LEADVILLE — Hosted by Colorado Mountain College in Leadville, the Colorado Cup Snowshoe Race and National Youth Snowshoe Racing Championship brought together almost 80 competitors who ran their hardest through a beautiful, but unforgiving, 5K course.
The course, primarily sitting over 10,000 feet above sea level, took those in the competition from the lowest point on campus all the way to the highest, boasting hundreds of feet in elevation gain.
The grueling, high-altitude, hill-based obstacles were enough to keep everyone in the race well out of breath (even those in the audience).
The Colorado Cup, heralded by its organizer, Darren Brungardt, as the highest cross-country meet in the country, has been going for more than a decade now and has doubled as various national championships, with this year being no exception.
High school and collegiate teams from across Colorado, and various other states, traveled to compete and were joined by a handful of individual competitors.
Brungardt hopes to see snowshoeing, a sport he cites as having a relatively low cost of entry, become more and more popular in years to come, and dreams of seeing it in the Olympics one day.
For more information on the race, CLICK HERE.
