The Leadville Irish Miners’ Memorial

The Leadville Irish Miners’ Memorial is a thoughtful place. To get to the memorial, I drove past the familiar gateway to the graveyard and kept driving a bit further than I’d ever been before. I went on a summer day and was the only visitor I saw.

There are a few placards to read and study before walking up the memorial path. The placards tell a tale of squalid living and working conditions endured by the Irish immigrant miners, and an uprising against the mining industry and the then-governor of Colorado.

I love reading, and I love writing, but reading and writing only does so much for me. That’s probably why I’m also an artist. Some things are so big that they need to be expressed in multiple formats for any justice to be done. In turn, things like this are best learned about through different senses. The placards at this memorial, to me, are like reading a book, I sort of get it, it flashes by in my head. The facts and figures all make technical sense. But there’s something missing.

The missing piece is filled in by the memorial itself. This is where the history of the Irish Miners really connected in my head.

To see the memorial, you walk up a spiraling path which is lined with native plants and mining artifacts. What the artifacts are, is not always clear - to me at least. The process of walking the spiral reminded me a lot of walking through remote forests near Leadville. Sometimes, I come across some sort of artifact or rusted metal, where it’s clear that it’s a mining relic, but I have no idea what it is.

After spiraling upwards very slowly, like on a zen path, you see a statue surrounded by clear glass panels.

The bright glass panels contain columns of names of miners and family members who passed away, including their age or estimated age. It’s heartbreaking to see how young people were, including stillborn children with the same last name.

Having lived in Washington D.C. for a couple years and living amongst many memorials and museums, the memorial that this recalls the most for me has to be Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial.

Seeing the names on the glass panels was very moving to me. There’s something about seeing names on a wall that puts the facts and figures into perspective. The names being on glass is deeply symbolic. You can look right through glass, if you want. You can also look right through the death and destruction that mining can bring to a community.

Overall I was glad to see a memorial like this. It’s an important place to visit in Leadville, even if it’s not centrally located in town itself. Leadville’s mining history has plenty of facets - some facets are bright, and some of them flash darkly. I personally have been like many others who get swept up by the romance of Leadville’s history, and I admit that I have focused on the more glamorous side of things. I love to read about colorful characters in Leadville’s history such as Horace Tabor, Molly Brown, and that one time that somehow, Oscar Wilde ended up in town. And who wouldn’t be fascinated by the Ice Palace? There’s the fun of Leadville’s Boom Days celebration where everyone dresses up in 1880s fashion, there’s burro racing, festival booths, Wild West re-enactments, and plenty of gorgeous horses trotting down Harrison Avenue. There’s mining drilling competitions, and I have several memories of a Boom Days booth where I could “pan for gold” as a kid. Of course mining isn’t all fun and games, and recent memory serves to this fact as well - anyone who can remember the molybdenum mine closing in the 1980s can remember some lean and mean times.

And so, the dark and light facets of Leadville’s mining history are further clarified in this memorial. In addition to Boom Days, the Mining Museum, the Mineral Belt Trail, and many other sights to see around town, this brilliant memorial shows us the somber side of Leadville’s mining history.

In so many Western movies, the first scene shows a newcomer in town. We see man in a cowboy hat getting off a train, or a lone mounted figure riding down a dusty main street. Usually in the movies, you get the feeling that the newcomer has some sort of opportunity in town, or that they want to be there. The Leadville Irish Miners’ memorial is a thoughtful place to honor and learn about an entire class of people who certainly didn’t want to be in Leadville, as so many of them were pretty much much forced to be there. They were brutally oppressed, desperate workers who worked in devastating conditions, all of whom turned out the memorable wealth of the land for the low wage of a few dollars per day before dying very young.

I will return to this memorial frequently, and I still have to see it at night when light shines through the glass.

The Leadville Heavy Half

The Leadville Heavy Half is 15.7 miles up to Mosquito Pass above Leadville. The start of the race goes straight up 6th street from Harrison Avenue, and winds through some of the historically scenic parts of the old mining parts of town.

In 2023, The Leadville Heavy Half had the special challenge of being snowy. On June 17th.

This was a race where preparedness was a decent component of the race, because at high altitude, there was still snow on top of the large rocks. Near the top of the race, which was adjusted for 2023, we were all running uphill in what seemed like a mud river, with rocks that would easily loosen and turn over underfoot.

Things I brought:

1. Osprey water pack

   Filled a bit less than halfway with Scratch Labs powder. There were aid stations so no need to take a huge amount of water for the Half.

2. Frogg Toggs Rainjacket

   This is a lightweight rainjacket. It’s inexpensive and doesn’t breathe very well, but this is what I wanted for this race. If I needed it to breathe a bit I could open the front. The important thing is that it kept rain and snow off of me.

3. Melanzana sweater dress

   I like this dress because it has a hood. My mom got me this blue sweater dress years ago and it’s my favorite.

4. T shirt

   A basic t shirt that I often wear. It has a lotus on it. I think I bought it at the Galleria when I lived in Houston.

5. Sportsbra

   Underneath it all, Victoria’s Secret, more like Victory Secret.

6. Shorts

   I had these in my bag and I never needed them. I wore leggings the whole run.

7. Leggings

   Athleta leggings, they were warm and didn’t soak up too much of the snow.

8. Ice spikes

   Like chains but for your feet. I didn’t end up using these, but it wouldn’t have been a bad idea if I had not had my Brooks Shoes below.

9. Brooks shoes - Pure Grit 6

   I got these at the thrift store in Leadville, they don’t seem very special other than that they have nice gripping elements on the bottom. I chose the grippiest shoes I had for this race, and it was a good choice. At several points in the race, it was like running uphill through a river. There were many loose rocks and several inches of flowing water for many many yards near the top of the race.

10. Sunglasses + Hat

    Funnily enough I have done a race where I forgot my hat. I couldn’t find it on race morning and I sweated off all my sunscreen so you can guess how that ended up! Luckily this time I had a pretty well-built list and I didn’t get too scattered before the race, so I remembered. The sunglasses I have are the first goodr lenses I ever bought, also at a Leadville race event in 2019. They have a bit of paint on them but I like them better that way.

11. Honey Stingers + Gummy Bears + Gu

    I only recently discovered Honey Stingers and really liked them. My other MO for fueling on long runs is gummy bears. For 13 mile or half-size runs in the past, I usually eat an entire medium-sized bag of gummy bears, or 600 calories worth. This isn’t really enough though, so I took the Honey Stingers too, which to me are like giant-size gummy bears. The race was sponsored by GU so I enjoyed eating exactly one of those during the race. It’s a little unusual but I ate some Honey Stingers the night before to load up on carbs. I didn’t eat any during the race since I ate gummy bears instead.

Some of my fueling choices

So that’s all my gear I had!

As far as night-before fueling, while driving up to Leadville from Boulder, I drank as much water as possible where the water had some Scratch Labs in it. This may have been one of the more important steps for me of the race. Carbo-loading and fueling is something that I see other runners talk and write about often. For Leadville, I recommend… hydro-loading? It’s a bit more than simply ‘staying hydrated’ it’s purposely drinking almost more water than is comfortable on the way to high altitude. This helps me personally avoid headaches from dehydration. It may not be as important to do this for people living in Leadville and racing, since I lived in Leadville for about 18 years before going to college, and I don’t remember thinking as much about water back then.

I ate some oatmeal and quesadillas for dinner because that is the most carbo-rich thing I could think of. I ate oatmeal again for breakfast the next day. My opportunity to fuel is the day before, because I struggle to get energy during races. I theorize that my body works so hard at running, that it stops digesting or doesn’t actually digest. Almost everything i eat during a race, I end up throwing up later after the race. I always feel better afterwards, I wish I could keep food down, though. This is no dis on any of the foods I eat. It’s a total me-thing, not because the gummy bears are bad or whatever.

As far as the running I did to prepare, I pushed my baby in a stroller for many of my training runs, to the point where when I didn’t have the stroller, it was like running after pushing a sled. I sort of fell forward. The most I can put my baby through for a stroller run is about 5 miles, after that, I think it’s a bit too long for him to be in the stroller and I get him home so he can crawl around. My other runs on Strava were 10 or 13 mile elevation-gain heavy runs. I knew I wasn’t going to win or place high in the Heavy Half, my goal was to finish.

For a few days I thought The Heavy Half was the easiest race in the Leadville Race Series, it turns out with the Leadville 10k included in the series, the Heavy Half is probably the second easiest race. It’s hard to explain Leadville to those who aren’t familiar with it. I guess, one way to think of it is that everything in Leadville is hard - even driving there can be hard if you don’t hydrate right. The Heavy Half isn’t the hardest race you can do, but it’s still pretty silly. Running up a mountain from Harrison Avenue? 7 miles straight uphill, the last miles of which are covered in snow?

The Heavy Half doesn’t qualify as a half marathon because it’s too long. It might have been the hardest half marathon in the United States, but it can’t be, technically, because it’s 15 miles instead of 13.1. It’s aptly named, in this case. The Heavy Half is the heaping serving of a half marathon, it’s the cup that overfloweth, a weird outlier race that happens concurrently with a distinguished marathon. That said, there’s very little that is ‘half’ about it - I would say it’s entirely heavy.

As for what’s along those almost-16 miles, most people probably aren’t thinking about the closeup scenery of the mining relics, however the close scenery was all we had in 2023’s race, which was wrapped in sheets of falling snow.

I frankly loved this. Being a person who has painted a mining structure from part of the race, I couldn’t get enough of the old mining shanties and buildings along this race.

Even outside of the Heavy Half, whenever I see these structures, I think to myself “What on earth were people doing here?” and I start to get an understanding of the determination and obsession that was mining. I imagine scores of miners traveling up to 12000 feet almost daily to search through the earth for ores, run machines made of wood and rope, and pump water along refining sluices. All of us in the future are enjoying life with metals that were probably still in the ground 200 years ago. I’m writing this blog to you via my computer, basically electrified rocks, and I drove to this race in a car that almost certainly made use of molybdenum, the key mineral at Climax mine in Leadville.

As for how I felt during the race, I felt good most the time, and I was in good spirits. It was certainly hard, but I knew I could finish it.

I ended up getting 556th out of about 770 people. The above is my strava map, but I must have derfed something up about it, because my official finishing time was 4:44 and the mileage should have only been 15.7. Maybe I went out of service briefly and that was it. Who knows though, maybe a short walk back and forth around an aid station, or stopping to take photos of mining relics added some extra mileage, and maybe I accidentally paused Strava somehow, or it lost signal and the other 30 minutes of my race. Either way I am happy with my 4:44 time, it’s so easy to remember!

In a word, that was huh-huh-huh-HEAVY

Leadville Tiny Waterfalls

When the snow melts in the summer in Leadville there are many small waterfalls to be seen. They’re very beautiful. I have a few photos of these here.

What I love most about these waterfalls is how much they change the terrain they fall on - the high rockies are usually dry and brutal, but all kinds of life - flowers, mosses - can grow around these snowmelt falls.

It seems like another world. These waterfalls are probably at about 11,000 feet, maybe even 11, 500 or so.

Boom Days Rocks

In Leadville you can still see some rocks or large boulders that I painted in high school for the Boom Days Drilling competition. This one is my favorite, it was a bright sky blue and now is a powder blue.

Mt. Elbert

My latest medium-sized Mt. Elbert painting is done! Here it is:

This was my first larger oil painting I’ve done in about 18 months, since I’ve been avoiding oil paint while pregnant and in my months of breastfeeding.

Never Finished - David Goggins

What I like most about David Goggins is that he keeps challenging the parts of himself that he doesn’t like. In both his first book and Never Finished, he often splits himself into two personas: David, and Goggins, where David is a person to transcend, and Goggins is his transcended ultimate self, his truest, best self.

I think that this approach is good, first of all, because it’s on Goggins’ own terms. Nobody else is pushing him to be the way he is except for him. The split persona approach might work for many people, because it allows all of us to confront the parts of ourselves that we dislike as if they are people who are separate from us. It’s a compartmentalization of the old and new, and parts of ourselves that work well for us vs. parts that do not.

I read Can’t Hurt Me a few years ago. I tend to read many nonfiction books at once, and Can’t Hurt Me felt like someone was finally being real with me and telling me the truth while others were serving up platitudes and embellishments. Maybe ‘truth’ isn’t the right word for it, and neither is ‘accountability’. What DG does in his first book is radical self-confrontation. He hones in on himself and his goals and ends up being a Navy Seal. He continues this in Never Finished in the form of ‘evolutions’ as chapters. Each chapter is biographical and also interspersed with applications. It usually takes the form of a few pages of biography, and a few paragraphs of applications. I personally found this cadence to be useful and worth imitating. The format of a personal anecdote followed with advice or broader application is something I resonate with.

What I like a lot about Never Finished is DG provides a few highlight tools to perform radical self-confrontation. In the first couple chapters, he recommends recording your own voice and also listening to your haters, or reading every comment. I think this is wonderful, because I’ve never heard more discomfort than from people who record their own voice, and also the popular adage is to never read the comments.

Several years ago I was one of those people too who hated the sound of my own voice, and I ended up getting rid of this by listening to myself over and over. And frankly I’m going to read the comments anyways, and DG had some good advice in his book on what to do with those. It’s not what you might expect so I won’t spoil it.

The title of Never Finished is perfect, as Goggins does believe that when most of us say we are doing 100 percent in life and physical feats, we are actually doing about 40 percent. If phoning it in is the most horrible feeling in the world, leaving it all on the field is the best feeling in the world.

The idea of self-leadership that Goggins discusses in this book is another good idea. It was my favorite concept in the whole book. Again I won’t spoil it or summarize, all I will say is this concept, for me, is one of the most important concepts to review and re-read.

Ultimately, I loved this book and I found so much wisdom in it that I plan on re-reading it often. I can’t think of two people on the planet who are more different than me and David Goggins, yet I find his work highly relatable. The one thing we do have in common is Leadville - I grew up there, and Goggins has run the LT 100 at least twice. I’ve never done the hundred, yet, maybe this is the most exciting aspect of Ultrarunning. It’s an equalizer, where people of different backgrounds, ages, and races all run the same trail but each experience is wildly different. DG’s voice is like this - it’s a challenger and an equalizer. It seeks to bring us all up to the same level. I don’t think a book can have a better mission than that.

My insane routine as an average high school athlete in Leadville

I was never the best athlete in school, but, I did do my best.

I was consistently the third or fourth runner on my team, I’d finish something like 25th or 30th overall, and the third in my group of peers who also went to school in Leadville. I was always very average, but I was very happy as a runner and skiier in high school.

For some reason, I had an absolutely insane routine which involved exercising three times a day, with weightlifting in the morning, xc skiing or xc running in the afternoon, and squeezing in some biking at night.

Here is my routine from when I was 16 and 17.

5:30 am - wake up and drive to the gym

6:00 - 7:00 - lift weights

7:00 - 8:00 - jazz band

8:00-3:30 - school

3:30 - 5:15 - xc running or xc skiing

5:30 - drive home + shower + dinner

6:00-7:00 - stationary bike while reading

7:00-9:00 - free time, art, videogames, college prep

9:00 - sleep

Looking back at this routine, it looks absolutely bananas. As a 36 year old, I ask myself… why? Why on earth did I do all of this?

The answer to the ‘why’ question is simpler than it sounds. It would be possible, in a moment like this, to be self-aggrandizing and to take credit for being a total unique person who did all of this completely on her own.

That would be false. The real reason is that I did all of this because I had good influences in my life.

My parents were always doing outdoor activities like skiing and hiking, and the friends I had in high school were also very athletic. Remember when I said I wasn’t the best, and I saw myself as average? It’s because even though Leadville was and still is small, there were still many others who were better than me at everything. That’s why I put in the time. It wasn’t because I wanted to be the best. I knew my friends would always beat me and be faster. I put in the time because I wanted to be the best possible me.

For me, there’s something relaxing about doing my very best. If I do my best, I never feel like I want to go back in time or do something differently. I rest well at night knowing my time was spent perfectly.

This is also why I still pursue art and make art - I think it’s something that I can always do better at. There’s always something interesting to find out, a new discovery, a new place to excel. I may not be the best at it, but I can be better than I was last year. In art, I can be the best possible me. Art and running are interconnected because everyone is running a bit of a different race. There’s no ball or time outs, there’s only a course, and all of us.

What seems to be the same about my life as a teenager and an adult is my habit of using every scrap of time for something. Every moment continues to matter to me. I don’t wake up to lift weights anymore, but I do wake up and lift my baby and carry him all around my place! If I ever have a routine that is more intense than my high school routine, I’ll keep you posted.

Until next time, see you, Space Cowboy…

Leadville Sunset on iPhone 14 Pro

Lately I had a chance to take photos of a sunset over Leadville with the iPhone 14 pro! It’s a very fun camera to have on hand.