Flat Out 5k

On Saturday, Sarah and I both ran in the Flat out 5k at the Flat Irons Mall in Broomfield. I've been looking forward to this for quite a while because it is the first time I've competed in a race. Sarah probably doesn't know it yet, but she's created a monster. I'm naturally competitive, hence the reason I play soccer 5 days a week. But now I have another outlet for my competitive vigor. In general, I wouldn't consider myself a runner. I do run once in a while, but for the most part I play soccer. I figured I would do OK, so going into the race, I didn't set my sites too high. After I finished the race, I ended up doing better than I thought I would. I finished 56th out of 689 people with an overall time of 20:15.

On Sunday Sarah and I decided to get out of the house and head up to Rocky Mountain National Park for some hiking. For our first hike we headed up to Bear Lake at 9350ft. From there we hiked over the snow packed trail up to Nymph lake. Right above Nymph Lake was a great lookout with views towards Half Mountain, Spearhead and Thatchtop.

From there we continued our ascent to Dream Lake at 10007 ft. Dream Lake is at the mouth of the valley between Hallet Peak and Flattop Mountain. We were hoping to push on to Emerald Lake, but the snow started to get too deep and we started post-holing. We turned around and headed back to the car.

Right now our mountain adventures are limited by deep snow and icy trails. By next weekend we're going to purchase some crampons for the ice and snowshoes for the deep snow so that we can extend our hiking season. After we got back to the car we headed down the mountain to Sprague Lake. The trail that we tried to hike was too snowed over, so we did a 1/2 mile nature walk around the lake. We eventually headed back to town and ate at our favorite sushi place before heading in for the night. The full set on Flickr is here.