....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.