Weeks of 8-29-11 and 9-5-11

8-29-11: The big week of the PhD qualifier. Not much time to run the first 3 days. :(
Mon-Wednesday: Off
Thursday: 8 miles with Mark Lehmkuhle, good to be back running on the trails. Bonneville Shoreline, 1500' gain.
Friday: 5 miles, Rattlesnake + pipeline with Holly, the good old easy run with the dog when I'm tired and have nothing better to do, 1000' gain.
Saturday: 15 miles, Upper Big Water loop with Joe Dean, nice and easy, 3500' gain.
Sunday: 6.2 miles, 10k on a treadmill, 39:0x with 21:0x and 18:0x splits. Felt pretty good, although my calves weren't used to running the sub-6 pace I did for the 2nd half. First "quick" tempo style run in a long time, next time around I'll do 8-9 miles at this tempo type pace. Sadly, this was 4 minutes off my 10k PR (which I already considered weak by at least 30 seconds due to a really bad positive split), but I'm still not down to weight, so this makes sense. No gain.

Weekly total: 34 miles, 6000' gain. Not much climb or miles, but a good 4 days in a row and I also got an 8 hour written exam out of the way that had been scaring me for the better part of a year.


9-5-11:
Monday: Off
Tuesday: 8 miles with Mark on Shoreline Trail, easy, 1500' gain.
Wednesday: 5 miles, Rattlesnake + pipeline with Holly, easy, 1000' gain.
Thursday: 7 miles with Dave Ploskonka up and down Grandeur Peak, took it pretty easy on the way up (well as easy as possible for a run at an average of 17% grade for the better part of an hour), worked moderately hard on the way down, 3000' gain.
Friday: 30 miles, 14 miles of pacing at Wasatch 100 with Mark Lehmkuhle, then another 16 with Ryan McDermott. Felt good, though my heels got a couple annoying hot spots due to wearing my New Balance Minimus on a pretty rocky course. Got back home at 4AM and then had to go to 24 hour FedEx/Kinkos to submit a poster for Saturday's Utah Bioengineering Conference. Oh, also, both runners finished. Mark beat his goal splits by just over 2 hours and Ryan may have been a few hours slower than he wanted, but the dude had a 6 day old baby as of race day. Based on how exhausted he was at night during the race, just finishing was a massive accomplishment. 6000' gain.
Saturday: Annoying conference after almost no sleep due to being out running and submitting a poster until 5:15 AM, then an NPR fundraiser, so I took the day off.
Sunday: Not enough sleep again since I had to get up early for a 9-11 memorial service, had things to do, took another day off.
Total: 50 miles, 11500' gain.

Didn't really want to take Sat/Sun off, but at least I got in 50 miles, which is better than last week and still consistent with beginning to build my mileage up for real. The first 2 days of this current week have gotten me decent mileage and I have a big long run planned for this weekend, among other runs, so I expect to be somewhere in the 60s or 70s this week. If I can get to and keep a good trend of 70+ mile weeks, I think I'm going to run a 100k in November just to see how things are shaping up for longer events.