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Yesterday: 20 min easy jog in the forest.  I was feeling sort of blah.
Today: 1 hr easy jog on the treadmill.  During it, I watched a documentary on the Pikes Peak Marathon.  I first found out about it and Matt Carpenter when we were living in Colorado Springs.  Pikes Peak is always in view.  I'd spend hours on my bike without a map, but I couldn't get lost for long because of that mountain.  We hiked up it once too.  The air at the top is pretty thin, and we got giddy.  There's a gift store with a bunch of shiny breakable things--I think I've written about this already on this blog--and shiny breakable things are perhaps ill-advised at 14000 feet.  They are sooo shiny, they hurt, and they break.  So we giggled, and kept giggling because the giggling was so funny, and then we passed out over tables in the dining area.  It took us about eight hours to hike to the top, but we stopped a lot.   We took it pretty easy but started at two or three in the morning.  Gotta beat the storms!

Anyway, I can't imagine running down Pikes Peak, much less doing the double.  I was confused when that was first mentioned in the documentary; I thought the guy meant the marathon, up and down.  Nope, there's an ascent to the top and then a shuttle down the first day, and then the marathon, ascent and descent, the following day.  And people do this double.  Brutal.  Can't imagine flying in and suddenly dealing with the altitude.  It took me a while to get used to it. 

And those people in the documentary saying that they're flatlanders from Kansas City...Kansas City isn't actually all that flat!  Even the nearby town I lived in had some decent hills (due to limestone bedrock being eroded by underground water--lots of little but steep hills, plus apparently caves and an underground city...we weren't there long enough.  But, anyway, Colorado is in a different league altogether.

Gotta wrap this up and eat my fries and watch The X-Files!