Good long-ish run on Saturday

I ended up deciding that the run I had planned was perhaps a bit overambitious, so I cut back from a 4 hour planned loop to something around 2 1/2 hours to make sure that I didn't suffer from it too much over the following few days. I ended up running a quick warm up of about a mile followed by a straight ascent of Brighton ski resort from 8750' to Catherine Pass (almost exactly 2 miles up to 10250'), a drop into Alta ski resort around 9400', a rolling rise back to just above 10,000' while running to and through the desolate Devil's Castle, a drop back to 9300' and a circuitous loop back to Cecret/Secret Lake (I think it's actually spelled "Cecret") around 10,000', another drop back to 9300', and reclimbing back to Catherine Pass and a quick 2 mile drop back to the base of Brighton. The total gain with all the rolling was somewhere in the mid 5000's, so it was a very strenuous loop for the seemingly unimpressive 12 miles. I felt pretty good most of the way, but I started to feel a bit sick going up to Cecret Lake and felt pretty crappy on the final 1000' climb to Catherine Pass from Upper Albion Basin. Surprisingly, I seemed to recover well on the final descent and finally picked up some momentum again, so I ended up feeling pretty good afterwards.

I brought along my camera and took a couple quick video clips en route, so here's something I uploaded from it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA6s9F_bLT0 . Pretty bad quality, but you can still get a few glimpses of how amazing the running up there is. I'll probably be back up tonight or tomorrow to continue to get the last bit of running I can squeeze out before it gets dumped on. It will probably snow up there sometime this week, but hopefully I can continue to get some decent running in for a few more weeks, as there's not usually major snowstorms in the until early November. After that, I'll take my training down to upper mill creek, lower mill creek, and finally the bonneville shoreline trail, basically all winter long.