Jon Maletz:
"ASPEN — Pain coursed through Chris Klug's legs, stinging his quads like electric shocks as he trudged toward the summit of Highland Bowl.
“After every step, I kept thinking, ‘How am I going to do another?'” he said. “When I clipped into my snowboard and dropped into Full Curl, my legs seized up on every turn. If I crashed, I would've tomahawked all the way to the bottom — I had these visions of cartwheeling through the snow. The cramps were so bad that I could barely hit the brakes; it's a little disconcerting when you're flying down a 45-degree slope and you can't stop.”
Klug managed to descend without incident and then, somewhat surprisingly, caught a second wind for the final stretches of last season's inaugural Power of Four Ski Mountaineering Race.
After 9 hours, 49 minutes, 3 seconds — and a trek that covered 25 miles across four ski areas and about 11,000 unforgiving feet of vertical gain — the former Olympian and partner Jon Gibans, an emergency-room doctor at the Snowmass Clinic, crossed the finish line at the base of Aspen Mountain's Lift 1A in 24th place.
“I was pretty psyched to arrive at the bottom. It was a bit unceremonious — I think my wife, my mom and a friend were the only ones out there,” Klug jokingly recalled. “We started (early in the morning) at Snowmass Village, and it was damn near dark by the time we finished. What a long, long day.
“It was a little more hard-core than I realized. For me, it was one of the harder races I've ever done — harder than the Elk Mountains Grand Traverse and the Leadville Trail 100. … I'm starting to wonder myself why I'm doing it again....”
(Read more? Can't wait to see how Roger Marolt fares? Click title and stay tuned)
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