I’ll be going (again!) for the Unsupported Collegiate Loop FKT starting in the very early morning of September 3rd, 2025. This is somewhat of a last minute decision, as my actual plan was to do an Unsupported Nolan’s 14 run right about now, a goal that I’ve been planning, recon’ing and training for these past few months, but unfortunately someone decided to set fire to the north side of La Plata Peak, effectively closing the route. So, the Collegiate Loop it is!

I attempted this a few month ago in July, but I succumbed to some hip flexor issues with painful cramps that may have been exasperated by potentially exercise-associated hyponatremia/lack of most any salt in my nutrition and I hope that last ~two months of additional training and PT as well as tweaks to my nutrition which I’ve sewn will reap some additional trail miles — and more efficiently. I still think I have a good chance of bettering Pawel Szafruga’s time of 2d 14h 20m 36s (set w/long detour around Twin Lakes) set last year and Andy Blatecky’s time of 2d 20h 43m 33s (on the full route w/o detour) set in 2022 by a small margin. If not, I’d at least like to finish the route.

Here are some helpful links for you:

• FKT page of the Collegiate Loop
• My Lighterpack: all the gear I’m bringing (mostly unchanged)
• Nutrition Spreadsheet: what I’m eating (slightly updated w/more salty foods, but gives you a good idea)
• My Inreach Tracker Page: so you can follow along

On the tracker page, I’ve put waypoints every 5 miles on the Collegiate Loop. If you click on any of 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 157.16 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 (bow down to the master!), we can roughly estimate his average speed at around 2.52 mph (smokin’!) using the distance of 157.16. But do remember: he did sleep, so at the end of each of the first two days, I actually better be 4+ hours faster than him before I can 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, and it’ll be easy to find 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, hip flexors, electrolytes), and I’ll see you out there!

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