Tuesday 072412

Apparently Boulder local runner, TJ Doherty was critically injured in a car vs. bike accident recently.   TJ – while I did not know him well (I only ran with him a few times) was a pretty bright light of a guy.  I recall seeing him at the Superior Downhill mile a bunch of years ago.  He had broken a collar bone a bit before, but raced anyway.  With a sling.  And he came through the first quarter well under 60.  Got this pic from Justin, who was his roomie multiple times.

Truly sad on so many fronts.

While the timing of this death, the Aurora shootings, the death of the Boy Scouts in Wyoming in a car accident while back from summer camp, the death of a coworker to cancer, are a coincidental, it has certainly struck a chord with me.  Life is fragile, and short.  Make it count.
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Wanted to share this story from HR before I forgot it. 
The finish of HR is  torturous.  I’d say ridiculously torturous, but in comparison to the rest of the course, it is not.  It is really just a last little chuckle at you, poking a wound.  The end (this way) is not particularly hilly, or high, it just appears to be unexpectedly long.  You can see the town of Silverton, you are dancing on the edge of it, all the big climbs are done, and you are on this single track just a bit east of the town.  It just seems to go on forever.  It is sort of like waking up on Christmas morning like a kid.  You have been waiting for this, but then your parents tell you that you cannot open presents until 3 in the afternoon.

Tim wanted to be done so bad, but this trail was going on and on. A girl (not racing) came on the trail from the opposite direction, and he asked her how far it was into town.  “No more than a couple miles, I am sure of it.”  We keep going and Tim is working and READY to be done.  The news of this being only a couple of miles gets mixed reviews.  It seems about right, but damn – he’d sure like to be done.

She then comes back on us from behind and (after after briefly freaking out that she was someone rolling him up) was heading back into town to finish her run, some 20 minutes later.  We have probably covered a mile and a half in this time (before you condemn that pace, you need to go do 99 miles of the HR course).  Tim bluntly asks “How far did you say it is into town?”  Her reply:  “No more than 3 miles.” 
I thought she was going to eat one of those trekking poles. 
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Anyway … looks to be one of those weeks where I am a one legged man in a butt kicking contest.  We started yesterday at 0730 and didn’t finish until 2100.  Ugh.  Need to keep the composure.
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Anton is back and says he thinks he could break the HR record.  I dig the confidence.
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Evening – I was able to break out a bit earlier and eyeballed San Bruno hill, a bit to the north of me.  I jogged through a slightly annoying set of crosswalks, lights, and relatively pedestrian unfriendly set of sidewalks and diversions, before I found myself on the shoulder of the south side of this hill.  After several disappointing run into dead ends in various neighborhoods, I spotted a guy who was jogging up and seemed to know where he was going.  I slipped about 100 yards into his draft, but then saw he also hit another dead end.  As I came up on him I asked him if he knew where he was going.  Jamal was also an out of towner, in on business from Seattle.  We made our way around the west side of the hill, chatting about running, when he ran briefly at Oregon, various ultras, the scene in Ashland, etc.  Eventually we found a nice little connector up, and got up about 1100 feet above the ocean pretty quick.  And probably even more quick down (off the east side).

Cruddy camera phone pix that I would have loved in the 90s.
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Funny, I will probably never see Jamal again, but we just enjoyed the run and each other’s conversation without little consideration of that.  That is the way so many runners are out of the gate.