Astro's Excellent Adventure

Finally got our Excellent Jumpers Title, 10-25-14

Astro and I have been working on our Excellent level Standard and Jumpers with Weaves titles for over a year.  We were sidelined last May when he hurt a front toe while running like a crazy greyhound with Zephyr.  So we missed a few trials.  Things looked good in October, 2014, so we entered a trial.  Astro did a great job and we got our Excellent Jumpers title along with our first Masters level Jumpers Q.  I was, of course, super proud of my boy!

This is our Excellent Jumpers title run.

And, this is our first Master Jumpers qualifying run the next day.

Getting our last Excellent Standard Q has been rather difficult.  We've had a lot of good fun runs where we came really close.  But, it hasn't happened as of writing this post and we've been in a few trials since these videos were taken.  I thought he did really well on these standard runs, but I'm always making a mistake. 

Saturday's Standard run

Sunday's Standard run

Hopefully I'll be able to get my act together one of these days and get this boy his Excellent Standard title.  In the mean time we will have lots of fun and he will get lots of treats. 

Imogene Pass Run

 

At the start of the race

I don't usually post about things I do, and this is long overdue, but it was pretty cool and I wanted to put it on the blog.  Last summer a group of friends and I trained for and did the Imogene Pass Run.  It's a race that goes from Ouray, CO to Telluride, CO.  The race is 17.1 miles long, goes up 10 miles and climbs about 5,300 ft to the pass, and then down 7.1 miles into Telluride.  Imogene Pass is at 13,114ft.  It's in a beautiful area, although I spent most of the time looking down at the ground so don't remember most of it.  :-)

The pass is the at the reddish brown area to the left of center at the ridge top.  This picture was about mile 8.5.

 We spent the whole summer training by doing a ton of hiking/trail running that had a lot of hard climbing at high elevation.  Luckily living at about 7,000 ft in Flagstaff makes the elevation training somewhat easier.  Yes, I was in some sort of pain the entire summer and after the race.  :-)  I had never done a race like this before.  The really good people run the whole thing, but most people including my friends and I, do a combination of fast hiking and running when you can on the way up, and then run down.  It was one of the hardest and funnest things I've ever done.

Super happy girls at the end of the run!

We all made it and in good time.  I hoped I would come in around 4 hours and I did at about 4 hrs 3 min, which turned out to be 17th in my age group.  So, I was super happy.  Post race celebration included a large lunch with drink, large ice creams, cookies, hot tub, and a large dinner with drink.  I'm hoping to do it again this year.