Week of 9-24-12: 53 miles, 11500' gain.

This week wasn't huge, but it felt like a turning point for me in getting myself back up and running, quite literally.  My right hip isn't 100% still, but it's manageable and appears to be heading in the right direction, despite training on it, as long as I'm stretching/icing on a daily basis in addition to keeping my runs from being overly long.

Monday: Off, recovering from a hard effort on Sunday, in addition to resting for Tuesday's workout.

Tuesday: 11 miles, flat, on a treadmill to keep the pace steady.  Workout of 1 mile at 7:00 pace / 1 mile at 6:00 pace, repeating over and over without rest, for 10 miles.  I figured this would be harder than it was, but I still felt relatively solid after 10, so when the last 6:00 mile was done, I popped off a couple minutes at 5:00 pace before cooling down for a half mile or so.  This is intended to be 30 seconds per mile over marathon pace and then 30 seconds per mile under marathon pace, but since I do these on a treadmill at almost 5000' and my next marathon (with a goal pace of roughly 6:20/mile) will be closer to sea level, I add on 10 seconds per mile.  The goal of this is to improve my body's ability to use lactic acid as an energy source, in addition to forcing my body to learn to recover while still going at an effort relatively close to marathon effort.  Eventually, I'd like to get the length of this out to 18 miles, but currently, I'm skeptical that I could do more than 14 tops.  Fortunately, I'm not really in shape yet, so I'll get it there.

Wednesday: 6 miles, 2000' gain, 1:10-ish? (I forget) with Meg Harnett.  Nice and easy effort.  Picked her up from the airport for the Bear 100 earlier in the day and then did some running at Brighton.  Started at the base parking lot, ran pass Lake Mary/Martha up to Catherine's Pass, down about a half mile into Alta, and then back over Catherine's Pass and back to Brighton.

Thursday: 3 miles, 500' gain, with Holly (the pooch).  A bit of running on the BoSho trail up in Logan just to test out my new Nike Zoom Streak XC shoes the night before Meg's Bear 100.

Friday: 9 miles, 2000' gain.  Pacing Meg at Bear 100.  Went from 36 to 45 on the course.

Saturday: 17 miles, 5000' gain.  Pacing Meg at Bear 100.  Went from 75 to 92 on the course.  Meg went on to finish in 25:07, 5th female.  Started a little after midnight, so it counts as my Saturday run instead of a second Friday run. :)

Sunday: 7 miles, 2000' gain, 49:12, with Holly (the pooch), hard effort.  Started from where the paved neighborhood becomes the dirt road at the bottom of North Canyon, ran up the dirt road, up the trailhead, up to about .5 miles away from Rudy's flat (couldn't quite go all the way up because it was going to get dark and I didn't have a light with me), then back down.  I worked hard on the way up and I was absolutely flying on the way down.  Having clocked the downhill on the moderately steep dirt road portion (as opposed to the trail portion), which is 1.4 miles according to a couple sources, my pace was about 4:50/mile here.  Keep in mind that this is a moderately steep downhill and quite smooth for running in addition to being double-track width, so this was faster than the rest of the downhill.  Overall, I'd guess roughly 8-high/mid pace on the ups (sounds slow to someone who doesn't run mountains, but it actually seems like a great pace to me for this trail) and 5-low/mid pace on the downs (maybe about 5:30 on the rest of the downhills on trail, still flying, but a little more technical with some switchbacks, so slower than the dirt road chunk).  Seeing my time at the end of this was a bit shocking, but extremely encouraging.

Total: 53 miles, 11500' gain.  I'm actually surprised at how much climb I got in, but I guess I didn't do any roads this week, and everything was trails except my treadmill workout on Tuesday.  That said, I'm definitely starting to pick up the effort a couple times a week, so I think I'm starting to transition into marathon type training well.  Overall mileage isn't all that big yet, but getting over 50 miles this week without much issue with the leg (it was a bit touchy after so many hours at Bear, as I kind of expected) is encouraging.

Next week: Once again, pending a good hip, I'll be hitting 1 hard treadmill workout and 1 harder non workout-specific day and 4 or 5 other days of easy to moderate running.  I need to be careful about upping my mileage too fast given my touchy hip, so I doubt I'll do much more than 60 miles, tops, and it's entirely possible that I'll only do about the same as this past week.

Music for the week (I'm going to continue to do this to provide some good listening other than the hipster nonsense that most other trail runners seem to listen to and blog about... haha...) is Bela Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin, a fantastic piece of music from the 19-teens. Starting around 18:19, the next few minutes contain some of the most intensely brilliant ideas I've yet to hear.