Salida Trail Marathon Epilogue: A Run Through Time

Ridge Trail, looking south - Emerald Mountain, August, 2025

​(Read Salida Trail Marathon Part I: One Step At A Time
and Salida Trail Marathon Part II: The Best Day )


I look at the rush of water that is Fish Creek, in such a hurry to get to the Yampa River and then the Colorado. I just want to say to it, slow down and stay awhile. You won’t make it to the Sea of Cortez anyway, you’ll just peter out in the Sonoran Desert. I wish I could hold the flow here longer.

Despite the un-winter with little snow and plenty of unseasonably warm temps, the spring melt still manages to make a low roar, filling my head, and I smile. It is a treat to trot alongside this waterway as it splashes up against and pours over the many rocks along the way.

Happy to be running on a trail, I climb the half-mile of switchbacks and head back down, then turn around and do it again. It is quiet, there’s no one around this morning, for which I am grateful. I can enjoy the peace and don’t have the worry that I’ll encounter someone who will silently agree with me that I’m moving very slowly. Not that, in reality, they’d even notice.

But I notice. I think back to my Run Through Time finish just a few weeks ago, on March 14th, the completion of my first trail marathon, and it isn’t exactly pride that I feel. When I think of my daughter running it - and running it well - I feel a swelling in my chest that is pride and love and even joy. But my own run? That feels…complicated. There’s the finish time difference - Charlotte’s 4:35 to my 7:06. And there’s the age difference - her 19 to my 58. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. 

It took everything I had to get through that day. Mentally and physically I started with what felt like nothing, and yet somehow ran up and down hills for 26 miles. While on the four-mile trudge up bleak road, I was so sure I wouldn’t make the time cut-off at the top it seemed pointless to continue. Yet somehow I kept pushing myself to keep going, striving for what speed I could muster, the stress of not being fast enough driving me forward. When I made the time cut-off, relief or elation weren’t on the table, because I still felt the pressure to make the second cut-off. In the last few miles the warmth and fatigue were really taking hold, and yet somehow my brain and body maintained - and summoned a sprint (for me) to the finish. It did feel terrific to be done and to be with my daughter and friend. Re-reading this paragraph, I feel gratitude and a bit of awe for how my body and mind performed on that day. But that’s still not the whole story.

I also have questions. Why was I so low energy, why was there so little in my muscles that I was doing the death-shuffle right off the start line? Why did my legs feel like concrete the entire day? Why, with all the hill climbing and heavy lifting I did in my training, did that not play out in increased power - even slightly? Why did I used to be capable of decent running speed but now my 30-second sprint pace is the pace I used to run an entire road marathon in? 

Last summer when I was toiling up the Colorado Trail for the fourth day in a row alongside Charlotte, who was not toiling, I said “I can do anything if it is just for one day.” This was the phrase that resulted in us signing up for the Salida trail marathon. I believed that with dedicated training - running and lifting - I’d improve my speed and power. But speed and power have not shown up. I’m not talking about huge improvements in my paces so much as the sensation of speed and power. A sensation I took for granted until it disappeared a year or two ago. 

It is so easy (and disheartening) to look back over the decades of rowing, running,
​triathlon-ing, backpacking and cycling and remember how fit and capable I felt doing those things. When I trained, I got stronger. A logical equation with mental and physical results. But right now, that equation is broken. I train, but sometimes the results are diminishing returns - low energy, weakness, mental exhaustion. This is not easy to accept. 

The official name of the race is the Run Through Time Trail Marathon. The name refers to the course which travels through old mining territory. I love the name of the race - in fact it is one of the reasons we signed up for the Salida trail half-marathon last year. Now that name resonates in a more profound way: a run through times past.

Times past - 58 years of experiences crammed into the nooks and crannies of my mind. Because these times are past - long gone. There is a sense of loss, and of longing. For older family members, my daughter’s childhood, for the days when you didn’t have to wait in a lift line on a powder day. The loss of how I thought my life would look from the perspective of my twenties and thirties. The loss of a myriad of moments: sitting on the floor between shelves reading a mystery book in the single-room library (the Graham Annex) I rode my bike to; backyard crab feasts thick with Baltimore accents in the humid air, game contests, beers in hand, piles of steamed crabs and wooden mallets and so much laughter; my young and tough Charlotte, running up the hill after me in her pink Boggs snow boots, determined to go where I went. 

But isn’t that simply life? We all have the losses, the longings, for the experiences that fill up our senses and brains until there’s hardly room to squeeze in one more. This really is the stuff of life, and it’s so good, but it can also be so heavy when the loss outweighs the freshness of new experience. Running through time, just as running through historic mining areas, is about perspective. We see the times past from here because we are no longer there - but dang isn’t it awesome that we had those times at all? 

The thing is, and maybe this is the key thing: I’m still running. It might not look like I think it should look. And some days it definitely does not feel like I’d like it to feel. But I am running. It is a powerful connection I share with my daughter. Sometimes I even get to run with Charlotte and we talk. Well, she talks, I pant.  There are days on the trail where I feel incredibly, gloriously alive, surrounded by all that sumptuous nature. I am very very lucky.

So, complicated feelings about my Run Through Time experience and all, what is next? 

I think next is about looking forward. About my new starting line being from age 58. About where I can go from here. The possibilities ahead rather than pining for the past that is behind. About running with the wind in my hair, and not worrying about time at all.
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"Get Busy Livin' "- Top of Beall Trail, Emerald Mtn, October, 2025