By Seth Boster | Colorado Springs Gazette
Joseph DeMoor has a confession to make.
He knows it sounds silly, but he likes to see his name listed on the first page of fastestknowntime.com/athletes. There are, at last check, 487 pages you could scroll through — names listed with their number of fastest known times, or FKTs, as the rather obscure records are known in the world of outdoor athletics.
And yes, at last check, DeMoor’s name was one of 20 on that first page. With 52 FKTs logged across Colorado’s mountains and beyond, the Carbondale man’s name stood 15th on the list of world record holders.
A college running buddy’s name had slipped to the second page.
“We have this running joke, we’re trying to stay on the first page,” DeMoor says. “Right now I’m on the first page, but not by much. I gotta keep my eye on that.”
Forgive his competitive spirit, however peculiar.
“There’s a certain population of people who want to see what they can do, and this is a way to do it,” says Buzz Burrell, the competitive mountain runner out of Boulder credited with co-creating the FKT phenomenon around the turn of the century.
The website he helped start is now owned by Outside Inc. — a sure sign of the once-underground scene going mainstream.
The site lists nearly 6,100 routes around the world. Those are trails long and short, single summits and multi-peak pushes, various loops and traverses that people have stamped their name upon with times recorded and verified by gate-keeping measures developed almost 25 years ago by Burrell and a Boulder collaborator, Peter Bakwin.
The site lists more than 200 routes in Colorado.
“It’s so incredibly overwhelming,” says Andrea Sansone, a regular watcher and record chaser in Golden. “It’s crazy.”
However crazy, it’s a way of life for Chris Fisher. Along with the record for climbing all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains in the single winter of 2023, he holds 21 more FKTs logged on fastestknowntime.com.
“I chase hard objectives for myself, to test myself, to learn more about myself,” Fisher says. “I chase the human experience.”
It’s the experience afforded by some of those 200-plus routes in Colorado.
Here we take a look at some of the most-sought, vaunted and respected FKTs around the state:
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