All Points West

One of the challenges of running this nation is to fit the races in a teacher's calendar, with a teacher's budget. Paul Misur is a good friend and fifty states runner who has added the goal of completing each marathon in less than four hours: 50<4. When we compared calendars he suggested that Gary and I could save money by driving west, running a couple of races then take advantage of cheap airline tickets to Hawaii. It seemed silly until I did my homework and found that there were two races on consecutive weekends the week before the Kona marathon. In 2013 the marathon calendars listed Sandhills, Nebraska and Estes Park, Colorado on the first two weekends in June. The first of the three marathons to open
their registration was Kona, so I registered early. Then. January 14, I received an email that Sandhills was opening. I couldn't get a confirmation on my phone and decided to wait until the next morning to register at the computer at work. I get to my classroom by 7:30am and logged on to the website and the race had filled in ten hours!! Argh!! Panic and desperation set in. I am not the kind of runner that bothers race directors, but I posted a tweet and an email begging to be able to register. Andrew, the race director was very nice and allowed me a second chance. Phew, now all I had to do was arrange air travel and wait for the Estes Park to open. By the end of February the calendars that I was watching changed the date of the Estes Park Marathon to June 21! Again, panic! I couldn't be in Kona on Sunday and Colorado on Saturday. No problem, Colorado has so many marathons that plan B would be easy to figure out. I pulled down calendars for Colorado marathons from every online source that I could find. I posted a plea on the Marathon Maniacs website for a Colorado race on June 14. I need to be entirely honest, there is a race in Colorado on June 14: The Leadville Trail Marathon. I love running trail marathons, but realize that they can be tough. This one has three huge elevation gains. It's elevation chart goes from 10,500 to 12,500, back down to 10,500 then up to 13,500, back to 10,500, up to 12,500 then back down to 10,500. They had an 8:30 time limit so I thought I could make it happen. I registered and arranged airline travel from Denver to Hawaii.