colorado

Get Involved: Tommyknocker Ultras Volunteering

The past few months have revolved around running…but I haven’t always been the one with a bib pinned to my shorts! I have discovered that some of the best motivation and inspiration to get yourself outside for a run is to help others do the same. And the best way to do this?! Volunteer at a race! You’ll get to watch runners take on new distances, push the pace, turn an ultra around and just enjoy life. It makes you want to get out there yourself…but it’s also a reminder that running without fully recovering is a bad idea!

Just over a month ago I roped Marissa into volunteering at the Tommyknocker Ultras in Woodland Park, CO. I was a volunteer at this race by default – I had been working with Human Potential behind the scenes and I wanted to watch their first official race unfold. Since racing a 50K the weekend before Run, Rabbit, Run 100 would have been a terrible idea I showed up to volunteer instead. I knew the Race Director and most of his core crew personally so when I arrived with Marissa in tow the night before the race they didn’t hesitate to put us to work. Our first task? Rock hunting.
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By Heidi Kumm, ago

Chasing Fall Colors

Guess what?! Fall is here! The mornings are cold, the afternoons are toasty and the trees are getting yellow. Oh, the beauty of fall. Of course, the spiders are moving INTO my room and the tree out front is dropping it’s annoying pods all over the yard…but I’m going to go ahead and focus on the good parts of fall. Like how it’s time for the boots + leggings + scarf outfits to become a staple in my life!

Fall is the one time I really miss Wisconsin. In Wisconsin the fall colors are stunning – from red, to yellow, to orange, to purple, to… The rolling hills are covered in colorful trees. I’d walk through frost tipped grass in the morning and be stripped down to a tank top come afternoon. The bugs were finally gone and even the midday heat was bearable without humidity. And as a farm girl most of my fall memories revolve around moving calves/cows to their winter homes, winterizing the water troughs and claiming the “good” blaze orange layers before hunting season comes around. It was busy on the farm, but the good kind of busy, the excited kind of busy.
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By Heidi Kumm, ago

Playing on Pawnee Pass

After the stellar success I had running the 4 Pass Loop in Aspen [click that link, then you’ll understand just how much sarcasm I’m using there] I decided to give this run-in-a-circle-and-up-mountain-passes thing another try. This time I headed to Indian Peaks Wilderness to run the Pawnee/Buchanan Pass loop with a group of runners and strict instructions to bail out if it hurt. For the most part I did a fantastic job of listening to my body and playing it safe! Sort of. Mostly.

I was really nervous going into this run. I didn’t know many of the people running and the ones I did know where a heck of a lot more experienced on the trail than I am. There really was nothing expected of me but in my head I had some standards to live up to [or down to…] and I didn’t want to disappoint. I didn’t want to whine too much or be the idiot that ran right through pain and into an injury just to save face. Yea, I was scared to run with these people…but I also knew it would be good to run with some more experienced people, so I showed up and ran.
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By Heidi Kumm, ago

A New Mindset! [Mt Evans Ascent DNF]

This past weekend I toed another start line…this time for the Mt Evans Ascent, a 14.5 mile run up a “Colorado 14er” mountain with over 4,000 feet of elevation gain. You finish at 14,264 feet above sea level and last year I learned that the altitude is real and it can kick your butt. This year…the wind was real, my mental mojo was missing and I only made it to the top because a motorized vehicle helped me get there.
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By Heidi Kumm, ago

A Miserable Reality Check

Just a heads up – this post is going to be whiny. I had a rough run this weekend and I want to talk about it. However, there is a pretty good chance you don’t actually care about the running part…so I’ll give you a little mountain eye candy.

On Saturday morning we headed west to Buena Vista to run a chunk of the Collegiate Peaks Trail Run 25M course that Chris will be running on next month. He wanted to get a feel for what he would be racing on and I needed hilly miles on single track…done and done! Turns out I was also about to get a miserable dose of reality…and, now that it’s all over, I’m incredibly glad that Saturday’s run sucked. Because I needed a bad run to make me appreciate the good ones…and I needed this craptastic run to go down before race day on a different course.
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By Heidi Kumm, ago

The Mystery of the Backcountry

The backcountry is an interesting place. If you take a second to think about it you realize that a lot of the things about the backcountry are really quite miserable. What part of skinning uphill for miles with a 40lb pack sounds fun? None of it! It doesn’t matter how beautiful the scenery is…that kind of hiking hurts, a lot.

And somehow I am still always jumping at the opportunity to spend hours trudging through the snow. Why?!
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By Heidi Kumm, ago

Keeping the Chaos Fun

Plans are great. They give you a purpose in life and expectations for your future. We all makes plans and usually have high hopes for things to go as planned. Some times they do. Other times…not so much. Reality happens, life gets in the way, roads ice over…

When plans to awry things get interesting. More often than not you can react one of two ways – work yourself into a quivering mass of anger or readjust your expectations and enjoy. This past weekend I watched a lot of people lose their cool over things they had no control over, all while I did what I could to take a step back and find some fun in the chaos.
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By Heidi Kumm, ago

Riding Solo-ish

Welp, all that “hey, look at me because I might be a runner” blabber clearly did not work as a long-term motivator. All that running I was supposed to do this weekend? Yea, I decided to take up cross-training instead. I’d blame all the snow that finally arrived in Denver Read more…

By Heidi Kumm, ago
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