I just sent an email off to my former running club, The Crested Butte Mountain Runners. Located around 3,000 meters high up in the Colorado Rockies. Expat Englishman, Martin Catmur is still organizing incredible trail races as he was when I was there over 10 years ago. As I typed, such was my excitement that I had to backtrack many times to make numerous corrections.

I remember the first time I heard of Crested Butte…

I was between jobs and at the end of a 3 month road trip in my camper van. I had lived in a town called Brush! which is a couple of hundred km’s away. Before the road trip I packed up and moved out of my apartment so I really didn’t have anywhere to go back to. In fact I was not even sure I wanted to return. I had been living there about a year. I don’t think I even did my homework properly when moving to the area from Ireland. I had just looked at the map and said… ” 1,400 meters…Sure that’s mountains!’

When I got out of the Greyhound bus and looked around I felt like Jim Carey in the movie Dumb and Dumber and also said.. ‘ Gee, I thought the Rocky mountains would have been a bit rockier!’

Brush! was no ordinary town,at least they said. The eastern prairie town had some kind of a local ordinance that required them to have an exclamation mark after the name of the town.

Now I was on the road… I was not really in a hurry back, think I really just wanted to extend the trip a couple more days. I was a bit bored. I parked the camper for the night down near the local park on Tomich Avenue in Gunnisoni. Not really knowing where I was going I just wandered around.

Karaoke was on in Timbers bar that Friday night so I stopped by. I had always fancied myself as a Bob impersonator. Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women number 12 and 35′ was my party piece at that time, it went down well the students of the Western State College…
Several times they came over to me buying me drinks saying ‘Hey Dude That was awesome… Especially the ‘everybody must get stoned line’ Hey now tell me about rainy day women 13 and 36..Anymore!!?

Gunnison is up around 2,600 meters and is cold in the winter.. Really cold. Its in the vast Gunnison valley where the cold wind gets trapped little escape. Many a winter day its the coldest day in the USA. Damp hair turns into icicles in seconds. You go indoors it melts rapidly, out again frozen hair again, wrecks your head.

At that time many of the Western State university students were from New Zealand on scholarships.. They were fine track athletes, some had even ran in the Olympic Games. They were also running the cross country season and skiing for cross training. Tonight they had a traditional start of cross country season dinner in the college.
In the morning at 8am there would be a 2 mile time trial. Coach had gone to bed early, and as students do all over the world they were burning the candle at both ends not really concerned about their run.

I got invited to run the time trial and though I hadn’t run much in the last year was surprised to clock something like 11 minutes and at altitude, I was delighted. I was well down the field but didn’t care. Some of the hungover Kiwis ran it in the low 8 minutes.

Main Street, Crested Butte, Colorado.

Earlier that night construction workers from the highway project between Gunnison and nearby Crested Butte told me to drop by their site office on Monday morning as they were looking for crew. I did just that and was hired on the spot… I lived out of the camper on the site. I couldn’t believe my first weeks wages.. It was a union job and they paid the federal construction rate.. I came out with over $1,000..
The job lasted till Christmas. The foreman took care of us with a nice bonus. The day we were finishing up he filled up his pickup with beer. We had the mother of all parties on the site after work.. I brought out my ghetto blaster and played my U2 Cd’s. The Joshua Tree was the one everyone wanted. I sat down in a quiet corner, looked out over the site fence up at the distant spectacular mountains. Track 7 for evermore will be indelibly stamped in my mind. That moment I coined the phrase for my beloved Colorado when I heard ‘ In Gods Country ‘ rattle out of the ghetto blaster.
I looked around and couldn’t quite believe the sheer beauty as the sun set around those spectacular Crested Butte mountains. I was in Heaven. There was no going back to Brush! I had found my nirvana.

Please visit the Crested Butte Mountain Runners website:

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 2nd, 2010 at 6:37 pm and is filed under jogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.