Goes faster, I walked the majority of this because my body wasn't cooperating..
Strava write up below..
Over 5 hours off of previous time.. but, a lot of thoughts.. the route was exactly what I expected. But I didn’t have fun. My body is jacked and so is my mind, I think.. they wouldn’t work together. My feet and hands had no coordination, I fell multiple times and my feet and hands both wouldn’t land where I wanted them to. I fell and broke a pole 1.5 miles into the day. I fell down wheeler and sprained my foot and bruised my thigh, tripped multiple other times.. fortunately there’s no severely consequential terrain. I felt like I was forcing this effort the entire time and I think I’m done for the season with big efforts. I’ve spent a lot of suffer dollars from the bank throughout winter/summer 14ers and my body hasn’t been right since the summer push.. the shorter 2-3hr efforts are fine, but anything that’s partially a slog just isn’t clicking. With that said I highly doubt I’ll be going for the Sangres traverse. I feel like I’d be forcing it and that’s a route you can’t force… because if I did trip or miss a hand like I did alot today, you die. I’m going to focus on having fun, and only fun. Doing things that appeal to me for the rest of the year.
With all of that said, I love sufferfests and I love moving long distances through mountains, but I don’t love doing it when my body isn’t working correctly and I can’t move the way I normally do through mountains… I don’t know if I should be proud of this effort or not, I’m glad I smashed the time, but I’m not happy that I forced the effort. But I am happy for the self awareness that comes with that. I do think if everything was clicking and I felt myself I would done this 1.5 hours faster…
I’ll probably have more thoughts but here’s a few for now.
Oh, I spent 7-10 minutes during the first miles videoing and taking pictures of elk. There were probably hundreds!!! They were making all kinds of elk noises. It was really cool to start the traverse to that… and then as soon as that ended, shit show 🤣