Sarah Lavender Smith

I consider myself a capable trail runner — in California, that is. In Colorado, no way.

A tunnel halfway up to Tomboy Mine, above Telluride on the Imogene Pass Run course.

I’ve been in Telluride, Colorado, a little over a week, adjusting to life away from home and acclimating in the high altitude for the September 12 Imogene Pass Run. (Our family travel blog away-together.com details why we’re here and what we’re doing.)

If you’ve never been to Telluride, picture a cluster of brightly painted Victorian-era houses and frontier-era storefronts lining main street, all dwarfed by the surrounding mountains. The town sits at 8750 feet in a horseshoe-shaped bend in the San Juan Mountain range, and the road to town dead ends where the peaks rise up almost 5000 feet more and waterfalls cascade down. Spruce and aspen blanket the backdrop, and hunks of red rocks jut out most of the way up. Then the trees thin out and the red rocks turn a smoother gray on the peaks and ridges, which are stained by rust-colored splotches of mineral deposits that lured prospectors in the 1870s.

If you could look right over the mountain behind Telluride or tunnel through it, you’d reach another old mining town, Ouray, also tucked in a box canyon of stunning scenery. Connecting the two towns is a single-lane rocky road: Imogene Pass. It used to be the trail leading to large-scale mining operations where thousands of people worked from the late 1800s through the Depression. The road runs past the ghost towns of Tomboy on the Telluride side and Camp Bird on the Ouray side, and it crests above timberline at 13,114 feet.

I have some history with Imogene Pass, even though I’ve never run it. I’m here training for the race in part because the trek over the road always stood in my mind as an extreme daytrip infused with family folklore. (more…)

Starting later this month, I will be blogging more regularly at our family’s new site, away-together.com. We leave in two weeks for nearly a full year of travel to several destinations, to educate our kids (and ourselves) by seeing other parts of the world and to strengthen our bond as a family. I’m excited, nervous and asking myself, How did August get here? Running in July mirrored the pace of my life. I’m relating a few highlights here to try to make sense of it all:

Smiling at the finish of the Eden Medical Center 5K/10K in Castro Valley.

July 12: I stand at the start of a hilly 10K by Lake Chabot, seeing some road racing regulars for the first time in a long time. Morgan and the kids are with me to do the 5K. Coach Alphonzo is there with hugs and telling me to do the damn thing. I haven’t trained to race this distance on pavement in over a year — which is partly why I’m here: To face the challenge of running fast. To have fun (what a concept!) going all out. So I go for it, I go out fast with the lead women who turn out to be in the 5K. They peel off at the 5K turnaround and I’m the only woman near the front of the 10K pack (oh, sweet Jesus), trying to catch the guys ahead. (more…)