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".