Bolder Boulder 2015

I hope this becomes a recurring post each year. I first ran the Bolder Boulder 10K race when I was in the 7^th grade with a neighbor girl that I ran track with. Was either of us prepared to run 6.2 miles? Not really, did we have any clue what we were doing? Not really, did we do it anyway? Of course. We even ran it again the next year, but since then I haven’t ran it.

And so this year, as it has become one of the most famous 10Ks in the nation I decided to jump back into running it. Leighton decided that he wanted to run it too. I wasn’t so sure if 5 ½ year old could do a 10K. On the 5Ks that we’ve done usually he ends up on one of our backs for part of it. But we committed to it and trained.

Well kind of trained. I was training for a ½ marathon so a 10K was easy for me, but a few different times Leighton and I would go out and run on the trails together. It was more of some running/some walking along the way and I was ok with that. I knew we’d do a lot of walking and planned accordingly.

Finally the big morning arrived. We wore matching “Superman was adopted” t-shirts and Clint dropped us off a few blocks from the staging area. We were in section NC, and while the fast people started around 6:45, our wave wasn’t scheduled to start until 8:53 or something like that. Before long we were lined up and ready to start. The starting gun made Leighton nervous and I think for the first ½ mile we talked about it and how it was not a real gun. He finally concluded “yeah, but it didn’t have to be so loud, that scared me”.

Hanging out with the NC corral before the start

He did great, mile 4 to 5 was a little rough, we knew Clint was cheering us on near mile marker 5, so that kept him going. As did the fireman and paramedics along the side of the road that we stopped and got photos with. We ran into some friends and just had a great time. There was some walking along the way, which was totally fine!

Crossing the highest point on the course

Finally we were headed up the big hill to the stadium and then across the finish line. After some photos we got our bag of goodies and found a spot in the stadium to watch the Memorial Day tribute which was amazing to watch and a good reminder of the freedoms we have and the sacrifices that have been made along the way.