Number 40 was the Pueblo Marathon in Pueblo, Colorado on 24 February 2019. I finished in 4:26:11, 35th our of 82 finishers, 27th among 57 men, 4th of 11 men aged 50-59. Rachael ran the half in 2:41:27. This was the slowest run so far, but I feel pretty good about it. I hadn't trained very rigorously since completing number 39 and I thought that this time I would take it easy and see if I could finish comfortably. The answer this question was basically no, but it still felt good to be done and confident going into a busy marathon year.
While I have been to Colorado many times, my hitherto experience is East West, from Lyman to Grand Junction with many points in between. I had never before followed the front range as far south as Colorado Springs. My knowledge of Pueblo was based on the many public service announcments of my youth inviting me to write to the Federal Citizen Information Center. Apparently, at one point one in four Americans associated the word "Pueblo" with government publications. Now it seems that the web site usa.gov has replaced the former center but is still run out of Pueblo. Colorado's congressional delegation somehow has a long history of landing programs. Prior to this trip I had no idea Pueblo (the steel city) was a major steel manufacturing center, or that Colorado Fuel and Iron was the largest employer in the state for many years. The steel mill is still operating, although employment is now below 1,000. Seems like the history and present state of Pueblo would make for an interesting study, but this is not that story.
The Pueblo marathon is staged by Mad Moose, which runs events across Colorado and Utah. Supposedly, Pueblo lies in the banana belt of Colorado, with relatively little snow and milder temperatures than Denver. Somewhere we read that mid-February highs were around 50 degrees Farenheit. Two days before the race it actually snowed three inches in Pueblo, but Denver indeed got much more. The snow in Pueblo was mostly off the trail by race day, although shady patches still had snow and ice. We saw the week before that temperatures were of 20 F were predicted for the start, rising to around 40 at finish time. We cleaned out our Southern closets for old winter clothes we could discard along the way. Driving South from Denver International it was interesting to watch the progression from snow bound to open semi-desert.
We landed in Denver at Noon on Saturday and drove to Colorado Springs for lunch at "Four by Brother Luck." Brother Luck was a contestant on seasons 16 and 17 of Top Chef, which we follow fanatically. It was a lot of fun to step through the window of reality TV and see his restaurant. It is a pretty simple bar but with Top Chef-style imaginative cuisine. I had the brussel sprout salad and the chicken with gravy. The salad was fantastic. Rachael, who normally hates brussel sprouts, liked it because they were fresh and shaved so they tasted more like cabbage. The Chicken was good, sitting on top of corn bread, but it was a bit dry, we had to ask for more gravy. Rachael had a very tasty rib sandwich. Here we are outside of Four:
After lunch we drove down to Pueblo and picked up our race numbers at Brues Brew House downtown and checked into our hotel, the Springhill Suites just a couple of blocks from the finish line. Our rental car was a Mini Cooper convertible. Normally it's hard to get such a fun car, National's Emerald Isle is usually full of SUV's that nobody wants. But in Colorado during ski season apparently this is flipped and we had our choice of VW and Mini convertibles. Here we are outside the hotel with the car:
The marathon starts at North Marina in Lake Pueblo State Park and finishes at Historic Arkansas Riverwalk Park (HARP) in downtown Pueblo. "Historic" here has a subtle meaning, implying not that the riverwalk is historic, but rather that the riverwalk is along the banks of the historic path of the river. After the great flood of 1921, the river was diverted to avoid the central business district. But now the city has restored some of the downtown water way and created a park. On race day, Rachael and I caught conveinent shuttle buses from HARP to our respective starting lines. We are planning to move in just a month, so we are trying to thin out old clothing. Here I am at North Marina in clothes that I brought to stay warm but that I'll never see again:
Actually it was a beautiful calm morning, 20 degrees didn't feel too bad. Here I am a few minutes later stripped down and ready to roll
Once we got going I quickly felt warm, I ran with gloves off most of the way and dropped the sweatshirt at and hat at 15 miles. The course, though concrete all the way, mostly follows the current course of the Arkansas river and is spectacularly beautiful. Here is a picture draw from the Mad Moose web site of a couple of runners near the start
A man from Austin, Texas sat next to me on the shuttle bus to the start. This was his second marathon, his first was run exactly one week before in Austin. Apparently he is in some kind of work place exercise program that counts steps. He said that he got his steps last week at the Austin Marathon and then came to Colorado this week to ski. He saw that there was a marathon to be held and thought he would get his steps in this way again. He had finished Austin in 6 hours and 30 minutes, finished Pueblo in 7:30. Not sure how he felt after the race. Across from the aisle on the bus sat a couple of 50 state runners from Brooklyn, New York. Excluding these folks, almost everyone in the race was from Colorado. I ran for a while next to a woman from Nashville, TN who was running her 39th marathon in the 50 state challenge. She said that she had met a couple the day before that had run 50 states 5 times over, e.g. more than 250 marathons. Whatever crazy thing you think to do, someone has done something crazier. I also ran for a while next to a ultramarathon-running lawyer from Leadville. We were both trying to take it easy, easing back in turns, in the end he won by dropping back the most.
My hope was that by running a marathon more or less like a training run I could finish easily. I wasn't entirely successful in this, I felt pretty tired at the end, but I ran the whole way and finished in stride. I recovered much faster than usual, already ready to go out and run 4 days after the race.
I used Strava to track this run, which was pretty stupid of me since this was the very first time I turned on Strava. It was not set up to announce splits, so I ran the race without knowing my pace or current position. This was also refreshing, however, since I was trying to lay back and take the run as it came. Here is the Strava map
The marathon started at 8:30 and the half at 10:00, so Rachael finished just a few minutes ahead of me but was still at this finish when I got there. Here we are together at the HARP
After feeling warm for most of the last few miles, 40 degrees felt cold pretty quickly after I stopped. We went back to the hotel, cleaned up and took a nap. Later we went out to a steak house on the HARP. Here's a shot at sunset outside the steakhouse. It's beautiful, but the historic Arkansas river is pretty dry this time of year. The actual river is fine.
I once ate at a steakhouse in Pocotello, Idaho where the waitress thought I was an eco-crazy tree hugging vegetarian for wanting mushrooms with the meat. The best steakhouse in Pueblo is not that bad, but it is kind of close. I think that it has an expert back of the house, but a high school front. I had the "Manhattan" steak, which was pretty good, although shaped more like a rock than a steak, but the service was definitely more 2 hours from Denver than downtown Manhattan. The bread was stale, the salads were huge but tasteless, plates were literally thrown on top of each other. But, on the other hand, maybe when one becomes so old and coddled that one complains about service at a steak house one has gotten too old and coddled.
We got up early, saw some horrible traffic in Denver on our drive to the airport, but none of it was in our direction. Overall, we had a great weekend and moved this project 2% forward.
