Cory and I ran the Copper Mountain Trail Half Marathon on Sunday as part of the Colorado Running Festival. Overall I had a great time



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This course is fairly technical and hilly, I wouldn’t recommend it to newer trail runners.

Of note:

• Length – 13(ish) miles in true trail race fashion the mile markers were more suggestive than accurate and with the tree cover my garmin was unsure as well
• Elevation – this race starts at 9,200 ft and climbs to over 10,000 ft this is not kind to low lander
• Course – this is a double loop (bow-tie) course. The first is a true loop nothing crazy here but the second loop is an out and back on true (2 ft wide) single track. So on my way out I was jumping out of the way of all the speedy runners, including Cory) on their way down.  
• Hills – The race site said 2400’ of vertical gain, my garmin said about 3200’ either way there is basically no flat sections.
• Hydration – There were 3 aid stations along the course, but the portion along the Colorado Trail just couldn’t support one. This section was a little over three miles so not too long but something to think about on hot days.

All that adds up to this not being a PR course, it is the most beautiful race I have ever run and all the racers are so kind and friendly.

I don’t have any photos of the race since I didn’t think to bring my camera with me, in the future it will be worth it to finish a couple minutes slower in order to capture the scenery. Overall it was a good race, fairly small and held in a cute little mountain village. I would recommend it to anyone wanting to run trails, breathe little to no oxygen, and participate in a no frills race. 

It felt really good to get back out and race after a little hiatus, I am starting to feel like a ‘real’ runner.

So normally I would never post an advertisement but as I was cruising YouTube this commercial popped up from Always. I was drawn in and had to watch the whole thing. I found it moving and a great message, so I had to share:

Hope you like it too!

There are many transitions in life, for me accepting transitions can be more difficult than the actual transition. This year has been full of transitions some that started out bad but ended up good; many months of unemployment for my hubby that led to a great new job, A nightmare selling process of our home that led to getting our dream house that we love, etc.

The last transition is still in the slightly painful place for me. The short story is that racing an Ironman is not in the cards for me this year. With four moves and a fairly debilitating medical issue that knocked me down for over a month I had to accept that training for IM Canada just wasn’t happening. I can only hope that it leads to something better in the end.

The good news is that I am now fully recovered from my medical issue but missing about six weeks of training so close to the race just wasn’t going to cut it. As a was trying to recover I got a terrible stomach flu, and I was a ball of stress worrying about the training I was missing, knowing that Canada was slipping through my fingers. Now I could have transferred to a later Ironman, Tahoe is still open and Maine was newly announced but I wasn’t excited about either. At that point I didn’t have the heart to keep trying and just wanted to focus on getting well. So I let my third straight year of Ironman racing go.

At first I will admit it was a relief to not stress about training that I was missing but with some distance I am starting to miss it. But with letting Ironman for this year go, I have started to dream about different (maybe bigger) challenges.

When getting back into “training” I was craving simplicity, especially with a lot of traveling coming up. So I have been focusing on running and trying to increase my milage. Following my heart, most of my miles have been on trails.

While I miss triathlon training and racing, I am loving the focus on running and especially trail running. I am also ready to start racing again so I will start with a trail half marathon at Copper Mountain, leading up to a couple marathons and a 50k in October.

We’ll see how this summer/fall goes assuming everything goes well I will be chasing some bigger goals on the trails. While I do miss Ironman, I WILL be back just not this year. I will admit it’s pretty fun to chase some new dreams.

Has life ever gotten in the way of your plans?

Just two tiny months until I toe the line at Ironman Canada. I am very excited about this race and about the venue. I can’t believe it will be here so quickly and the amount of work I need to do to get there. The next seven weeks will be full on peak training mode before taper and racing. The weather has turned so there will be many hours spent in the mountains, both in the saddle and on the trails. Canada isn’t an easy course but I am not in it for “easy”

This year hasn’t been easy with lost jobs, selling houses, moving twice and dental disaster that I won’t bore you with. The only thing to do is to shake the year off, and focus on the training. I have been looking forward to Canada for so long I want to show up healthy and ready.

So here’s to the unofficial start of summer and peak ironman training!

Man, I am late to this party! It’s been a bumpy ride and I hadn’t even thought of monthly goals until yesterday but I think it’s will be fun to bring them back, I do love goals. Now that my focus is shifting to training for Ironman Canada I feel refreshed and ready to get back at it. I am searching for local races to fill in my spring and summer calendar and getting excited about upcoming adventures.

March and April are crazy months here in Colorado, swinging from beautiful sun drenched 70 degree days to ice and snow the next. At least the mornings are beautiful.

With March having travel, a sort of race (details coming soon) and crazy weather I will keep my goals simple. In 2012 I was prepping for Ironman Coeur d’Alene I had what felt like a really solid month of training in March. So my goal is to beat all my totals from March 2012. Canada is just a month later so this seems like a good comparison.

I finally made the move to self hosted!

I have owned the domain name Chasingmyjoy.com for some time now but didn’t really know how to make the move to self hosted. With a little research and help it turned out to be fairly easy. I think I have the main things set up like all my archives moved over and auto redirecting set up but please let me know if something isn’t working.

It feels good to have made the move but now I need to figure out all the finer points but it’s fun to figure it all out.

Have any tips for a newbie self host-er? Anything you wish you had known earlier, or great tool you have found?

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