Sanitas: Lap 1 - Jen Alexander

Date: Friday, December 7th, 4:00 PM
Temp: 40 degrees
Time Up: 31 Minutes
Time Down: 20 Minutes

So today was my first lap up Mt Sanitas for raising money for Team AllEars.   If you didn't read my initial post, please go back and read here.  It explains what I'm doing and who I'm raising money for.  Basically for every $25 that someone donates, I'm doing a lap up Mt Sanitas here in Boulder.  Mt Santias starts out at 5520' and goes up to 6843'.  My trail group a few years ago would do their yearly time trial up Sanitas.  It's a pretty hard climb/run/hike as it's only 1.2 miles long.  It's short but also pretty technical.  

Anyway, Jen Alexander was my first donation to have me do a lap up the mountain.  Right now I'm in the end part of my marathon training and quickly realized that I needed to get these done asap so that they don't interfere with the rest of my training.   Also with the possibility of snow shutting me out of the mountain one of these days, I couldn't procrastinate.   So when Jen said she donated I decided that the very next day I had to get up on the mountain.

Looking up from the bottom

I was busy working all day, and couldn't get out too early.  With the prospect of it getting dark fairly early these days I knew I would be cutting it close.   I bundled up with what clothes I had and took off.

When I was thinking about doing this challenge, I wanted to choose something hard, but also something that I could do 10 or so times (hopefully) and not impact my training so much.  Sanitas is basically just one large hill repeat.   I think the problem won't be doing one lap.  It's going to be those days where I might have to fit more than one lap into my workout in order to finish them all.

Fun uphills!  Going downhill is even more fun.

As I was heading up to the top this day, I was noticing that I was passing lots of people that were on their way down, but I didn't see many on the way up.  Maybe it was because of the lessening light.  Next time I go out at this time, I'm bringing my headlamp. ;)

The Top

I got to the top just around 4:34.  31 minutes after I started.  I think my best time to the top was last summer when I did it in around 28 minutes.  I hope that I can do that again but with all the long runs, speedwork and tempo runs right now, I don't think that's going to be possible until after the marathon.   Anyway, thank you once again to Jen and the Alexander family for helping support the fight against Breast Cancer.  :)