My son and I drove up to Jackson Hole yesterday to meet up with my wife who had been there since Thurs morning attending some classes for here work at the hospital laboratory. This has become an annual trip for us. In the morning I headed out for a run on my favorite route up there that takes me through town to a dirt road that goes out around the back side of the elk refuge. Once I started into the refuge there was an unattended aid station then I started running into mile markers that were within .03 of my Garmin mileage. I realized there was going to be a race coming. I passed a 5k turnaround sign and figured it must be a 5k/10k. I was expecting to get caught during my run by the race which probably wouldn't be a good thing because I wanted to keep my run easy because of my hip and I knew if the race caught up to me it was going to be real hard not to join in. I hit the 10k turn around and I was planning for 10 miles so I had 4 more miles to run. As I came back through the course The aid stations where manned but I made it back to town. I ran down the main street to where I figured the race was starting and got there just before it began. It was called old bills run and it was huge. It started and turned up the street I needed to take to get back to the hotel so I jumped in a ways back in the pack where it was around 7:30 pace and ran with them about 1/2 mile until I had to leave the course to get back to the hotel. I ended up with 10.7 miles at 8:24 pace. Later in the day the LOTOJA [LOgan TO JAckson ] bike race was finishing in Jackson. It's a 206 mile race that starts in Logan and comes right near my home in Preston then on up to Jackson. It is the longest sanctioned single day race in the country. It has 4 major climbs along the way [around 10,000 ft all together] and finishes 1800 ft higher than it starts. We started down the highway about the time we were expecting them until we saw the lead of the race which was a pack of 8. We leap frogged them and the next few packs of riders back up to the finished and watched them sprint in. The course record is barely over 9 hours. That is just under a 23 MPH average. My best biathlon race at 14 miles was 23.3 MPH. I can't even imagine maintaining anything close to that for even 30 or 40 miles. Add in all the climbing and another 170 miles and that is very impressive. 2 hours later when we headed home there were still 100s of riders on the course that we went past over the next 40 miles. They have about a dozen different start times to spread people out and about 1200 riders total. I definitely have to do this race some time but it will have to be a year when I don't have a fall marathon.
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