After the triathlon season ends, I always find it tough to take a break, so I rarely do.  I definitely take the intensity down, but I soon resume to my “normal” training.  I know it’s best for my body to rest more, but I still want to keep racing.  That’s why I wanted to sneak in one more race before the end of the year.  Since snow fell early in CO this year, Nikki and I decided to do a snowshoe race.  

A couple days after Thanksgiving, we went up to Copper Mountain to do the 6th Annual Gobbler Chase 5K snowshoe race.  It’s a quick 5k loop on Copper Mountain basically going up and down at around 9500 ft.  Nikki, myself, and my sister in law all raced on our Atlas Snowshoes and it was super fun.   Even though it’s a 5k, running on snowshoes is always a lung burner.  I lined up next to my ultra runner friend Dave Wilcox, who lives in the area, and we were on our way!  I took the lead early on, pushed hard and finished in 23:48 to take the win by 2 minutes.  The topper was winning 4 ski lift tickets to Copper Mtn.  Nikki had a great race and placed 2nd overall among the women!  The next day I noticed that I had my picture in the local paper, The Summit Daily (see below). If you’ve never been on snowshoes before, give it a try!

Tim