This evening, as we finished our work day, Ethel said "Let's go".

We grabbed our jackets and headed out for a short drive. I'd already done a ten-mile run this morning on Lime Creek Road, but Ethel had been in the condo all day.

We headed up and over Coal Bank Pass, then on the way up to Molas Pass we pulled over and Andrews Lake. Here's a pic, with Snowdon in the background:

                

Usually summers are long and terrible, as we're in 115 F heat in Phoenix waiting on football season to start.

This year, we spent August in Colorado, and - while we've still been waiting on football season - I've had a parallel effort of training for Imogene, and that sense of urgency has made time pass very quickly indeed - such that now I don't want to go back down to Phoenix.

However, we made arrangements with Patrick the Tree-Top Ectomorph; he's flying in the day before the race, on a one-way ticket, and then we're driving back to Phoenix with him, so that means that I'm committed to going back to Arizona on the 12th of this month.

Well, there's always the ugly baby, and my new golf clubs.

And football :)

        

On Sunday, we stopped in at the Durango Flea Market, as Ethel wanted another skillet for the condo.

We didn't find a skillet, but we did find some Phish.

            

Yep - for one dollar (each) I got Lawn Boy and the Squirrel Nut ZIppers.

This is my fourth (or so) copy of Lawn Boy. I've bought Farmhouse, as well, and like it just fine, but Lawn Boy is one of my all-time favorites.

"Reba dipped a ladle for a taste of her creation
 And she knew that what she'd made would be the finest in the nation -

Bag it, tag it, sell it to the butcher in the store, oh..."

When I hear Lawn Boy, I remember driving all around Vermont with Ethel and Silas, sightseeing and singing along. If you can listen to "Bouncing 'Round The Room" three times without starting to sing along, I'd like to hear from you. You obviously need more coffee.

I haven't been able to hear the whole thing again, as Ethel and I usually talk when we are in the car, and when we're in the car is the only time that we would be listening to music, so it's been "listen to part of a song/talk/listen to some more/talk/get out of the car/forget to turn the CD player back on when we get back in" since this weekend.

Phish - at least this Phish - is pure joy and play, sort of like the BareNaked Ladies without the "social consciousness" aspects (when the BNL decided to let me know about their politics, I didn't dump 'em - I just deleted that song from my library. I decided not too long ago that, if my entertainers get political, then to allow that to cause me to stop enjoying their entertainment would be to say that their use of the entertainment platform for espousing their views actually MATTERS - it means that I'm paying attention, which is exactly what they want me to do, and just what I don't want to do) .

If there are any Phish phans reading this, I'd like to know if there are other Phish CDs as playful and delightful as Lawn Boy. I don't want to just buy Phish at random; following the Crash Test Dummies all the way down into "I Don't Care That You Don't Mind" taught me the error of that path.

        

On Saturday, I went up and over Imogene Pass.

To keep from wiping myself out by doing the whole thing, I started at the 2.5 mile mark on the course, cutting out those first couple of miles of distance and about 800 feet of the climb. Ethel was my crew - here she is waiting on me to get my GPS signal:

                  


At Lower Camp Bird (elev. 9765) she handed me my backpack, gave me a kiss, and saw me off on my own.

I ran up from Lower Camp Bird through the switchbacks, up through Imogene Basin, and to Upper Camp Bird(11,235). From there, you can see the Headwall:

                 

That big chunk of brown metal you see in the forground is some old mining equipment. The trees you see behind those rocks were the last trees that I was close to until I got up and over the pass. Yes, that big patch of white is snow left over from last winter, still there on the last weekend of August. At this point, I pulled my hat out of my backpack, as it was getting cold - while I was running, I was still generating body heat, but my bald head was exposed.


At this point, I looked back down the way I had come, towards Ouray -

                   

...this is a good place to stop for a minute, and as I did, a young lady caught up with me; a good thing, too, as the course description (which I was carrying in my backpack) did not mention the fact that there is a fork in the road here, so I was able to get some direction from somebody who had done this before.

The course heads off to the left here and switchbacks up and over the Headwall - you hit that crest at 12,290 feet. By that time I was mostly walking - I took my first walking steps right at 12,000 feet. From then on up to the Pass, I ran when it was level enough, and walked otherwise.

I noticed that the people who were walking were passing me on the way up; I was aware that walking was faster than running, which meant that running was harder than walking - but I wanted to get maximum training benefit from this run, so I ran uphill as long as I could.

Above the Headwall, I was on Mars - nothing alive, no oxygen, a completely alien world. I can't describe it very well. Maybe you should go check it out yourself. Somewhere in here, I pulled the jacket out of the backpack. Walking wasn't making as much heat as running, and It. Was. Cold. Up. There.

At about 12,900 feet the pack trail departs from the "road" and heads straight to the pass - at the top of the pass, the cold is exacerbated by the wind, and there is a feeling of nakedness and exposure.

I looked over the edge, down towards Telluride -

                

You can see the green fields of San Miguel County, off to the upper right, in a small corner of a wedge between ridgelines.

At this point, the new trail is Tomboy Road, and it heads off to the left, very steep and very rocky - in fact, it is so rocky that I couldn't take advantage of the steep downhill, and averaged 10 minutes/mile all the way down. About a quarter-mile of the way, I saw where a Range Rover had pulled over because he saw me coming down, and the "road" wasn't wide enough for the Range Rover and me, too - when I went by, I made him an offer for the SUV, but he wasn't interested in selling.

Down, down down down down, hopping from reasonably-looking stable landing spot to precarious pebbly perch, absorbing five thousand feet of vertical in my quads. There is one level stretch on the way down - I turned around there and took a picture, looking back up the canyon:


               

In the middle of the picture you can see Bridal Veil Falls.

I ran down, down, down, continually hoping to find a spot where the footing was good enough to let me speed up, and not finding it. Down, down, down.

Eventually I could look straight down at Telluride, while I was running on a blasted-out road above it, and started passing by some really high priced real estate, until Tomboy Road dead-ended into actual pavement - Oak Street.

I turned onto Oak Street, still heading down, and saw Ethel's truck right there - I dropped off the backpack, not knowing at the time that I had less than two blocks to run to where the finish line will be in two weeks.

I found a little park and took some time to stretch, and for some reason somebody had thrown a pile of crushed ice there on the grass, so I pulled my shorts up, stretched out my legs straight, and sat down in it - then, when my hamstrings and calves had had all of the recovery that they could stand, I rolled over so that my quads were laying on the ice.

People were staring. That's one nice thing about doing something like this - it hurts so badly, that you don't care what people think of you afterwards.

********************

Now it's two days later, and I've had time to think about it. I've also had time for the DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) to set in, and I can barely walk - even though I need to ru 10-12 miles today.

I learned that mountain running Is One More Thing That I'm Not Good At - every runner I saw was passing me, and I passed none of them. This trip took just under four hours on my watch, and something over that in true elapsed time (I stopped my watch when I took breaks) - this tells me that, especially given that I didn't do the first 2.5 miles, I'm not going to break four hours, and so I'll be in the back half of the race pack - all of this training, and I can't even climb my way up to average.

I've actually enjoyed the training, but I think that that was because of the delusion that being able to run uphill for hours meant something - now I realize that the woods are full of folks who are a lot better than I am at that, as well. I've always thought of myself as an excellent downhill runner, but Tomboy Road dispelled that illusion.
              
I've tossed around the idea of not doing the actual race, since I've already done this training run - not only have I had the experience of going over Imogene Pass under my own power, I also have some idea how bad it can hurt.

But my friend Patrick the Tree-Top Ectomorph is still planning on coming up from Phoenix for the race, so I suppose I'll go ahead and do this. Again.

But I need smarter hobbies. And smarter friends : )

        

The Imogene Pass Run is in two weeks, so tomorrow is my last planned long, steep hill run in training for that.


       


Last week (as I reported on Monday ) I tried to run from the base up to Upper Camp Bird and back, which would be a 15 miler, but I got lost.

This week, I'm planning on running from the 2.5 mile mark up to the top and back - a 15 miler - and this week, I have printed maps and course description : )

(The astute observer will look at the above elevation profile and realize that there is only one little bitty stretch of flat/downhill on the whole Ouray side, and will see that - by starting at the 2.5 mile mark - I'm denying myself that one bit of respite. Well, that's the way the schedule works out - I need a 15 miler tomorrow, and this is it : )

This is going to be a difficult run, and not istake - I'm under no illusions about that. For one thing, tomorrow is the end of another 60 mile week, so I'm not exactly "fresh" (all of my miles these days are above 8700 feet, at least, and almost all of them involve long, steep chunks of mountain).

So I've run a lot of miles this week, so I'm tired. However, none of the  miles that I've run in training since this silliness started have been above 11,000 feet, and up there the air gets thin indeed - and I'm not prepared for it.

So tomorrow is scary.

So I've set up some rules for this run, rules which I hope will keep me from getting hurt, or from "leaving my race in training" - i.e. wearing myself out so bad during a training run that I can't recover before the race itself.

One of my long-standing rules is that I am not allowed to walk during training runs. And one of my normal rules is that when I'm running uphill, I can only stop for administrative purposes - potty stops, pulling off my camelbak to get supplies, etc - there are times when I stop on uphills, but that's when I reach a place where I simply cannot continue without a rest.

Well, if I enforce these rules tomorrow, I might get hurt - there are a lot of place on the Imogene course to fall down and hurt yourself, and there are no Urgent Care centers at 13,000 feet - or, if not hurt, then I might overdo and wear myself out. When I think about that top 2000 feet of climb, at 14.1% average grade with less than two-thirds of the normal oxygen partial pressure, it's just plain scary.

So - FOR TOMORROW ONLY - here are the rules:

1) I can stop at any time and rest - in fact, I WILL stop and rest, often. I will carry my phone with me - of course, for emergencies or to keep on track with Ethel, but also just to take pictures, which will force me to stop. Stopping tomorrow is a GOOD THING - it will probably help me to keep going in two weeks.

2) I am allowed to walk uphills, as long as I keep my GPS going and track my walking distance, and then tag that distance on at the end of the run - an uphillI at the end of the run, just to keep myself honest, even though it probably won't be as steep, and certainly won't be as oxygen deprived.

I'm hoping that these rules allow me to complete the run without injury, and without wiping myself out. But, since I can't be sure of that, I'm adding one more rule -

3) I can turn back at any time.

Currently the plan is to run to the top and back down to the 2.5 mile mark - however, if I make it to the top, and I feel okay, and if I have cell coverage, then I'll call Ethel, and - if she wants to drive to Telluride - then I'll go down the other side.

Maybe.

If this goes well, and if it seems that I can still benefit from more steepness, then I might run Kendall Mountain in Silverton next Tuesday or Wednesday. But that's "if this goes well".

        

Last night, while wandering downtown Durango between meetings, looking for someplace to eat dinner, we came across Jean Pierre "Le Cafe Chic" and Wine Bar -

                                                

Now, it occurred to me that I've never actually eaten at a French restaurant. For one thing, I'm a recovered drunk, and the French like to pour wine into everything - even water. And the French are not known for low-fat cooking.

But we decided to give it a go, anyway - we figured that if there was any problem with eliminating the booze, we were just a short walk to the front door.

As soon as I entered the place, I was a bit overwhelmed - there are no French restaurants in Flat Red Clay, Alabama, where I come from. And the movies have taught me that French waiters can show you the entire contents of their nostrils just by looking down at you - "yes, I am Frahnch. I show you my boogarrs, you scummy Ammericun."

And the place was gorgeous - as Ethel said, it was an old building "repurposed", and it was done well. Most of the wood had deep grains - it looked like stained honey oak. The rest was all carved ornately. There was a grand piano taking up the space of four tables - which told me that the prices on the menu would be padded to cover the lost revenue from those four tables.

But when the maitre'd (trans: "the mother of D") was seating us, Ethel explained that we didn't need the wine list - that we were allergic to alcohol, and he didn't miss a blink, even when I explained that they did not want us to order from the wine list. And the server put me right at ease - a nice American girl with normal nostrils.

Ethel ordered the Ratatouilie (I'd like to announce here and now that I spelled that right the first time) which turns out to be a yummy vegetable soup; I ordered "La Something d'New Orleans" which turned out to be a really tasty, really small biscuit covered with shrimp.

(ed. note - the server pronounced it "New Orleans", not "Nawlins", which gave me a shiver of superiority. But that didn't last long).

Along with my shrimp biscuit, I also got 1.5 carrots (assuming that each of those slices was a full half of a carrot), three spears of asparagus, and two little heads of broccoli. I think that it was the most expensive meal I've ever had, based on price per pound.

Ethel and I split our meals - I got some of her soup, and she got half of my biscuit, one of my carrot slices, and two spears of asparagus. (I was keeping count).

We then had dessert - usually I pass on any dessert, but after Ethel got those two spears of asparagus, I was in bad shape from a caloric perspective. I ordered what they called "flan" but what any Mexican would call "fruitcake" - Ethel order something called "L'Opera" which was five different types of chocolate, in layers. After eating that, she'll have to go to confession. (OB-GYNs reading this - I suggest this dish as a new specific Rx for menopausal patients).

They finally brought me the check, and I called my broker and sold some stock - I got out of there for just a few shares of Oracle and what I still owned of Netflix - and, as we walked out the front door, we stopped and had a nice conversation with the Maitre'D (literally, "The Maid of D") about L'Opera - it seems to be a local favorite.

It was a very good meal, although the portions were small (I'm still not sure that those were whole half carrots). I don't know when we'll be back, but I suspect that that will be determined by Ethel's estrogen levels getting low, and the DOW going back up.

(editor's note: standard FCD prizes to the first person who can, without Googling, identify the source of the subject line. Not you, Ethel)

        

....i.e. mostly way up high, and feeling endangered - tending towards extinction.

Way up here towards US Mountain between Ouray and Telluride, for instance -

                  

Saturday was 15 miles - starting around the quarter-mile mark of the Camp Bird road, aka "Imogene Pass or Bust" - although I was intending to go to Upper Camp Bird and come back down without going to the top.

I didn't make it - because I took a wrong turn at Lower Camp Bird.

This resulted in my running straight uphill for the next mile, at which point I was at 10,600 feet by mile 6 of my run, whereas had I run the way that I was supposed to have run, I'd have been at 10,115 at mile 6.

It was a bit unnerving - I thought that I was on the right path, until well after I had made the turn at mile 6, and realized that I had been running downhill for 3/4 of a mile - and saw more downhill in front of me. There's nowhere on the Imogene course that you go downhill more than briefly. So I figured that I must have made a mistake, and shut off my GPS and walked back up the hill to the turn.

I met many folks there who were certain that I was, indeed, on the Imogene Pass road, and after being convinced, I hitched a ride back to the place where I had stopped, and started running again - more downhill.

                 

Finally the road I was on dead-ended in a T into another road that was going straight uphill, and I headed up that road. I then met a running coming down who told me that the road we were on was the correct road - that I should have gone straight at Lower Camp Bird and I would have come up this road, instead of going way up and off to one side and coming back.

I considered going on up to Upper Camp Bird, but I was already at mile 8 on my GPS out of a planned 15, and I had been going up more than I should have by this point - and realized that I had to run back up the hill that I had just come down to meet Ethel, as I didn't have a phone with me. So I ran back to the 6 mile mark, where Ethel was, and explained it to her.

She suggested that we come back next Saturday to do it correctly, and I then ran the 6 miles downhill, hard, to my starting point.

I hammed that down pretty well, staying below 8 minute pace except for the brief uphills (which were the brief downhills on the way up).

When I got to the bottom I started walking around to loosen up, doing a high-knee walk for about fifty yards, at which point I fell over in a full-on quad cramp. Ethel came to my rescue, and I went out onto a iron grating above Box Canyon there in Ouray and did my stretches and drank my chocolate milk and RockStar.

                 


Then we went for a drive north out of Ouray, and toured the Owl Creek Pass area east of Ridgeway - just because we saw this ridgeline and there was a Forest Service road that ran in that direction -

                 

- and came down near Gunnison. We realized that we were within driving distance of Crested Butte, where we had gone skiing in 1993, so we drove up there for dinner, and ate at a restaurant that we remembered.

We drove home late, going through three mountain passes in the dark, with deer standing right beside the road - every minute you're waiting for them to jump in front of the car, and there's no where to turn to evade them. Scary.

So Sunday we were worn out, and just drove around the area, touring up near Vallecito and Lemon Lake.

Monday was a vacation day; it was rainy and grey, and Ethel didn't want to do anything, so I decided to go ahead and get my last 20 miler in ahead of time. Ran down to the 41 mile marker and back on Hiway 550, which gave me a total of about 2000 feet of vertical with a sustained five miles of uphill on the way back.

Yesterday afternoon, we looked at another, larger unit here at Cascade Village. I can see us living up here full time, but not sure that we could swing a bigger place right now.

This morning was five miles up and down Lime Creek Road, as easy as I could do it, but I don't feel well now. My resting heart rate was 46 this morning, so I don't think that I've overtrained, I may have simply overdone these last few days.

One might wonder why I'm doing this - why I'm training this hard. The fact is that I can, right now, do the Imogene Pass run and meet all the cutoffs easily.

And no amount of training is going to make me competitive, by which I mean "coming in well in relation to others of my age and gender".

So I'm in a sort of grey area, a place where there's no reason for me to keep training hard.

But I don't know how to stop training hard - if there's a race, it seems that I have to train as well as I can to do as well as I can, even though it doesn't matter.

And I don't know why.

        

because my phone just died.

I was in my second conference call of the day, but the phone still had two bars. I put it on the house charger for a half hour, and on the car charger for ten minutes, but it still won't crank up at all.

My company told me to go to the Verizon store in Durango to see if a new battery would fix it, or to get a new phone. I love the company I work for : )

        

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about being up high up at Stony Pass .

Here's something I didn't show you, because I can't get the picture big enough to make out the item of interest -


             

What you see is a girl on a road, and if you look close, you'll see something orange in her hand.

What you do not see is that she's at Stony Pass - at 12,588 ft elevation - and the only thing in her possession is a small Zip-Loc sandwich bag of Cheez-Its.

That's right - we were in the middle of the San Juan Mountains, way up in the air, far far away from any bit of civilization, and this woman was walking - no indication of where she came from, no vehicle for her to get out of, no camp for her to be staying - and the only thing she had in her battle of Girl Vs. Wild was a small bag of Cheez-Its.

This stunned me. I'm aware that Cheez-Its is a food group, but it's not ALL of the food groups - nor do Cheez-Its comprise clothing or shelter. They are not all that one needs to sustain life, and certainly not at 12,000 feet.

She walked over the pass and disappeared, and Ethel and I investigated the area - looking for the headwaters of the Rio Grande, trying to identify the wildflowers, trying to breathe - and then, after a while, she came walking back over the pass; this time, she still had her Cheez-Its, but she also had a full-grown MOuntain Man, complete with huge backpack, trekking poles and dreadlocks.

Obviously she did have all she needed. Walk around with a bag of Cheez-Its, and somebody will show up with everything else.

Since I'm trying to do my best to prepare for the Imogene Pass Run, I didn't bring any Cheez-Its to Colorado with me, as I'm not eating red meat or white flour until after the race. However, shortly after we got here, Ethel found this -

                                                                  

That's right - healthy Cheez-Its. Cheez-Its that you can eat with a warm, fuzzy sense of being green and wearing natural fibers and smelling like patchouli. The kind of Cheez-Its that they probably eat at Berkeley.

I'm waiting for them to come out with Free Range Cheez-Its.

        

Here is a big pile of gravel in front of Ethel's car.


                                 

That pile of gravel wasn't always there, but it was there when I took this picture.

When I parked the car there this morning, there was a large iron box - one of those big, hulking old construction implements that always looks like it's been there forever, and will be there forever. I had nine miles to run with hill repeats, and didn't want my keys jangling for nine miles, so I hid the keys on a small lip on the back of the big iron box.

I did the miles, and then ran back to the car. When I got there....the box was gone.

And the area where the box had been - and a good bit more around that - was buried several feet deep in new gravel; the gravel had push marks on it, like it had been shoved around by a bulldozer.

I used some words that are not in the first 164 pages of my book of spiritual discpline.

I used those words twice.

And, while I was standing there on the gravel, it occurred to me to look around - what if, just what if, when they had moved the box, my keys had perhaps moved with it a bit? What if they weren't underneath all of those tons of gravel?

And then I saw, off to my left - there was another big iron box - a smaller big iron box - and somebody had put my keys on a lip on the back of that box.

Somebody was both observant enough, and thoughtful enough, to have seen my keys fall on the ground, realized that those keys belonged to that SUV, and put the keys somewhere where the owner would see them while he was standing there cussing.

I drove around, found some construction folks, and asked the foreman about it - nope, they hadn't had anything to do with that gravel. That was another crew that was working somewhere else. So I kept driving around, and couldn't find the folks who did this for me.

So now I'm going to buy a six-pack of good beer - not the kind that I used to drink - and put it in the place where those keys were left for me to find, with a note on the six-pack thanking whoever did that.

Somebody told me, when I told them about this - he said "You must be living right". I said, no, that the guy who put my keys there is living right - I'm just the beneficiary.

        

Ethel and I spent much of the weekend at high elevation.


                 

I took this shot from around 11,400 feet on the north slope of Engineer Mountain, during yesterday's hike.

The weekend started out on Friday evening (as weekends have a tendency to do) when Ethel and I went to drive around and figure out where my Saturday long run was going to be. The idea was that this would be a crewed run - that I would run with nothing but my GPS, and she would drive the course to furnish Gatorade, Succeed pills, those little-bitty energy drinks, and motivation.

First we tried to drive up Kendall Mountain in Silverton - bad idea. That road has enough big rocks on it to shake your SUV right over the edge - and it's a serious edge. She didn't feel comfortable driving up it, and I didn't feel comfortable running up it, either. It seemed pretty steep, and pretty rocky to try to run when it's that steep. Turns out that it is about 10.1% grade - more on that later.

In order to get to Silverton, we drove up and over Coal Bank Pass, where I ran the previous Saturday. That's a fun run, but a workout - but I know that it tops out at 10,600 and I figured that I needed to go higher than that, as Imogene is at 13,120 feet. And the Coal Bank climb is only about 6.8 % grade - more on that later.

We drove up to Ouray and drove up the Imogene Pass road itself, which is easily drivable up to about the 5.5 mile mark - and it's a beautiful road, and I was thinking as we were driving up it "...this ain't so bad. I can handle this." Ethel said that she'd love to crew me there, as she could hike and take pictures while waiting for me to catch up with her.

We decided to head back the next morning and do the run there - but we wound up being delayed in Ouray because we were eating catfish at the Red Mountain Inn.

It's actual native catfish, and it seemed very good - until I realized that I was eating Rocky Mountain Catfish, and then remembered about Rocky Mountain Oysters, and suddenly I couldn't put on enough tartar sauce.

So, we got home pretty late, and thus realized that we shouldn't try driving back to Ouray, and I did the run up in the Cascade Divide area on forest service roads, and it was a lot of fun (or as much fun as a 20 mile run on hills at elevation can be).

Running at high elevation isn't hard - as long as you're not running very far. In fact, you can sprint at elevation faster than you can at sea level, because the air isn't slowing you down as much. Running at those speeds and distances is called anaerobic running, because your leg muscles are using the oxygen that's already stored up down there - they aren't counting on your lungs to keep them going.

But as soon as you are running longer than (say) 400 meters or so, running at high elevation is much harder - because now you're running aerobically, and you need to use the oxygen that's in the air to replenish your tissues. And the oxygen just ain't there.

The Mexico City Olympics was up around 7000 feet elevation. The sprint records set there lasted for years - but the distance events were all won in really slow times.

You'd think that, on top of a mountain, there would be MORE air. You can look all around you and what do you see? AIR!

But the higher you get, the less air that there is available - and the less air, the less oxygen. The partial pressure of the oxygen stops being enough to force its way into your blood vessels somewhere below the summit of Everest.

That's not a danger in the Rockies, but it's still a problem. Sea level air pressure is listed as 29.92 inches of mercury - in other words, the air is pushing hard enough to push a column of mercury up about 30 inches into a small tube.

But at 10,000 feet, that column of mercury will only go 20.58 inches - just about a third less air to breathe.

So when I was running on Saturday morning, mostly up above 10,000 feet, I had one-third less air to run with. So I wasn't running very fast.

It wore me out - but I felt better by Sunday morning, so I did a short 5 miler, just going up as high as 9400 feet or so and then back down.

But Sunday afternoon we went up the Engineer Mountain trail just as high as Ethel wanted to go, which was just shy of 12,000 feet  - and I was in no hurry to keep going higher myself, as it was getting difficult to move my legs. I was pretty tired from the weekend, and there was less oxygen up there than I wanted.

All of this training is aimed at my running then Imogene Pass Run on September 11th.

So this morning, reviewing the weekend's training, I decided to take a look at the course description and elevation profile again, and put the numbers from the elevation/distance writeup into an Excel spreadsheet.

What I learned from that exercise is this - past the point where Ethel and I turned around on Friday night, the course gets STEEP.

From mile 5.45 to mile 10, at the top, it's an average grade of 14.1%.

More than twice as steep as Coal Bank Pass. Half again as steep as Kendall Mountain.

That's not a road. That's a ski slope .

And, when I looked at that distance to be covered at that degree of slope, I felt a terror down inside - way down inside; about three inches below my belly button, and about an inch-and-a-half behind the skin; right around the place where the large intestine heads south. It was an area of physical terror larger than a golf ball but smaller than a tennis ball, and it was sort of dark orange with an edge coating of red.

When I lean over, I can feel that ball of terror get bisected by the waistband of my pants. It's a tangible thing. It's as real as you are - realer, actually, because I don't know that anybody is reading this, but I know that that ball of terror is angry at me.

(Let nobody say that Jim Puckett isn't in touch with his feelings).

Since that time, I've been trying to figure out some way to back out of this race and keep my dignity, but I'm starting to think that the whole "keep your dignity" thing is optional. I'm about ready to decide that I need to head back to New River to take care of my queen palm trees, or my dog. Or maybe something at work needs to be dealt with in person and can't be handled remotely. Perhaps I have a periodontal appointment.

Come to think of it, Ethel needs to replace her license plates, and she has to go back to get an emissions test.

That's my definition of "an emergency".