To get where you want to be, you have to do much more than you think it’s going to take. You must increase your actions by a factor of 10. — Grant Cardone, The 10x Rule

The Chirico Tenpeat has been on my radar for a couple of years, in the same way that a dear great Aunt’s birthday is on your radar. Which is to say that when Facebook reminds you on the day of, you curse out loud because it’s too late to send a card. In past years, this free “event,” held in the middle of the workweek, always seemed to defy my online searches until the day of, making it impossibly late to rearrange my work schedule to attend. This year, however, I happened across a post in February, announcing the 2019 Tenpeat on April 24, and I promptly took the day off. (I’ve since learned the event occurs on the last Wednesday of April every year, and hence perhaps not to difficult to plan for).

The Tenpeat, about 30 minutes outside of Seattle, follows Tiger Mountain’s Chirico Trail to Poo Poo Point, 3.8 miles round trip with 1760ft of climbing. The aim of the Tenpeat is, you guessed it, to do this trek 10 consecutive times, for a total of 38 miles and a whopping 17,600 feet of ascend and descend in a single, 12 hour push.

While an impressive number of people finish a full ten repeats annually (14 this year, including one who, no joke, paraglided down from the top on a couple of runs), race organizer, Jess Mullen, encourages people to come out for as many repeats as they can do, which for me, as a first-timer, was five, in a leisurely 8 hours and 14 minutes.

My “down” legs gave out before my “up” legs. Having completed the Yakima Skyline 25k with 5000ft of gain and 5000ft of descent just four days before, I was fatigued coming into the day. Moreover, I’d planned simply to use the experience for “time on feet,” deciding even before my arrival that I would complete as many repeats as I felt like, accounting for socializing time, without any real goal in mind.

Still, my head is already spinning on 2020. For certain, I would need to treat this as a “real” event (with a hilly, 50 mile-esque training plan), and not the “fun run” I treated it as this year. And, given my best time on what I would consider to be an equivalent course is 12:59, a sub-12 Tenpeat feels like a good, solid stretch goal.

I’ve already blocked the day off on the calendar.