Leadwoman – the sign up decision

Fast forward to 2018. In February, I got word that a group of ladies I used to run with were going to do Rim2Rim2Rim (R2R2R) that September.  This is where you hike (or run if you want) the Grand Canyon from one rim to the other and back.  In this case without stopping.  They had a large group of women that were originally interested, but as life would have it, several dropped off and the group eventually became 7. I basically invited myself (they gladly said yes) and took over someone’s hotel reservation as this is the sort of thing you have to plan a year in advance.  That same April, I was in Keystone, CO at a conference (which turned out to be the weekend I got engaged).  There was a fantastic and very memorable speaker that dedicated a lot of his research to competing at altitude.  My take away was instead of 3 weeks acclimation, you could also have multiple exposures to altitude during your training/race season and that will help tremendously with training and racing at altitude.  No more getting there three weeks before to acclimate, since that’s pretty impossible in my world anyways.  My wheels started turning then about returning to Leadville, but I had a wedding to plan now.  We had just bought a house in March, moved in together in July (since we were engaged now) and the wedding planning began (well, not really, but it sounds good—I really procrastinated that one).  While in Colorado that year, we had planned to do 2 or 3 14ers so we got in Quandary and Grey’s.  Weather came in so we didn’t get to make our way to Tory’s.  This ended up being the beginning of my 1+ year of training for Leadwoman (which I didn’t know I was doing at this point).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That July, my best friend, Courtney, made a post on Facebook about getting a group together for Ragnar Tampa trail race.  Her post quickly turned in to 2 teams that would participate at Ragnar that December, with me being on one of them.  On 7/27/2018, I put my Garmin back on and training REALLY began.  Immediately for R2R2R and Ragnar, but ultimately for Leadwoman.