I signed somebody else up for Leadville.
That was the entire note I added above the race newsletter: “I am signing you up for this FYI.”
No long pitch. No training plan. Just a warning disguised as information.
The event was a trail race high in the Colorado mountains. The course ran out of Leadville, crossed old mining roads, climbed toward Mosquito Pass, and spent enough time above the trees to make the lack of oxygen part of the experience.
It looked terrible.
I wanted in.
This was how a fair number of my races began. Somebody sent a link, or I found a course that looked a little unreasonable, and registration happened before the practical questions could catch up.
Leadville had every useful ingredient: altitude, weather, a hard course, and a trip west. It was not a place to chase a normal road-race time. Getting through the route was the point.
There was also something better about making it a shared problem. Training alone is easy to skip. A race with a friend becomes a date on both calendars and a story before anybody reaches the start.
The newsletter called it daunting but doable. That was good enough for me.
I was lifting, running after work, and moving through a heavy stretch at Shutterstock. The work schedule did not create obvious room for mountain-race preparation. My response was not to wait for a quieter year. It was to put the race on the calendar and see what training I could fit around everything else.
Whether that was confidence or poor planning depended on the week.
Either way, somebody else was coming with me.