Net down hill marathon in Denver

It's really downhill. It's twelve miles of steep-2 miles of rolling, and 12 more of steep. If you run it, be careful. I've run Tucson a couple times, and wasn't right for a month. This one is twice as steep. I ran the first half of the course this spring, and decided not to run the race.

The altitude shouldn't hurt you that much-but the pounding will.

Have fun.....you can't run the run the Manitou Springs race if you preferred that one as it is the Pikes Peak mountain race....now that will kill a flat lander running up 50 foot hills....

you never ran that race before right? why are you asking if you can pb then?

Almost a mile drop in altitude? Damn... no way would I run that. You're risking way too much. I wouldn't mind a downhill race, but I think something like this would beat up your legs severely. Consider what you want to be doing in the month or two following the race.

If you don't routinely run downhill at marathon pace, your quads will turn to mush and you will DNF. Your quads will be blown out enough to scuttle your training for the following month.

I believe this is the first time this race is being ran.

I'm training for NY in November but am vacationing in Colorado for 2 weeks. Definitely will do some hiking, Mt. Elbert, etc. I was going to run 16 on Saturday & 14 on Sunday but figured a hard marathon on Sunday would be decent training. Just not sure how much all that downhill will affect me in the short & long term.

If you want to sabotage your training for NY by running this race, go for it! You have no idea how much this will trash your legs.

Chris from M@ wrote:

I'll be visiting Colorado for two weeks & there happens to be a marathon next weekend, well actually 3 (Steamboat Springs, Denver, & Manitou Springs)

I'm interested in the Revel Denver marathon next Sunday the 17th.

The race starts @ 10,297 feet & ends @ 5,759 feet.

I'm a flat lander from New England. Marathon pB is in the 2:50s range. Can I pR with all that net downhill & it being @ altitude. I do minimal downhill training. Probably a 50 foot hill here & there.

You will be trashed by the amount of descent and the pounding it will have on your quads.

Here in Nevada, I ran a sub 3 marathon pace training run down an 18 mile road that dropped 5,500 feet. I became very acutely aware of the camber in the road and that along with the continual descent knocked my legs to jelly for the next three weeks.

That is outrageously downhill. The altitude is extremely high, but if you're acclimated, it should, on paper, be faster by a couple minutes. It would seem like it should be more, but at that kind of altitude, things are just slow. Of course, without training for downhill, I would expect you to struggle and blow out your legs before the finish. Since it's all downhill, you can probably still coast in, say, the last 10k on dead legs without slowing a massive amount, but it's going to hurt a lot.

I recently ran 5 minutes faster than what I consider my "genuine" PR on a similarly downhill half marathon course starting almost 3000' lower than your race... I calculated my aerobic equivalent on the course as 6 minutes faster than my PR, but I had no competition and didn't have to max out my effort. Still, my legs were pretty beat by the end and, on a particularly steep 10th of a mile stretch of downhill at mile 10, I felt, at least for a few strides, that one of my quads might actually rupture. I train for downhills and it still beat me up this much in only a half. Oh, and when I did just a super downhill 8k last summer (crazy downhill, like 1900'), it knocked me out of training for a full week. If you care about racing something well in the fall and keeping your training consistent through the summer, don't do it.

Chris from M@ wrote:

I believe this is the first time this race is being ran.

I'm training for NY in November but am vacationing in Colorado for 2 weeks. Definitely will do some hiking, Mt. Elbert, etc. I was going to run 16 on Saturday & 14 on Sunday but figured a hard marathon on Sunday would be decent training. Just not sure how much all that downhill will affect me in the short & long term.

I've found a moderately hard effort marathon length training run can be helpful (I did a 26.2 mile run 6 weeks out from each of my last 2 PRs, hard enough that I just started genuinely hurting in the last mile, but was able to resume normal training the next day with no interruption), but a "hard" marathon is too much. Save that effort for race day.