Went up the Manitou Incline last night. If you are not familiar with it, it's an old incline railway that has been decommissioned. All the rail has been lifted up, but most of the railroad ties remain making for a nice set of stairs. It rises from the end of Ruxton Ave in Manitou up 2011' vertically in just a hair over 1 mile and ends near the top of Rocky Mountain. Take a look at just how nasty it is. We started out at the Barr parking lot at ten minutes after 5 and an hour later we made it to the top.
After a few minutes of rest at the top, we headed down the shortcut to Barr trail and ran back down the trail to the switchback. From there, we got back on the incline and headed the rest of the way down on the stairs.
I forgot just how hard a workout it is. We made the incline a normal part of our training last summer when we were preparing to hike Pikes Peak for the first time. I think the first time it took me 1:07 to get to the top. As we continued on, I was down in the 43-45 minute range by the end of the summer. It was nice that I'm a little bit faster at the start of this year, but I've got some work to do to get back to where I was last summer.
On Thursday, I'm gonna head back over there and run on Barr Trail instead of hiking the stairs.
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just run, stupid.
