Another weekend, another race. Would you really expect anything else?

Tomorrow is the Leadville Marathon and Heavy Half. Probably the two of the hardest of their distance around! We leave this afternoon for a few nights of camping with our Runner’s Roost teammates and the race. Camping before a race isn’t as bad as you may expect. As long as you can get your morning breakfast routine in, you’re good to go! Luckily my oatmeal requirement is super easy in my Jetboil. Get one if you ever camp, it makes life easy!

Anyway, packet pick up is today until 7 pm and then again tomorrow before the race.  The start is at 8 am from the 6th Street Gym, the same place the Leadville 100 pre-race meeting is. I’m not sure what to expect for size this year since most of the Leadville races are growing quite a bit but last year’s 1/2 had 216 finishers and the full had 358!  The half is capped at 500 and the full at 1000 but based on prior year numbers, that would be pushing it!

As you have probably heard, Colorado is facing very tough times with wildfires right now. There was a fire not far from the course up near Mosquito Pass over the last week but thanks to the hard work of the firefighters in the area, the containment reached a level that they felt safe allowing us to run Mosquito! Great news! Keep the firefighters in your thoughts though, it’s going to be a long summer.

Side note for anyone camping, there is a Stage 2 fire ban in Lake County which means no open fires of ANY kind. This includes campfires in rings as well. They just upped this ranking this week. Check with your camp host though for any changes.

Breakdown on Finishers in 2011

Leadville Heavy Half

Christopher Borton – Overall Male winner – 2:17:07 (9:08 avg)

Kate Barmettler – Overall Female winner – 2:38:20 (10:33 avg)

96 women finishers/120 men finishers

4:14:30 mean average finish time

Leadville Marathon

Zach Crandall – Overall Male winner – 3:46:22 (8:38 avg)

Stevie Kremer – Overall Female winner (3rd Overall!) – 4:06:19 (9:24 avg)

109 women finishers/249 male finishers (10 people were outside cutoff time)

6:08:00 mean average finish time

The Course

The marathon and half courses!

The Half Course is shown in red and the full in blue until they merge at aid station B. The course for the half runs east and straight up Mosquito Pass while the marathoners are lucky enough to have a second climb up and around Ball Mountain! From what I’ve been told, the hardest part of the course (besides climbing to 13,185 feet!!) is after the half and full split. The marathon has a steep climb and is really rugged with a bunch of fist sized baby head boulders! Should be fun navigating that on tired legs on the decent to the finish. The climb up mosquito doesn’t worry me too much, just get in a rhythm and crank it out! The half marathon is actually 15.46 miles and the full is right near 26.2!

Here is the fun part, the course profiles that show total elevation gain as well.

Heavy Half:

Half Profile!

Not bad getting 3,700 feet of climb, especially since most of it is in the first half of the race!

Marathon Profile:

Full profile!

6,333 feet of climb sounds good to me! Check out that climb from 2 to 4 though. Looks steep! That’s the part with the baby heads too.  Ball Mountain is part of the Silver Rush 50 course as well but it looks so short compared to the top of Mosquito Pass! This will be the highest point in a race that I’ve run. Hope Pass is about 12,600 feet and Silver Rush 50 hits 12,200+ four times. Going to be tough breathing but well worth the views!

The course has 5 aid stations for the half and 7 for the full. The other races in the series have great supplies and food and drink at their aid stations so I assume it will be the same for these races!

Spectators are encouraged to skip aid stations A and A1/2 and only go to B. The course runs along the roads you would take to get to the first two and it is too much of a hassle to run around cars while they kick up dust! B is much more accessible, even though you share the road with the runners for a half mile.  B is very near the turn around for the Silver Rush 50 course. Directions are found on the map above!

Awards are 3 deep per category for age and sex and everyone that finishes gets a finisher medal. Ceremony is at 5 at the 6th Street Gym with a full meal! Be there!

Full runner’s guide found here.

I think this is most everything. My posts on Silver Rush 50 are continually my most popular. I know I scour the internet for details on every race so hopefully this helps! Let me know if you have questions!

Good luck to everyone running, we have a huge group up there so it should be a ton of fun! I have no idea what to expect for times so I’m leaving that for my recap on Sunday!