Mountain Repeats / Monsoon in the Face

Hill repeats are a large part of a runners training and are made to build speed and endurance. They generally involve running up a hill that's about 300 feet multiple times. This results in tired but improved runners. Ultra training ends up taking this to the next level. Today some of us went for some mountain repeats

The Santa Rita Mountains are about 60 minutes south of Tucson and are home to one awesome / brutal mountain, Mt Wrightson. The trail up Wrightson is 5 miles long and involves 4000 ft of elevation. Korey, Mike Duer, Dallas, Chris and I all met up in Madera Canyon at 6 am with the intent of doing multiple ascents of the mountain. I have run up this route once before for my first run with TTR, it was brutal and I wanted another shot... this was it.

We all started up the trail, Korey and Mike shot ahead and a long day of climbing began. I stayed with Dallas for about 3 miles but he pulled away too. The top of the mountain was socked in but they were nice white fluffy clouds so I was excited to run through them. I hit switchback city and powered my way up to the Baldy Saddle. I ran up along the ridge through the clouds and made my way to the summit. The others passed me on the way down. The view of the summit was really cool since I was above the clouds. I knew I wanted to do another climb so I only stayed about 2 minutes, ate some Accel Gel, drank some water and started back down. I was happy and feeling good and way ahead of my previous time. An uneventful run down brought me into Madera Canyon again after 3:10, a 30 minute improvement.

I refueled grabbing a turkey/avacado wrap and a coke, refilled my water and got some more Gu and started back up. Looking up at the summit the clouds were getting thicker, I knew I probably wouldn't make it to the top before some weather rolled in so I resigned to only making it back to the Baldy Saddle again. The first two miles were brutal and humid and I felt like crap. I pushed through and ended up really enjoying the second part of the climb. There were a few light rain showers but they only lasted for about 2 minutes each.

At the saddle I looked around and the clouds were starting to get dark. This confirmed my decision to turn around. I figured with about 4 miles back to the canyon I could hopefully get down before the rain started since I had made good down hill time before.....this was WAY wrong. I got down through the crazy switch backs (~1 mile) and it promptly started to rain  monsoon. This slowed me way down...the trail was pretty much turned into little rivers which annoyingly covered up all the rocks....I decided not to push speed and just walk it in....getting a sprained ankle would be bad....

The rain was cold....I trudged along....my foot started to hurt..... other than that I felt great.... plenty of energy.... Chris had passed me on his second time up and passed me again on the way down, he seemed pretty adept at running through the rain soaked trail. He stopped and lent me a goretex vest and walked with me for a bit then took off to get down off the mountain. The vest warmed me up and I walked/jogged the rest of the way in..... I got back to the parking lot thoroughly soaked 3:50 after I started up for the second ascent....this is really slow considering I skipped the final summit part.

This run kicked my butt.....but in a good way...overall I got more than 7 hours under foot, great training for Flag! Also the total elevation gain/loss was 7500/7500 which is just short of the total gain/loss at Flag! So I figure if I can do that in less than half the distance I will be ok! Overall a good day...well except for the Monsoon in the face.

There was a little bit of climbing today!