Welcome to Red Rocks Park

Red Rocks Park is a state park about 15 miles west of Denver, in a unique transitional zone where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains. The park is full of those cool red sandstone rocks which I gave a little geology lesson about a couple blogs ago when I ran Garden of the Gods 10-miler. Same rocks here, I believe (same formation), just now we're just 60 miles to the north. Inside the park is "Red Rocks Amphitheater", famous for its great summer concert lineup and film series (Film on the Rocks). The open-air amphitheater is anchored by two large sandstone rocks reaching three hundred-feet high, offering natural acoustics and is why it's well...famous. It also has unbelievable panoramic views of the city (that'd be Denver). I believe Wide Spread Panic played there this afternoon.

Inside the park, it's 868 acres are filled of abundant trails and lots of winding roads, and like it's cousin, Garden of the Gods, it's HILLY! And the Amplitheater is full of stairs, of course, while are a popular destination for those wanting a great workout. Hills and stairs. Tons of hills, tons of stairs. Get where this is going? My friend, Jim, asked me yesterday, while I was gagging on a lung at Athletic Training class, if I had any interest in running the hills and the stairs at Red Rocks today. I've never run over there but sounds exactly like the kinda of challenge I'm seeking right now. I'm in.

Jim picked me up at 7 this morning...thankfully the 99 degrees, which set a record high on Friday, vacated the state, and it was a nice and cool 70 for our run. Didn't seem like it, seemed like 90, but I've been avoiding the heat of the day running, evident by my pasty-white skin, which is usually pretty tan by now, so 70 is about as hot I will run lately. The heat zaps me and well, I don't want to spend any excess time recovering more than I have to right now, so I've been either getting up at 5a.m. to run or doing the TM thing. Anyhoo, I told Jim when we got there that he was to do his thing and I'd do mine, I didn't want to slow him down and I had no idea how far I was going to run. The idea was to run around the hilly park awhile and then get to the amplitheater and run the bleachers and the stairs. So that's what I did. 6 miles I ran around the park, with about 600' in a couple miles, so definitely some good hills.

I like this hole in the rock, which I ran through a few times, on my hilly road run. Once, going through the hole, a beer truck was passing me coming up (getting ready for the big gig, I suppose) and a car was coming from the top down....the 3 of us in that little hole was kinda...um...freaky!

When I reached the amplitheather, I kinda stood there at the top and looked at what the protocol was for running this thing. Apparently, there are like 66 rows of bleachers, which are just all solid stone, and each bleacher are about 4' wide. It appears that people just ran back and forth along the bleachers. Back and forth 66 times. Someone told me the entire bleacher run was equivalent to a 5K, but a few of the front rows were closed off due to the upcoming concert so I think the distance I ran the bleachers was about 2.8 miles.

Running back and forth on these bleachers was kinda interesting. And rather ... um....monotonous. Back and forth, back and forth. But it also makes it "different" from the norm of everyday miles and watching all the people and the various things they were doing was kind of fun. One group of extremely well fit studs and studettes (in other words: I'd never fit in!) were sprinting the entire length one way and then doing various drills on the way back. I was sort of stuck in the middle of this group because they'd outrun me on the sprints but I'd outrun them on their drills...but that's okay, they were so inspirational with their well-cut muscly bods, which I was so envious of. ugh.

Bleacher running. Run one length, climb up two steps, run back the other way. Repeat 33 more times. View of Denver in the waaaaay background.

Another bleacher pic, this time you can see the amplitheater in the middle

I finally reached the top, I was totally dehydrated so I got some more water at the visitor center and went back to the bleachers to watch Jim doing his bleacher running. I then decided it was time to run the stairs. The stairs are on each side of amplitheater....and they're steep. I ran up and down the stairs 4 times. 218 steps up = one time. Let's not forget I did this times 4. I ran up them, though, and never stopped. Yay for me. I'm kinda stair/hill wimpy so I was pretty pleased.

The stairs run along side of this massive red sandstone formation.

All said and done, I did about 9.3 miles of hills and stairs. I'm tired! And I think my calves grew about 8" in diameter with all this hill stuff I've been doing. :/

But all this crazy hill work serves a purpose, of course: it's making me stronger (I hope??). I've been all over the map this past week - do I run SF, or do I not and if I do should I bump down to the half or is that admitting defeat? One minute I'd think one thing only for the next day to come and my thoughts would stray the other way, and vise-versa. I'm not one to give up or give in easily, but I know it's not wise to run 26 miles on a bum heel. I am confident the heel issue is not Plantar Faciitis; it's not stiff or sore when I wake-up, it just hurts when I run on it after about mile 10. I have not been to a dr., due to insurance issues, but I've run long enough to know it's not a normal ache and pain from training....like sore quads or something. Still, I have an extremely high tolerance for pain and from what my long-time running guru friends have told me, whatever it is it's probably healing itself ... I just need to keep off the point of pain. Which the new shoes seems to be helping do. I don't know, I don't have all the answers, and I'm sure my "run yourself into the ground until you totally ruin your entire running career" friends don't either...but a few good runs this week, with a good 20-miler on Friday, makes me think that yes, I can do the full in San Francisco. 4 weeks from today. No, I'm not in the shape I wish I were in, and no I will not race this for any specific time, but I need to find out if the heel can handle the distance on concrete so I will know if I, upon return from SF, can start to train hard for the Chicago Marathon in October... or if I need to scrap Chicago and let the heel heal more. San Francisco will be the perfect test. And SF is a hilly course, which freaks me a little considering I have not trained to the best of my ability with the heel putting a halt to major training after Boston ... but I AM getting stronger physically and more importantly, mentally...and if I didn't have SF to shoot for, then my training would start to slack. That's how I work: I train/run better with a purpose behind it. I have 4 more weeks, and I'm going to work hard, and I'll just see what I can do in SF. I'm actually getting a tad excited!! So bring SF on, I'm ready to give it a shot....and I'm going to continue with my hilly path to get there. Stay tuned, I have lots of crazy incline ideas to tackle in the upcoming weeks!

A couple more pics from my run around the park before I did the stairs and bleachers run.

This is a little blurry, I have no idea why, but it's just a parking lot in the park where I was running.

The Amplitheater is in the cut-out section of the rocks, just off to the left a little. Sorry, I don't own skills to put a little arrow in there like Adam, at IAMBORING, can do.

Just some rock formations in the park

And that'd be me, running. Sort of running.

And I have to share! While I was at my Athletic Training class getting my butt kicked Saturday, my boys climbed another 14er. Mt. Democrat, elevation 14, 148'. Both the boys went up with their dad. They rose at the wee-hour of 4:30 and out the door by 5:00. They tell me it's about a class 2 climb but a few sections are a class 3 and 4. I'm guessing that's pretty hard. They said it was really windy at the top but overall a beautiful day (though they didn't stay on top too long as they could see a storm approaching). I have some video they took but am having problems loading it - I'm a little blog challenged with nifty cool stuff like most of you guys. Maybe I'll figure it out this week, but probably not. But here's a couple pictures. Enjoy.