The longest 7-miler I've ever "run"

Today I needed to do a 7-mile run. Since we had the day off, Cory and I decided to drive to Boulder to run some trails (but he did his own thing since he is so much faster). I put together a loop that included summiting Green Mountain. The way up was not super runnable and it took me an embarrassing amount of time to finish it. I found that the Greenman trail is a lot rockier than the Gregory Canyon trail. According to his blog, it seems that Anton Krupicka runs this trail many times each week... not sure how he does it.

Funny story about Green Mountain. The summer of 2009 Cory and I met working at camp. After camp was finished we did a 6-day backpacking trip in Rocky Mountain NP with his sister and one of our friends. Then we visited Cory's Uncle Roger and Aunt Brenda who live in Boulder. Roger took us for an early morning hike up Green Mountain and he warned us that we would be ascending around 1000 feet per mile. Cory also took me aside and warned me that Roger would be super fast and that it would be fine if I didn't want to do the hike. I understood that Roger is a crazy athletic man (he's about to finish off all of the 13ers and 14ers) but I wasn't about to be shown up by a man in his late 50s.

We began the hike and I soon realized that I would need to be jogging to keep up with Roger's hiking pace. I was humbled. I didn't want to be the one slowing the group down and so I decided to turn around. Fortunately at this point, our friend Matthew let me know that he was feeling sick. Matthew's illness was also a funny story. Matthew didn't want to spend money on eating out and so he decided to buy some bologna and white bread at Target. Unfortunately he kept the bologna in the hot car and after a few days of consuming warm, processed meat he was out of commission. Matthew never cuts out of an adventure so we knew something was really wrong.

Anyway, only Cory's sister made it to the top with Roger that day. I keep trying to convince her to run some longer trail races because she is super human. Watch out for Kristen Linfield some day.

The view