It was a long red-eye flight on one of those airlines that nickel and dimes for every little thing. I didn’t even have a Diet Coke as they wanted to charge me for that. To their credit, they weren’t quite as bad as Spirit Airlines, infamous for charging for a glass of water. But Frontier was darn close.
Having said that, I’m a bit bleary eyed and fuzzy on details… heck, I’m fuzzy on the blurry big picture items too. But in the meantime, I thought it best to upload a few pics from along the way in South Dakota. So here we go:
Dawn meant a nice bit of magic hour sunlight illuminating the Crazy Horse Monument.
It also meant my cruddy point-and-shoot camera kept blowing out the colors around me so a lot of things are washed out or out of focus… or maybe it’s just me.
But here I am calling my shot, right beside the 8 minute mile corral marker. According to the timing company, I was spot on — 8 minute miles to the tick.
The course itself was mostly run along the Mickelson Trail, a railway to trailway conversion that I had last been on in 2006 with my brother when we “did” Deadwood. There was less of a killer incline on the Run Crazy Horse Marathon (Deadwood had an uphill opening 13 miles… and then a downhill that barely mattered as we were so wrecked from the half marathon slog up). Still, the altitude and incline I did face on this section of the Mickelson Trail proved challenging and at times soul crushing… but I persevered.
My reward for such perseverance were lovely packed gravel trail views of the surrounding landscapes… not too shabby of a place to be running.
Befittingly, this horse thought we all were crazy as we ran past it:
In the end, as I said yesterday, I wound up with a just shy of 3:30 finish time:
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On an unrelated note, here’s a few pics from my drive back to Denver. I was careful to use cruise control set to at most one or two miles over the speed limit. This ensured no highway hypnosis or heavy foot on the gas pedal and I arrived back to the Mile High airport with nary a speeding ticket. So that’s something.
Before leaving Hill City, SD, I stopped for a selfie outside Krull’s Market. In an homage to that 1983 Star Wars rip off, “Krull,” I posted this to Facebook with the caption:
I’ll take the pumpkin bog, a box of cookies, a glaive, a Diet Coke, and, um, oh a pack of gum… Ya know what? I should never come to the store hungry. Just the glaive then. No, I don’t think I’ll be needing a bag…
Hashtag – Super Nerdy 1983 Movie Reference Everybody!
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Lost Springs, WY, had this amazing sign on the outskirts of town:
On the corner of First and Main, right across from the City Park, was a bar. As I posted on Facebook, these led me to two indisputable truisms:
1) If you live in Lost Springs and have never set foot in the bar, everybody still knows your name.
2) If you drank too much at the bar and needed to Uber home, your pool of drivers means you’re probably looking at surge pricing.
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Finally, I may not be an expert, but these are some damn fine ruts:
