Friday 8th, September 2017, Steamboat Springs, Colorado

Life is good and I cannot complain too much!!   EB

You can’t control everything.  Sometimes you just need to relax and have faith that things will work out.  Let go and let life happen.

“Anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.”  Khalil Gibran

Well the three weeks of training in Breckenridge was fantastic. Great mountain weather with the occasional afternoon thunderstorm but nothing that would be consider “Noah’s Flood” material.  The temps were in the 70s for daytime highs and the low 40s at night.  Not too bad.   To top it all off, even after three weeks of running different routes I felt like I had only covered a small percentage of it.  This will definitely become a “to do” each summer.  All of this was to get ready for the Run Rabbit Run in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

 

Now that I am up at Steamboat, and ready to run,   I am finding that there are things that I have no control over.   Those “things” are the Forest Fires out in Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho and of course Colorado.  There are two fires close to Steamboat and the air quality for the last couple of days has been questionable.  This, to say the least, is creating some anxiety in me.

This picture is from Wednesday looking toward the Ski Area and Mount Werner.  The picture below is from Thursday evening in downtown Steamboat.  Now this does not look as bad as the pictures from Montana but thinking that I am going to run in and out of the smoke for about 30 hours.  Well I am guessing that this is not the best thing for my health in the long term.   So….you would think that this would be a “No Brainer” – don’t run.  But when you have put in miles and miles of training, spent money on travel arrangements, rearranged work schedules, etc…. Things become a little more complicated.   What to do…what to do??   I decided to NOT run.  And I rationalized it this way.  We live in a very toxic world that our ancestors did not have to contend with.   Those that chose to run in the smoke will take a significant “hit” to their respiratory/cardiovascular systems and they are going to go back to cities, towns, homes and even jobs, that are much more “toxic” than what their ancestors had to contend with. I do believe that stress like this can be accumulative and in the long run disease causing in the human body.  So I asked myself why risk it?  And the answer was don’t…  I want to be able to run something like this when I am in my 80s  and potentially when I am 90.  There will be other Ultras out there and I want to stay healthy enough to run them.