Fitness crazies crash website

I wasn’t skiing Thursday morning because I was sit­ting in front of a computer cussing. Around the country, roughly 2,000 fitness freaks were doing exactly the same thing.

Everyone was trying to register for the Pikes Peak Ascent and Pikes Peak Marathon.

Registration opened online at 8 a.m. on Active. com and by 8:01 a.m. the site was a mess. Nothing worked.

The races, on two consecutive days in August, have become some­thing of a Mecca for crazy distance runners. So in past years, the slots for the two races generally filled up in a matter of hours.

The uphill portion of the race ( the ascent and first half of the marathon), from downtown Manitou Springs to the summit of Pikes Peak, is 13.32 miles with a 7,815 vertical foot gain.

So we’re talking about superheroes here, not normal folk. But though they can run an uphill half- marathon (and there are even “doublers” who run the ascent and marathon on back-to-back days), no one was superhero enough to outsmart Active.com.

Just after noon on Thursday, the ascent/ marathon website had posted the following: