Mainly Marathons Center of the Nation Series – Day 6 – Sterling, CO

I don’t know if it’s the years or the mileage. But I do know my Garmin’s GPS was broken by the Center of the Nation. I thought something might’ve been screwy yesterday but I figured the course was atypically short.

Today, I thought the course might be long… and then inexplicably my watch seemed to think I was in a space/time anomaly wherein the clock kept ticking but the distances didn’t seem to accrue loop after loop after loop.

Note: I only started snapping photos in the last couple of loops.

I therefore trusted the 14 loop rubber bands to track my mileage. Nonetheless, it *felt* long today. That could’ve been Day 6-ness or maybe it was the hills. Mainly Marathons described the route on their website not as a 14 but as a 12-looper and:

Course description: Out and back (2.184 miles total); some pavement, mostly finely-crushed gravel; a few small hills

Besides the obvious shorter distance to require 14 loops, there were more than “a few small hills.” There were seemingly CONSTANT hills. Nothing Himalaya-ish to be sure. But to be honest they did seem to grow steeper as the day wore on, as if the two tectonic plates that make up Sterling’s Pioneer Park were bashing into each other and uplifting the ground even as we ran it.

I was a little burned out from traveling, running, sightseeing, so there aren’t a lot of photos of the day. There are some sure but a lot less to choose from to try and curate. Plus, I’m always a bit melancholy at the end of a series. As the quasi-summer-running-camp draws to a close we all figuratively sign each other’s mileage log books with a “HAGTS!” phrasing… “Have a great training season!”

I often find myself in a reflective mood towards the end of a Mainly series. We’ve spent days together, pounding the same pavement, gravel, grass, et cetera time and time again, loop after loop after loop. I’m incredibly privileged, lucky, and humbled to run with these folks. And that includes the people running the courses and those running the logistics of the series. These are all amazing, incredible people who are taking on a personal challenge. It could be their 1900+ race, or their quest to hit 50 states, or even their first race of any kind. The reasons run the gamut and each person has an inspirational story. I selfishly focus on me here at runkevinrun.com – narcissism is implied in the URL after all – but I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge en masse the people involved with Mainly Marathons. You all are superheroes in a land of the ordinary.

Here are a few of the shots from the proverbial “merry go round” that for me was most definitely breaking down: