I ran the Bolder Boulder for the first time since middle school on Monday. It was fun, and I had a good race. I ran 35:13, which won my age group (age 47, BB does it by your exact age).
The Bolder Bouder was the first race I ever ran in Colorado, back in 1990, if I remember correctly. A kid named Kevin Blue moved from Greeley to my elementary school in Lone Tree and tried to recruit someone to run with him. My older sister ran cross country and track at the time, and so I was curious about trying it myself, and I gave it a go. I think I ran 49 minutes and he ran 41 minutes. I’ve been a runner ever since.
The race was more or less how I remembered it, all these years later. But this was my first time in the A wave, I think. The start was high energy, frenetic, and chaotic. I lined up right behind one of the banana men, and the race went off more like a XC race than a typical road race. But I settled into a groove after a couple of hundred meters.
I think I paced the race well. I hit the 5k in 17:41, then I picked things up a bit through the next couple of miles. It started to rain pretty heavily toward the end of the race. I don’t think the rain impacted performance much, except for when we got into the stadium and had to run on the tarp. Supershoes and a slick, wet tarp are a bad combination, but I didn’t see anyone go down, perhaps surprisingly.
I haven’t run a ton of 10ks in my life, so that is a lifetime PR for me. Makes me think I could go sub-35 at low altitude, maybe even sub 34 if conditions were perfect on the right course.
My time this year puts me #14 all time for 47-year-olds. So I get to have my name here for at least a few years. On that 40-49 .pdf, I see a lot of names of people I have considered heroes or have revered with a sense of awe: Frank Shorter, Doug Bell, Ardel Boes, Pablo Vigil, Herb Lindsey, Ric Rojas, Dave Dooley, Todd Straka, Melody Fairchild, Colleen De Reuck, Ellen Hart-Pena, Clint Wells, Frank Richardson, Simon Gutierrez, Bernie Boettcher.
I’m not in their league, but it’s cool to have my name somewhere in their vicinity, at least for a little while.
That Kevin Blue kid (he called himself “Cup” Blue, for some stupid reason) has always been on those lists dating back to when we ran together. I was always a bit envious of that. Perhaps poignantly, I think he got booted off the 11-year-old list this year for good. His 41-minute 11-year-old time no longer makes the cut. He quit running a looong time ago. But it's funny to me that the person who first got me into running got knocked off those lists at the exact same time I was able to make my way on to those lists, a full 35 years later.
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