Leadville Update – Tour de Mt Massive | The Adventures of Emily & Chad

I focused last week on recovering. My recovery seemed to be going slowly at high elevation so on July 3 I drove to Salida to get to a lower elevation for a day of recovery. The lower elevation definitely helped and I felt much better on Wednesday. I had a couple of great mt bike rides on Wednesday and Thursday, then ran from the Winfield road over Hope Pass to Twin Lakes and back on Friday with local SLC speedster Jay Aldous. I was hesitant about the run due to my calves, but after 9 miles, the lactic acid seemed to move out of them and they felt very good. Saturday I rode a section of the LT100 Bike course (Half Moon Road to Twin Lakes). It was good to get out on the course. I was hoping to see the entire course last week, but that didn’t pan out with my recovery so I will need to do that on my next trip out prior to the races. I will have a busy 2 weeks before the LT100 Bike and run as I will want to see ~60 miles of the bike course and ~30 miles of the run course.

The highlight of my trip so far has been Tour de Mt Massive with Jared Campbell on Sunday. Jared and Mindy came through Leadville Saturday on their way to Silverton for Hardrock 100. We hung out on Saturday, had a great meal at Tennessee Pass Café, then watch the movie “Race Across the Sky” which features the 2009 LT100 Bike. It was fun to see the movie again, it had some great course footage to help bring back some of my memories from when I road the race in 2004, and it helped to get me excited about the race.

Jared and I wanted to get in an adventure run on Sunday. Mt Massive is the second highest peak in Colorado at 14,421’. It has 5 summits over 14,000’ on its 3 mile ridge plus another 2 summits over 13,000’. The mountain truly is massive with there being over 1/2 square mile over 14,000’. It has the largest area over 14,000’ of any peak in the continental US.

Mt Massive ridgeline as viewed from the Silver Rush 50 Course East of Leadville

Jared and I wanted to hit all of these peaks. Since we had the luxury of a car shuttle (thanks Mindy), we put together a route up the North Ridge from the Windsor Lake Trail Head and down the South East Ridge. In total, our run was 11.5 miles and 5,300’ of climbing. We were only on a trail for ~1.5 miles which made it a great run. Since we both have races next weekend, we did the route at a very easy pace, not running any of the climbs, very little of the ridge, and keeping the pace easy on the descent. The run turned out to be fantastic. It was great to have a running companion for this trip, we spent a significant amount of time over 14,000’ which will pay us back for our races, and we got to do a full ridge traverse of Mt Massive which is looked at from Leadville everyday.

Starting at the ridge, we hit the following high points