Towers Road

After a couple long days of meetings, I was itching for a trail run today.  A Towers Road time trial was not really on the radar until seeing Nick's post this morning and how all the FCTR are tearing up the hill lately.  This has sort of become the benchmark workout of the trail run group with biweekly races up to the towers, but also a workout that I have almost always opted to avoid.  For some reason I can climb quite well on singletrack, but going up the road just wears on me mentally and physically.  So that being said, my PR (set a couple of years ago) was somewhere north of 40 minutes.  I figured I should at least go under 40 even if I decided to wimp out on the pain level I wanted to endure today.  The plan (which worked well on a Horsetooth Rock time trial 2 weeks ago) was to go out easy and progressively up the effort as the climb progressed.  Well with the wind situation today, I ended up sprinting whenever there was a brief pause in the massive headwind and just trying to maintain upright forward motion when the winds picked back up. Easily 50mph or more wind gusts.  So it wasn't pretty, but I got up to the towers in 39:19.  I let it fly back down the hill with a nice wind-aided 22:41 descent, also a PR, which included a 5:36 mile split.  I guess I am going to have to make this a regular workout.  It's borderline "no fun" level on the workout gage indicates that is must have some benefit.

Todays run:

6.77 miles round-trip, 1684 feet climbed, GPS data here

Start/Finish at Soderberg Trailhead

The rather uninspiring finish line.

About 3.4 miles and over 1600 feet of "fun".