and you think I lead deathmarches?

There's a little race being run right now in the mountains north of here: the Hardrock 100, a 100-mile trail run that loops out of Silverton and runs through Telluride and Ouray as well as over Handies Peak, one of the 14ers (mountains over 14,000 ft). Beautiful and rugged country, with stream crossings, snowfields, etc etc and a ridiculous amount of elevation gain/loss (33,000 ft!!!).

Kyle Scaggs just crossed the finish line this morning in 23:23:30 (and he's 23 years old; too bad he wasn't 7 seconds faster!), smashing the previous record by over 3 hours and finishing over 6 hours ahead of the second-place runner. Think of it: this guy ran a hundred miles of rugged terrain in basically one (extremely long) day. This sort of thing completely fails to appeal to me personally, because if I'm going to be in those mountains I want to be taking my time and enjoying myself, not a sleep-deprived zombie running by headlamp, but I can't help but be hella impressed.

(also, to amuse a certain segment of my flist: one of the runners is named Paul Gross. :-)