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Howdy all, I’ll be going for the Unsupported Collegiate Loop FKT Attempt starting in the very early morning of July 15th. If my asthma doesn’t make an appearance and I don’t get run off the high country because of a dangerous lightning storm (I write this as one is overhead), I think I have a chance of bettering Pawel Szafruga’s time of 2d 14h 20m 36s set last year and Andy Blatecky’s time of 2d 20h 43m 33s set in 2022 by a little bit. Here are some helpful links for you:
- FKT page of the Collegiate Loop
- My Lighterpack: all the gear I’m bringing
- Nutrition Spreadsheet: what I’m eating
- My Inreach Tracker Page: so you can follow along
On the tracker page, I’ve put waypoints every 3 miles on the route. If you click on them, you’ll get some more information. They look like this:
The part I highlighted has a few bits of information:
“30mi” is (roughly) the mile marker for the route — the route as mapped is about 157.11 miles long (it’s actually more close to 167 miles, but the track and map are merely an abstract of reality, of course) — regardless the general lat/long position should be spot on. It all works out, believe me.
“6188′” is the elevation gained at 30 miles. 10,000′ is a lot to climb in a day and this route is lumpy, so it may be total elevation I can do each day that’s the limiter of my progress. More elevation is gained the first half of the course than on the last half and average elevation is higher as well. It’s reasonably significant, so the first half will be a lot harder. My thought is get the hard stuff out of the way first, then sleep through the easy stuff.
“11.9hr” is the clock time I hope to get to that point by. That’s taken from Pawel’s average time on his FKT. If we forget that he sometimes (very briefly) stopped and even more rarely slept, We can roughly estimate his speed at around 2.52 mph (smokin’!) using the distance of 157.11. But do remember: he did sleep, so at the end of the first two days, I actually better be 4+ hours faster than him before I get to sleep myself!
“Unsupported” means I’ll be bringing all my food and gear from the start to the finish of the route and only picking up water and not allowing anyone to assist.
The Collegiate Loop is the two options one may take on the Colorado Trail — Collegiate West and Collegiate East — found South of Twin Lakes and North of Mt. Ouray, and just done in a loop. I’ll be starting at the Mt. Shavano TH because I know the area well, they’ll be easy to find and available camping. I’ll be going clockwise from there so I’ll hit the biggest climb of the route following Fooses Creek up, up, up! and get that out of the way.
That’s about it. Wish me luck (weather, asthma), and I’ll see you out there!
