Second PR on Quandary in 8 Days

I use Strava to record my runs, connected to my Suunto Ambit2S through Movescount. Whew! that was a lot to say up front. Anyway, Strava has a feature where you can set start and end points for an objective, run, ride, whatever, and then everyone who follows the same "path" will be in a virtual competition to see who the "King of the Mountain" is. KOM is how they designate it. You can even set your "segment" as they call it to private so that you are competing only with yourself.



The photo above shows my PR from Monday, March 9, when I got 1:53:03 on the winter ascent route on the East Ridge of Quandary, a Colorado 14'er at 14,265'. I've been faster on the summer route, but this includes bad snow and bad weather usually.



I went back for another shot at it this morning (March 17, St. Patrick's Day) and of course took my green Black Diamond AT Ski Z-Poles. DOH! See the curious little bird there? This is at about 11,800' near where the summer and winter routes part ways.

There was a good whiteout going on, and I ended up being lost a few times in the cloud, with poor light, and the trail splitting a few dozen ways to avoid where the later/slower crowds postholed like huge plots of Swiss Cheese.

I did some on-the-fly pace math and determined that I would not be able to hit my 2nd-place goal of 1:45 but I could get a PR, so I kept the motivation determination up and made a solid effort, and sure enough, hit the summit at 1:50:53. Yeah, two minutes faster in 8 days. While being lost in a whiteout for at least 5 minutes of that.


Here's the screenshot from Strava for that. How do you like that little balloon there with the 185 BPM HR? That's extreme. Yeah. Me too.





Here is the summit, showing my running clothing and shoes.

If you want to know more about how to train and outfit yourself for extreme endurance events like this one, get in touch, or at least subscribe to my newsletter, okay? http://sevensummitsbody.com/blog/newsletter/

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