Pikes Peak Region Trail Finder

BY BRIAN GOMEZ, THE GAZETTE

Ryan Hafer was sidelined with an injury, while Matt Carpenter was nowhere to be found. So Scott Gall made the most of his return home, taming a tough course on a hot morning.

The former Manitou Springs resident became re-acclimated to the altitude in enough time Sunday to win the Barr Trail Mountain Race, with a charging uphill and a smart-minded downhill giving him a long-awaited victory over a not-so-stacked field that didn’t include Hafer, the defending champion, or Carpenter, the running king of America’s Mountain.

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Gall, 37, of Cedar Falls, Iowa, completed the 12.575-mile jaunt from the Pikes Peak Cog Railway depot in Manitou to 10,200-foot Barr Camp and back into Manitou in 1 hour, 39 minutes, 2 seconds – the slowest time in the 12-year history of the event. On the women’s side, Stevie Kremer, 27, of Crested Butte, won in 1:51:58 in her Barr Trail debut.

With temperatures in the high 70s and excess gravel on the 6.3-mile, 3,630-foot climb up Barr Trail making traction difficult, Gall grew his lead on Daryn Parker, 30, of Manitou, in the “Ws,” a tricky section comprised of 13 switchbacks, and Parker threatened coming back into Barr Camp but couldn’t close the gap. He beat Parker by 82 seconds for a $400 first-place check in a $2,700 purse, and John Tribbia, 29, of Boulder, was 2:46 back.

“The descent is tricky because if you roll too hard too early and you cramp up at the end, you know your legs are done, and you’re done,” said Gall, who moved to Cedar Falls with his wife, Sarah, to open a running store in 2003. “I was keeping my eye behind me and trying to find a place that was middle ground. … I was grinding the whole way.”

Gall finished runner-up to Carpenter in 2001, in 1:34:43, and he also took second behind Mexican Ricardo Mejia in the 1997 Pikes Peak Marathon. Carpenter has won eight times on Barr Trail, and the Manitou resident was one of 13 runners to have finished the prior 11 years of the event, however, he has been noncommittal regarding his running future. A stress fracture in his foot kept Hafer on his couch, a year after the Coronado High School graduate broke the record Carpenter set in 2007 by 28 seconds, with a finish in 1:29:05.

Race results

Carpenter held the record for the previous slowest winning time on Barr Trail, in 1:33:27 in 2008, and Parker couldn’t push the pace on Gall with an injured left ankle. “Once we got to the top and were nowhere near each other, he was going to lose me,” Parker said after his sixth top-10 finish. “He started building his gap. I didn’t see him from there.”

Kremer caught a break when Silverton resident Megan Kimmel, a third-place finisher last year and the 2009 runner-up, dropped out in the middle of the race, and she grabbed the lead from runner-up Rachael Cuellar, 29, of Albuquerque, N.M., about 2 ½ miles past the start along Ruxton Avenue. Cuellar never got closer than 10 feet after losing the lead, and she finished 25 seconds behind Kremer, who conceded that she “surprised myself a little bit. … The last two miles, she was booking it. Uphill is my strength. Downhill is not.”

“I was too chicken to go any faster than I was going,” said Cuellar, who also was running for the first time on Barr Trail. “I wanted to try to make it without falling.”

Two-time defending champion Brandy Erholtz, 33, of Bailey, dubbed a third-place finish “really frustrating,” especially since she was 4:23 behind Kremer a year after she set the women’s course record in 1:47:57. “If I don’t have the lead at the halfway point, I’m not going to be able to get it because downhill is not really my specialty,” she said. “Uphill is where I get some good distance. But even though I was pushing, I was pushing slow.”