What are we getting into?

This weekend is the Pikes Peak marathon. While I’ve been training on the course, I don’t know what the actual event will be like. I don’t think anyone does before the try this race, considered by some to be the toughest marathon in North America.

The rough time prediction method is to take your sea-level marathon time and add a half-hour… to get your ascent time! Then add another 2/3rds of that for an estimate of your marathon finish.

Helen and I didn’t know that when we each separately predicted a 5 hr finish time. I’ve now scaled that back to 7 hours.

Is it really that bad? See for yourself what happened in 2008. Granted, they had snow that year.. but in some cases, people exceeded their overall marathon finishing time before they even made it to the summit..