Big Mountains and High Elevation

Day 5 – Matt is traversing through the saguache range right now, and I’m looking up at the mountains from a cafe in Buena Vista. This range just south of Leadville has the highest concentration of 14er’s in the state, with something like 14 or 15 all crammed into a few square miles. The mountains are HUGE.

Day 3 ended with Matt coming into the Mt. Massive trailhead just before midnight. I was psyched because that meant we could all get some sleep finally. But no, Captain Energy was riding high and decided to do the next section right then. So Ben and I fueled him up and then dragged our sleep deprived selves around to the next spot, above Twin Lakes. We got to sleep a little before three and then slept in until seven. Awesome.

Day 4 was painful. Matt had not had enough sleep and the mounting fatigue brought him down early in the day. He took a nap at one point, but it still wasn’t quite enough to get him going. So we decided to finish the day a little early, with slightly less than 40 miles for the day. The logic behind this was that Matt could hang out at camp a little, eat a lot and catch up on sleep. We had a lot of fun last night just lounging around with zero stress about crew points or sleep deprivation.

So now he’s on to day 5 and feeling pretty good, all things considered. He’s a little behind the desired pace but we are all confident that last nights extra rest will provide an advantage in the end. The challenge he has taken on is pretty incredible, but he is holding up amazingly well considering he’s run nearly 250 miles in the last 4.5 days. Yikes. Crewing for him is like a longer version of crewing for a 100, but being a part of this is really exciting and makes me want to do something similar myself. But not for a while. Thanks again to all the sponsors. We’re going into Salida today to pick up supply drops at the post office, courtesy of Nuun, Black Diamond and Montrail. I’ll update this again as soon as possible.

Tagged as: Colorado Trail