Category Archives: Travel

Leadville 100 Trail Run – A View from the Sidelines

August 19, 2014 by Jeff C | Comments Off

As a spectator watching the 30-hour Leadville Trail 100 Run last weekend, I watched the 4 a.m. pre-dawn start on Saturday, put in a very long day along the course, got a nice dinner and a full night’s sleep, then woke up , had breakfast, and headed down to watch most of the runners cross the finish line mid-morning on Sunday.

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The Leadville Trail 100 Run starts in the dark, at 4 a.m. in downtown Leadville

About half of the 700 or so amazingly fit and marginally insane runners who crossed the start line at 4am last Saturday made it back to finish in downtown Leadville — after an almost unbelievable 100-mile trail run — before the 30-hour time cutoff.  One hundred miles.  On foot.  All of it between 9200 and 12,600 feet elevation, and doing more climbing than an ascent of Kilimanjaro.

Even for someone who’s done several “ultra” endurance events (on foot, bike, and otherwise, and including some in Leadville‘s thin air), the 100 mile mountain trail run is hard to get your head around.  Of the lucky half that do finish, the vast majority take over 24 hours — most watching two days’ sunrises during the same race.  They don’t sleep — they barely even stop moving.  I was eager to get some pictures of the event, but a major motive for my spontaneous trip to Colorado was to see if the Run was something I might conceivably do someday.  The verdict?  I’m not so sure.

A few miles into the race, before sunrise on the first morning, the racers start a trail that skirts the edge of Turquoise Lake, west of Leadville.  You can see the runners spread out for miles along the lakeshore, their headlamps and flashlights twinkling through the trees and outlining the edge of the lake with bluish light.

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A three-mile-long string of runners makes its way along the trail at the edge of Turquoise Lake during the first hours of the LT100 Trail Run.

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The signature features of the Leadville course are its two separate ascents of  12,600-foot-high Hope Pass — once in each direction at mile 45 and mile 55 of the run.  The aid station near the top was a great place to watch a few hours of the race mid-afternoon on Saturday.  It took well over two hours to hike up to the top, so there were hardly any other spectators and only a small squad of volunteers up there handing out water and food.  There were 20 llamas hanging out — they’d carried all the supplies up there because the trails up are too high, steep, narrow and rocky for any vehicles.  We watched the leaders coming back over the pass on the inbound leg, and watched most of the more mortal racers hiking up the mountain — still less than halfway through the race after nearly 12 hours.

The guy in the yellow shorts is Robert Krar — flying down the mountain after his second ascent of Hope Pass.  He went on to win the race that night with a time of just 16 hours and 9 minutes.

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We cheered for and chatted with dozens of runners, often the same faces several times in different locations.  Dramas unfolded, and faces became familiar.  Inevitably, we remembered them with descriptive nicknames.  There was British Guy.  Sandals.  Bathroom Guy.  Peeing Girl.  Elmo.  Duck Dynasty.  As we descended from Hope Pass, we found Air Force Dave still only halfway up on his first ascent at 4:15pm — the deadline to get over the pass.  We offered him some food and water and tried to buoy his spirits as he turned around and walked back downhill with us.    I saw him quietly remove his race number in a symbolic personal ceremony recognizing that his race had ended early with a “DNF” (Did Not Finish).   “Puker Guy” had a happier ending:  we first saw him in trouble at mile 43,  doubled over, nauseous and struggling, but happily we saw him crossing the finish line 57 miles (and about 17 hours) later, flanked by his celebrating friends and family.

Ken Chlouber, the founder of the Leadville Race Series, famously tells every 100-mile racer, “You are better than you think you are; you can do more than you think you can!”  I don’t think that’s true for everyone — certainly some folks aren’t even as good as they think they are or can’t actually do what they think they can.  Most people are afraid to ever find out; Leadville is one of the places you go to do that.  Somehow, every racer can and should be both proud and humbled, no matter how their race ends.  Win or lose, finish or fail, these were the folks who weren’t afraid learn whether Ken was right — about them.

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#674 Trevor Teeselink (center) was the “Last Ass Over the Pass” — the last finisher to reach the finish — just four minutes ahead of the 30 hour deadline.

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Two new friends I met and ran with some this summer in Leadville were among the 100-mile finishers.  Somehow I saw Stephanie Lefferts (in green and white) over and over during the race — both directions at Turquoise Lake, at Hope Pass and at the finish.  Her boyfriend Mike Ambrose was so fast (he finished in the top 20 despite a nasty fall that almost ended his race) I barely saw him during the race and missed his midnight finish.  After a nap and shower, he was back at the finish line to celebrate with Stephanie and her dad at 9:25 a.m. Sunday morning.  Congrats to them both.

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A Hawaiian Connection: Mahalo, United Airlines

June 20, 2014 by Jeff C | Comments Off
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The view of Honolulu and Waikiki from atop Diamond Head Crater.

On my way home from Australia, my connecting flight was cancelled, leaving me stranded in the middle of the Pacific and halfway home.  Happily, that was Honolulu.  My 2-hour layover became a 26-hour layover, leaving me time for dinner on the beach, a morning run to and up Diamond Head Crater, and an afternoon on Waikiki before heading back to the airport and resuming the trip.  I got just a handful of pictures.  It worked out well, so I’ve decided to wholly forgive (and maybe even THANK?) United Airlines for the screw-up.

At least the botched connection had a huge silver lining.   The airline debacle on the front end of that trip was all downside.  I arrived in Cairns, Australia on a Sunday, and my bicycle (needed for the triathlon I was there to do) arrived four days late, after an unintended (and unattended) tour of Tokyo and Sydney (neither of which were on my travel itinerary).  At least it got there in plenty of time for the race.

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Waikiki Beach, at the Moana Surfrider Hotel

 

 

 

 

SCUBA Dive the Great Barrier Reef: Check!

June 20, 2014 by Jeff C | Comments Off
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Scott Humphries Down Under

Even though I spent almost two weeks on the banks of the Coral Sea in Cairns, Australia — the primary port for access to the Great Barrier Reef —  crappy weather and busy schedules (for other priorities) meant I did just one day of SCUBA diving.  I’d spent much more time than that getting READY (and learning how) to SCUBA dive in preparation of the trip.  At least I got to dive with a couple of good buddies (Shane Merz and Scott Humphries).  SCUBA diving the Great Barrier Reef seems to be on almost everyone’s “bucket list,” so I couldn’t leave Cairns without doing it.

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Sub-sea Shane Merz

I actually don’t like or use the term “bucket list,” as the rather morbid perspective is about kicking the bucket and racing the clock before you croak.  I’ve got more lists than you can imagine of things I’m hoping to see and do in my life, but the focus isn’t on my impending demise.  They’re just a lifetime “to-do” list.

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As they’re quick to tell you down here, the Great Barrier Reef is one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World (I’ve only seen three!).  It’s a World Heritage Site (I’ve seen maybe 30 of the 1,ooo or so sites!), and allegedly it’s visible from space.  As for checking it off a bucket list, it’s hard to know when you can really do that:  It’s 1500 miles long (and is actually a network of hundreds of smaller reefs), so I figure I’ve seen about .0001% of it.  I think that counts; I’m checking it off the list.

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As I described recently in my post about SCUBA School in Belize, I have an underwater housing for my tiny Canon S100 pocket camera.  It’s not a big, professional underwater setup, but it works okay in shallow water with decent light.  The cloudy skies here made it marginal.  I noticed there were several shops in Cairns where you could easily rent an underwater digital camera as good or better than what I brought, so if you SCUBA, there’s no excuse for not bringing a camera.

 

Ironman Cairns (Australia): Swim / Bike / Rain!

June 18, 2014 by Jeff C | Comments Off

I was a little busy, so the photo credits here go to others (Stacy Humphries and the photo service FinisherPix).  

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My Australian/Texan buddy, Scott Humphries, crossing the finish line at Ironman Cairns Australia, toting a Texas Lone Star flag.

One of my best friends is Australian.  You’d never know it, though.  He moved to Texas in his youth and has no hint of an accent.  Even so – and because of those Aussie roots — Scott had my and Shane Merz’s full proxy when it came time to select which Australian Ironman site we would do this year.  He picked Cairns, a small city on Australia’s northeast Queensland coast and a primary gateway to the Great Barrier Reef.  As race day approached and the weather forecasts continued to say “Rain” every day, the phrase “Who picked this?” became a regular refrain.

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That’s me, crossing the same finish line – quite a bit later. At least the rain had let up a little by the time I finished!

If you read this blog regularly, you may remember that my friends and I have set a goal – a “quest” — to do an Ironman Triathlon (swim 2.4 miles; bike 112 miles; then run 26 miles) on every continent.  Australia was our fourth, and fortunately there was less trauma (i.e., no hospitalization required) compared to our European leg.  Though Cairns had promised to be sunny and tropical, on race day Down Under there was never a moment that it was not raining.  The ocean swim was rough enough to make me a little seasick (and the Ironman ‘crowd’ was rough enough to give me a black eye in the first ten minutes of the swim).  But we all finished just fine; in fact, the other guys each had personal bests.

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Me, Scott Humphries, and Shane Merz — minute before the swim start of Ironman Cairns Australia.

We’d debated for months exactly how to pronounce “Cairns.”  When you hear the local Aussies say it, the name sounds like those metal containers for soup (“cans”).  So arguably the “r” is silent – but not really.  They think they ARE prounouncing the “r.”  Australians describe a malt-based lager as “bee-uh” and an automobile as a “cah”, and in the same way, Cairns sounds like “Cans.”  But just as a visitor to Boston should not adopt an affected New England accent to discuss the clam “chow-dah” he ate in “Hah-vud” Square, neither should an American in Cairns pretend to pronounce the place “Cans” like the locals do.  So it’s Cairns – with an R.

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Shane Merz — crossing the line to become a FIVE-time Ironman!

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This is me — somewhere close to the end of the bike course.

Festival in Chissi, Bolivia

May 16, 2014 by Jeff C | Comments Off

I sometimes make a hobby out of choosing a random side road somewhere in the world and just seeing what I find.    ——       I should make clear that these images are from Chissi, a town far away and very different from Capayque, the village that has been the subject of several recent posts.

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I turned down the dirt road toward the Bolivian pueblo of Chissi just hoping to find a better view of the Lake Titicaca shoreline near the Strait of Tiquina.  But as I drove down the hill into town, I could see some sort of event going on in a big field — with dozens of people all in bright pink costumes.  Of course I drove right toward it.

As the pictures show, the men’s costumes were the gaudiest rhinestone-cowboy looking things you’ve ever seen – even putting aside the fact that they were hot pink.  The women’s costumes were slightly less outrageous – Bolivian women wear those tall “bowler” hats and those broad skirts all the time as everyday wear, so the costume just spruced up their usual wardrobe profile and turned it pink.

It was the day after Easter, and apparently Sunday’s religious celebrations give way to a carnival-like Easter Monday celebration with lots of costumes, dancing, a town feast, and quite a lot of beer.  I parked at the edge of the field and walked toward the action.

Besides my being out of costume, I was the tallest person in town, the only one with light-colored eyes, the only one with clipper-cut hair, and the only one who spoke English.*  It took about 10 seconds before I was invited into their circle, about 20 seconds before I was presented with a cup of beer and about 2 minutes for the crowd to form around me for a group photo, then about another 2 minutes ‘til I was put into one of those pink vests and hats and instructed to pose for more ridiculous pictures.

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The band (trumpets, baritones, drums and a cymbal) would play for 20 minutes or so (and the costumed folk would dance), then rest for 20 minutes or so (and the costumed folks would drink more beer).  At about 1 o’clock, the whole group danced down a path through town; several of my new friends grabbed me and pantomimed “comidas” (food).  We all ate the same thing:  A bowl (no silverware) with a chunk of “carne” (maybe beef, maybe not), a couple of different potato-like things, a roasted-in-the-peel plantain, and some lettuce and tomatoes.  It was a lot of food, but they’d made a big deal out of presenting it to the conspicuous gringo so I stuffed myself as best I could.

The photographic challenges were many.  The Bolivians seemed to be either painfully bashful about being photographed or uncontrollable hams, with no real middle ground.   I was almost constantly being tugged at and urged to take a different picture or try to answer a question.  As is often the case, it was hard to both participate in the event and photograph it.

I showed these pictures to another Bolivian man from the opposite end of the country.  He thought these were Peruvian traditions and costumes – and indeed Chissi is just 20 miles or so from the Peru border.   For those readers who have seen my recent posts from Capayque (in the mountains on the opposite side of Lake Titicaca), I should emphasize that this is a very different area.  Chissi is just a couple of miles from the main highway and — as the cervezas and elaborate costumes reflect — these folks clearly had a lot more disposable income than the people of remote Capayque.

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I stayed about four hours in Chissi – scrapping my plans to visit the ruins at Tiwanaku that day and putting my pitiful Spanish to the test with the simplest communications.   What country am I from?  Yes, I think your pueblo is bien (or was it bueno?).   Smile for a foto?  Comidas?  (Si!)  Mas cerveza?  (No, gracias,  I’m driving back to La Paz this evening.)  I wound up racing back to La Paz mostly in the dark, through a two-hour Bolivian traffic jam coming back into town.

There was a simultaneous celebration going on a few dozen yards away, which seemed to be some kind of harvest festival.

There was a simultaneous celebration going on a few dozen yards away, which seemed to be some kind of harvest festival.

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All this happened on my first full day in Bolivia – driving around by myself before I met the group in La Paz that went to Capayque.   My habit of turning down random side roads in search of something interesting was surely rewarded once again.

I’d like to think that if a Spanish-speaking Bolivian stranger wandered into the middle of a small town festival somewhere in America, he’d be welcomed and embraced to a similar extent, but I don’t know if that’s true.  Let’s hope so.

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Notice the Gringo in the back row.

Notice the Gringo in the back row.

 

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* I suspect I was also about the only adult who was wholly sober, and the only person with any substantial amount of hair on his face or arms.  It seemed like I may also have been in a minority who had no visible gold on the their teeth.