Dumb and Dumber

Celeste and I are still soliciting donations for our Courage Classic Ride in July.  We're trying to raise $1,000 each, $2,000 total.  Any amount you can contribute would be just wonderful, thanks!  Donate here:

http://www.couragetours.com/2011/celeste

or here:

http://www.couragetours.com/2011/srslush

And I'm blogging about my attempts to train for this ride.  Follow along with my misadventures!  And donate!!

Well things got a little crazy today, and probably not in a good way.  Today was a Towers day, which means all the crazy trail runners in town congregate at Horsetooth Mountain Park west of town to run up Towers road.  It's a beast of a workout, and we do it every other Thursday, rain or shine.  I had the hair-brained idea to ride my bike to towers, run towers, and then bike back home.  And believe it or not, Alex had the same idea!  Hey if another person wants to do it, how crazy can it be?  And our friend Jonathan Z does this all the time, so it really wasn't that special of a plan.

So after work I rode to Alex's house, and we biked up to Towers together.  The Fort was pounded with a furious rainstorm earlier in the afternoon but things seemed to be clearing up, and our bike ride was dry and uneventful.  We got to towers, changed from biking shoes to running shoes, and ran a little one mile warm up.  Oh I hate how my legs feel trying to run after a ride, all wobbly and such.  Best to work out of that before tackling towers.

Towers is about 3.4 miles one way, and sports about 1,650 feet of climbing.  It's a beast, don't kid yourself!  I was planning on giving it a nice easy effort today, knowing that I still had to ride my bike home after the attempt, but two things happened that caused me to end up pushing the pace.  One, well, hey, it's towers, baby, and I just get excited chugging up that hill!  I can't help it, somehow I think this is fun.  But second, the relatively nice weather we were enjoying started to turn naughty.  First a brisk wind picked up, usually in our faces.  Then low ominous clouds started to roll in from the south.  We were going to get hit with another storm.  I picked up the pace, thinking I could literally outrun the worst of the storm.  In hindsight I really should have just turned around.  Summit fever, catch it like the plague.  Thankfully nothing bad happened to me or any of our group but I don't think we were being very safe out there today.  I got to the top of towers and immediately turned around and headed back down.

By the time I got to the bottom the rain had started to come down.  Alex and I thought about throwing our bikes into one of the other runners' cars, but ultimately ego took over and we decided we'd ride home through the rain.  Last year at the Courage Classic Celeste and I got caught in a tremendous downpour so I figured I could use a little wet riding.  Oh what fun it was.  I was a little timid on my skinny tires, but Alex and I made it back to town without incident, unless you consider my feet getting soaked and my bike getting filthy incidents.  But it was yet another dumb thing to add to the rapidly growing list of dumb things I did today.

So when you add it all up, I got 26 miles of riding with probably 1,500 feet of climbing, and 8 miles of running with about 1,700 feet of climbing, all told.  A pretty good day's work.  A dumb day's work, but it's a good dumb.

This is for brave little Ziggy, who toughed out the thunder and lightning with Celeste on Towers today.  Yes this is pretty much the best painting ever.  I'm getting a tattoo of it on my shoulder.  Maybe the malamute on one shoulder and the lightning on the other.