Altitude. It affects my attitude.
“Lake Level” is NOT the same thing as “sea level.”
And so it was that the climb up from approximately 6300 feet at the start to the 7000 foot summit for the halfway mark took a toll on my breathing, as much as the lingering long cold I seem to be saddled with. I’ve run at altitude before… several times in the during my nearly 20 year running career. But I always seem to block out the way it impacts me. Sucking wind, coughing, headaches… but again that all could be the cold I can’t shake. Still, a tough day on the course… made a wee bit tougher due to a rumored ongoing dispute between the race director and CalTrans that saw a mad-as-hell construction foreman swerve his vehicle toward me so he could yell at me for running in a construction zone and ordering me to cross the four-land highway on an uphill dead-man’s-curve. Fear can be imagined and can be warranted.
At least the views were pretty good.
There was a lot of walking. A lot. But day 1 of 3 is finished. As I told the woman next to me in the shuttlebus back to South Lake Tahoe, this is an endurance weekend. And while I haven’t done well, I have endured… and that is enough.