Bit of a weird day. Got a head cold a couple days ago and almost didn’t do this, but woke up feeling good enough that I decided to rally.
Ended up feeling super nauseous the first hour and had some biblical diarrhea at a well-placed pit toilet just before copper lake. Still felt like I was moving okay, so was surprised that I was at least a few minutes behind the previous FKT’s splits by the lake. Decided to lock tf in and embrace my inner talus goblin and was able to claw back 15ish minutes up to the top of iron cap.
Felt pretty solid the whole rest of the day. Was fairly conservative on the downhills since I’ve been uncharacteristically healthy lately and didn’t want to jeopardize that. Had a bit of an ankle roll in the heinous rocky/footy section descending down to the creek. Wasn’t so bad but really didn’t want to discover what a second roll would feel like, so dialed it way back the rest of the descent.
Felt great on the last flat bit and body clearly still had a lot to give. Was running up the rolling hills and feeling super strong all the way to the car.
Fun day!
p.s.
for anyone looking to do this route, I'd probably recommend against the "direct" descent off iron cap that I did and would take Ben's route if I cared about speed. I had done the descent before and still didn't gain any time on Ben here (maybe less than a minute), and it's pretty out of character with the rest of the day. That said, if you enjoy crawling through dense trees and getting covered in pine needles, it's pretty cool to traverse onto the ledge and is certainly memorable.