Climbing 7,800 feet of ascent over 13.3 miles from Manitou Springs, CO to its 14,000 summit, the Pikes Peak Ascent is not your typical half marathon. With an average grade of 11.5% and almost no downhill sections, it is essentially one unbroken uphill run.
On August 15th of last year, I took a shot at ascending the mountain while our family was driving back from Colorado to my home in Dallas, Texas. I had limited time, and I ended up having to turn around after climbing to the A-Frame (10.2 miles in) in about 2 1/2 to 3 hours. It was the most beautiful run I have ever done in my life: looking off from the switchbacks as you ascend through the thinning morning air, you look down to where you expect to see earth and see only sky. It seems as though one must look a whole world below, lowering one’s gaze to a qualitatively different level, to see the city.
I decided then that I was going to summit the mountain. Earlier this year I signed up for the 2023 Pikes Peak Ascent on September 16th, 2023.
This is my training plan to summit Pikes Peak. I will be training mostly in the City of Dallas, which is at 420 feet of elevation, for a race that climbs to the top of a ‘fourteener’—over 14k feet of elevation.
Here’s the plan.
Goals
A) Ascend the mountain. Every mountain ascent and ultra distance I’ve run has always humbled me. I go out with a goal and realize just minutes or miles into the race that I have underestimated the sheer physical difficulty of the land. This is what I love about ultras and mountain running: there is no human being so strong that a few more percentage points of grade will not bring him to his knees. So I start with having respect for the mountain and gratitude for the opportunity before me and that means setting a low goal and being grateful to beat it. Goal A is simply to get to the top, which I have yet to accomplish.
B) Ascend in less than 3 1/2 hours. Popular wisdom says that your Ascent time should be somewhere between your flatland marathon time and your flatland marathon time plus one half hour. Since I ran just under 2:45 at the Houston 2021 marathon, 3:30 is a reasonably conservative target. This time would have placed me roughly in the top 10% of finishers in the 2022 race: 147 racers out of 1,360 total finished sub-3:30. Of these 147, 29 were from outside of the USA (and hence likely elites) and another 83 were from the state of Colorado. CO and non-USA racers combine for 76% of top 10% finishers. Only one Texan made the top 10%, with a time of 3:25-3:26.
Going sub 3.5 requires getting to the A-Frame in about 2 1/2 hours, which is faster than I did on my first attempt, but not tremendously faster.
C) Ascend in less than 3 hours. Sub-3:00 would have put me in the top 4.5%, 62 out of 1,360 runners. Of these field, 24 are non-USA and 26 are from Colorado: 81%. This means holding an average pace of 13:30 per mile. A sub-3 ascent appears to be significantly harder than a sub-3 marathon, but probably not harder than a sub-2:30 marathon: once you go under sub-3, the times start separating a lot; you have about as many runners who go 2:30-2:40 and 2:40-2:50 as runners who go 2:50-3:00. This signifies a breaking point in the distribution, a tipping point between amateurs and sub-elite and elite runners, so this is probably my optimal performance right now based on my marathon times—decidedly short of sub-elite standards but at the top end of amateur performance.
Practically speaking, going sub-3 means getting to the A-Frame or tree line in less than two hours. This is highly predictive of a sub-3 finish (more on this below).