Altitude

So one of the most important things I learned on this trip is that a difference in altitude makes a huge difference on your ability to breath. Considering breathing is an essential part of life it is a fairly essential lesson but one I learned the hard way when I got to Colorado.

On a side note when I arrived in Colorado last Thursday night the very first thing I noticed was how dry it was not the altitude. A warning to anyone coming to Colorado see if you can get your doctor to hook up and IV line of saline to keep you hydrated and make sure you bring about 100 tubes of chapstick. It's that dry.

Anyway when I finally met up with my dear friend Juanita and made it into her apartment (yet another story for another post) one of the first things she asks me is have you noticed a difference in altitude. I said no because really at that point I had not. The next day we went for our little rain hike (see "Adventures in Hiking") and still I hadn't noticed much of a difference. Now at this point I was feeling pretty awesome like maybe I was a immune to the difference in altitude. I quickly learned the next day that that was not the case.

Saturday we drove a ways up into the mountains for a hike. We take off up the trail and are having a good time messing around and playing. At one point Juanita did or said something funny I let out this fairly boisterous laugh and all of the sudden it felt like someone had drained ever molecule of oxygen from my lungs. You know if feels when someone kicks you in the gut and you loose your breath, pretty much the same feeling. I thought to myself wow that was weird, still not making the altitude connection. Later that day I was messing around with Juanita again and went to lift her off the ground and that same thing happened. Still thinking that's weird. But in terms of hiking and stuff I still wasn't feeling all that effected by the altitude. Then it happened.

Later that night we were having a bond fire out on a ranch. We were down in a valley to have this bond fire to stay out of the wind. At the end of the night a few of us were walking up the hill (a fairly steep hill at that). Now I noticed that I was having trouble breathing but I figured that was due to lack of exercise and the steepness of this hill. Juanita kept asking if I was okay, and I kept saying yes. It wasn't till I got the top that I realized I was not okay. I could not catch my breath and really thought for a minute that I was going down. For those of you hoping the next sentence is that I did go down. . .sorry to disappoint, I managed to catch my breath (or at least enough breath) to prevent any face plants in the dirt. But I did learn in that moment that I am not as awesome as I thought.

The next day we tackled Pikes Peak, and let me tell you the air is so thin up there that sometimes even when you are standing still and not talking it gets a little challenging to breath. But let me tell you folks it's beautiful up there.

Moral of the story, no matter how awesome you are you WILL be effected by an altitude change. So if by telling this I can prevent anyone from over doing it and doing an actual face plant than I have done my job.