first effort at the Flaming Foliage Relay. They dipped into the senior citizen category and called Uncle Cam. What a great group of folks! I’m glad they called.
Our official team name was “We Run for Swag”, but team captain Brock designed personal patches and handed them out just prior to the race. For the next 28 hours we were the Flamin’ Flamingos. There were three options for the race: In-person, Virtual, or Hybrid. We Flamingos ended up as the only Hybrid entrant as we had a couple folks recovering from COVID and other injuries that plowed it out on the treadmill back home.
We couldn’t have asked for better weather. Blue skies and upper 70’s in the day and down into the 40’s at night. The single-track scenery was the highlight but we did have to put in some highway time as well. My third leg was the 10K into my home town of Buena Vista–got to love family to greet you, cold beer at the finish, and new friends!
