Golden Gate Canyon: Take Three

Time for a real post with actual words and sentences in it!

Sometime in August, 2012 I went to Golden Gate Canyon State Park for my first taste of Colorado trails, and also my first trail experience after my DNF at North Face DC 50 Miler.

That's when the photo to the left happened. I got so carried away looking at the beautiful trees and feeling happy about being on a trail again that I forgot to actually look where I was stepping. And I wore road shoes out to the trail. I'm sucha amateur sometimes. After that spill, I retired from running for time being and took up crossfit instead, and here I am now trying to get back into the running groove.

A little over a month ago, I bought a Garmin 210 to replace my old running watch. Then I remembered how my old Garmin died on me before I crossed the finish line of Bear Mountain 50K. So I did some research (okay I didn't do hardly any research, I just asked a friend...kind of the same thing) and found out that for just a liiiiittle (a lot) more money, I could get the Garmin 910 XT, which has a battery life of 20 hours!!! SO I took my butt to REI and exchanged that bad boy and got an awesome sale price thanks to Memorial Day. Win all around!

I am in LOVE with this watch!



The following weekend, I decided to take my new watch out to Golden Gate Canyon for a trail run and see what the watch is capable of in terms of altimeter, etc. Well, I set out using my iPhone maps GPS and ended up in Golden at a mobile home park called Golden Gate. Not exactly what I was aiming for. I took two turns from there and somehow ended up at Red Rocks. I had to finally call a friend to get me back to Golden Gate...hours after I originally left the house. By the time I got to the park, I was hungry, it had gotten pretty dang cold outside and I was overall just done with it.

Can you see how ridiculous that day was? Point B was the trailer park, Point C is Red Rocks, and Point D is finally Golden Gate.

Once I finally had my park pass, got lost inside the park, finally found the trailhead I wanted and set out, it was overcast and about to rain. Lucky me. I got about half a mile down the trail when I decided it was to effing cold for me and turned back for the car. The fun thing was that the first half mile was mostly downhill. On the way back to the car, I had to stop and catch my breath (how out of shape AM I?!) thanks to me being a pansy about altitude.

The next day while waiting for the boyfriend's second soccer game to start, we got to chatting about how I might have exercise-induced asthma.  I've always thought I might have it, but in DC it was easier to run with it and Bruce was always sick so I never got it checked out. Now that I'm in Colorado and struggle to breathe when I'm not even moving, it's hard to ignore.

I went to the doctor, explained everything, and she prescribed me an inhaler to try out and see if it takes care of everything.

This past Saturday, the boyfriend and I decide to head back out to Golden Gate. He drove this time. We did not get lost. Hallelujah. I did my puffs of the inhaler before we set out for the trail. I'm really good at spraying my tongue with it. I was under the impression that he was going to go hike or do his own thing while I went for a run, but he told me at the last minute that he would run with me. Poor guy. I think he thought I was going to keel over out there.

Luckily this time it was a little warmer, but we did get rained on for most of the time we were out there. We start off by hiking, then ran the tiniest bit, and I started having a hard time breathing right away (on the mostly down hill area). I told him that we would have to walk for a while, so we did about 2.5 miles out...most of it downhill.

Things turned ugly when we turned around. Any slight incline left me wheezing ridiculously loud.

You could hear the hummingbirds everywhere!



At least it was pretty...



We had to stop several times for me to get my breathing under control, but we eventually made it back in one piece. Not going to lie, I wanted to cry a whole bucketload. So frustrating.

Woodpecker!

Normal Picture



Realized he just snapped twenty pictures in two seconds



Confiscating the camera



The trail we were on would be a nice one to run if I can get my breathing under control.

Last night I spent a frustrating amount of time trying to get all the Garmin software onto my computer so I can actually use the Garmin Connect website to track everything. It's pretty awesome! It shows you EVERYTHING! So on Saturday's hike, we went up to 9,285 ft elevation, with an elevation gain of 1,096 ft!

It's supposed to be a hot 98 degrees today, so I'll be heading to Anchor to do the Randy WOD, and maybe a short run after that. Giving the inhaler another go round.

Tough Mudder weekend is almost here and Cancun is less than two weeks away!!!!

Our hotel!