New schwag that I'll get to run in soon enough

I'm especially psyched by the pair on the left. For anyone that knows what they are, I bet you're wondering how I got them. :) I haven't run in them yet, but they seem even better than their predecessor. If I feel good (and I'm sure I will running in these) for the last half of August when I get to start running again, I'll be signing up for Hellgate on the 1st of September, at which point, I'll be 2 weeks into my slow build from 35 miles a week to 150 miles a week, which will end with just enough time for a quick taper before the first and only race of the year that I'll go into with adequate health. Time to get pumped.

2 weeks until training begins again, most likely.

Tomorrow will mark 3 weeks of absolutely zero physical activity. My energy levels are really starting to come back and I'm starting to be really jittery as a result of not running. I've put on 5 pounds in the last 3 weeks and am ready to use it as fuel. The big key now is to make sure I'm truly 100% better from the mono before I start doing stupid things again. My plan is to not race until at LEAST December at this point and I'm still playing it by ear rather than having stupid calendar-based goals. That being said, I'm forcing myself to wait at least 2 more weeks to ensure good recovery. I am going to be very closely monitoring my health over the next 2 weeks and if it continues to look good, I will start doing a VERY easy 5 miles a day 2 weeks from tomorrow (Monday the 2nd). I feel that I was very close to being over mono when I started running again in January, but I went a little too hard everyday, keeping it from fully healing, and when I started pushing the tempo runs as hard as possible in Feb/March, it started the regression. This time around while rebuilding, to ensure that nothing bad happens, I will be focusing on keeping my heart rate low (under 160) until at least October and not really doing much tempo work until I see what happens for next summer's racing schedule. Nothing is set in stone, but future runs I have in mind are the Hellgate 100k, Rocky Raccoon 100, Mount Cheaha 50K, Moab 12 hour, Desert RATS 50, and Old Dominion 100. Given good health, Rocky, Moab and Desert RATS are for sure and the others (especially Hellgate, which I have to decide on in 1 month due to registration) will be a bit more up in the air.

The future.

I found out today that my body never fully got over the mono I had in December. I was pretty close, but once I started upping my mileage and then attempted to race the 2 big races (which went extremely poorly, I should add), my body started to shut down again, so my health is fairly poor right now. My sports medicine doctor and I have devised a plan for recovery. I'm taking the next 3 to 4 weeks off and then I get to start up again with a whopping 5 miles a day. However, I get to up my mileage 10% per week, which will give me really big mileage by November/December after a long steady build. I'm debating one potential race in November, but I won't know if I'm going to run it until several months from now. I really have almost nothing else that I'm considering running until Rocky Raccoon 100 in February. I am determined to be VERY fit, have the kind of 100 mile race that my marathon and 50 mile performances indicate I am capable of, and I have come to realize that the only way to run well for 100 miles is to run more than everyone else training for the race. I've experimented with fairly high mileage prevoiusly, getting as high as 135-140 miles in a week, but I've always run it at way too hard of an effort to run that much consistently. Before my health plummeted, however, I noticed that if I would simply stop running so HARD everyday, I could do a heck of a lot more mileage and consistently pound out 20+ miles in the mountains over and over. So, the bottom line is that once I start running again in a few weeks, I'm going to start into the biggest overwork of my aerobic base that I've ever done. I suppose my blog won't be particularly interesting in the next month or 2, but one of my goals with that big mileage is going to be to do something of 30-50 miles as a trainer almost every single weekend, starting in around 2-3 months, so that ought to be an entertaining read I would hope.

Training in Death Valley

(A view from Zabriskie Point last Thursday, when entering the valley, click to view full image)


Since getting that hydration cleared up, I went down to Death Valley to train on the course with 20 year old veteran Nickademus Hollon (www.nickademus.org), who set the age record for the course at 19 last year. After a series of unforunate events (revolving around repairs of absurd maintenance issues in my new condo) kept me in Utah until this past Friday, I ended up driving out to Death Valley and getting there late Friday night. After camping out in Panamint Valley (part of Death Valley's protected area and the 2nd valley of the Badwater course, from mile 60 to 90), we woke up early Saturday, spent the morning and early afternoon hiking around the valley and exploring old mines, and then went running later in the afternoon.

After having a morning of moderate physical activity, running seemed like a moderately enjoyable activity, but not like something that I was really craving. Nevertheless, I started out at the top of Towne's Pass at 4956', 60 miles into the course, and ran the first 9.5 miles down the pass solo until I met up with Nick just before mile 70 of the Badwater course. Despite it only being around 95 degrees, I had fully drained a bottle and was probably already somehwat down on water, so I grabbed a new bottle, drained it in the next 4 miles while we were running, and continued on. While it wasn't particularly hot, it was surprisingly humid for being in the desert, and it wasn't entirely comfortable to run in. When we got to Panimint Springs, 14 miles in, I took a quick bathroom break, and we were off on the neverending climb out of Panimint Valley to Darwin.

Before writing more, I should mention that shortly into the descent from Towne's Pass, I looked up and realized that I could see all the way to the mountain region marking the finish of the course, the Sierra Nevada, 75 miles in the distance. Such an idea was incredibly overwhelming, so on the way up the Panimint grade, I found myself thinking more and more about how excruciatingly painful 135 miles was going to be and it got to me mentally for a few miles around 20 miles in. Fortunately, Nick's mom Marina was there to forcefeed me with gels, m&ms, and cookies (which is always a good thing on long runs) and give me water, so I quickly bounced back.

This sort of mental low is a little uncommon in training, but it's something that ALWAYS happens in runs over 50 miles, so it was good to experience that in training on a 30 miler and now remember going into the racing season how it was just a mental low that quickly went away.

I am feeling physically prepared for the strenuous Western States 100/Badwater double I have coming up. Most importantly, I am mentally prepared for it. Western States 100 will not be easy, but I am doing my best to consider it a "warmup for Badwater" to make final mental preparations. Obviously, running 100 miles 16 days before running 135 miles is not the best physical preparation possible, but I will be looking to just barely squeak in under 24 hours to get the silver buckle without having to go any faster than possible. Yeah, yeah, my PR is only in the 22s, but I'm a lot more physically and mentally prepared than I was for any of my previous 100s. I almost had all the pieces put together for my last 100 and ran the first 75 miles on par for a PR before absolutely breaking in the last 25 despite it being a course somewhere around 5-6 hours slower than my previous 2. I know exactly which pieces were missing, however, and they have been corrected, so I am positive that I will be able to run strongly the entire way through WS100, get myself a Silver Buckle, and be fully fresh 16 days later when the race of a lifetime starts.

In the mean time, here's a nice picture from the Badwater course, taken while driving back home on Sunday.

The importance of hydration.

I've had an interesting combination of incredible and miserable running since I last posted. Shortly after my last training post, I underwent a period of fatigue and frequent nausea resulting from running and a total lack of speed, where previously slow paces (7:00/mile, which I can easily hold for hours) would kill me in less than an hour. I underwent a Vo2 max test and found (without quite peaking out due to feeling lightheaded and fatiguedwhile exerting myself) that I registered a 64.5 ml/kg/min (compared to 63.5 last year), so I am probably around a max of 65 right now. However, the test showed that I had very little ability to metabolize fat, which makes no sense based on how I train (and compared to the exact same test from 1 year previously, which showed that I was incredibly efficient at burning fat, requiring only a small percentage of my intake on long races to come from glycogen, ie eating food) and on top of that, I peaked out at a considerably lower work effort despite my higher Vo2 max (an increase in Vo2 is like upgrading to a more powerful engine). Basically, keeping with the car reference, I had somehow developed a more powerful engine, but had a very small tank.

Thinking about this, I could not possibly put the pieces together without factoring that something was physically wrong with my body. I had run as far as 50 miles in recent months with no more than 1000 calories consumed in that time, so based on the tiny percentage of energy coming from fat metabolism during that test, that particular run would either have been physically impossible or would've left my body literally and painfully tearing skeletal muscle from itself to feed my running, which had obviously not happened. The trainer suggested that perhaps I was a. sick, b. dehydrated, or c. anemic.

I went to a sports medicine doctor the next week and found that I was definitely dehydrated and had probably (but fortunately, temporarily) overstressed my kidney, based on abnormally protein levels in my urine (in addition to overconcentrated urine). Due to my dehydration, my kidney had been unable to filter everything out of my urine properly and it left fairly high amounts of albumin. Additionally, it seemed likely based on other testing that I was getting over some sort of flu, so I probably had a combination of factors affecting my odd test and horrible running while back home visiting in MN.

I had been maintaining a weight of approximately 159-161 pounds for awhile, which seemed a bit low to me considering that I was right about 160 3 years ago before I ever lifted weights (and I was very scrawny previously). I got as high as 175 while lifting 2 hours a day when I had a broken foot last fall, in addition to supplementing with lots of creatine, nitrous oxide, whey protein, and hydroxymethylbutyrate. I had since cut all of that out and stopped lifting basically entirely, but maintained considerably more muscle than I previously had, so the 160 number seemed a bit low.

Within 3 days of proper hydration, my weight rebounded to a constant 164 to 166, my symptoms of fatigue went away, and I was running much faster on all of my runs with no increase in effort. The bottom line is, if you're going to spend a ton of time in the sauna, running in the heat, and driving around in a car with the windows up and the heat on full blast, even in the summer, make sure you drink LOTS of water. You can't just weigh the same before and after your sauna session as you'll still pee out a good percentage of that water and eventually get dehydrated if you're not paying attention to your weight over a longer period of time.

Since rehydrating my body (which had been maintaining that low weight for at least 2 to 3 months), I have felt considerably more comfortable in longer runs, back to back long days, tempo runs, and overall increased mileage. In the last week and a half, I have hit 4 long runs of 16, 18, 20, and 30 miles (in that order), all but the 20 miler in 90+ degree weather, and all with at least 4000' of climb, felt extremely comfortable on all of them, and would be doing even more if Western States wasn't in a week and a half, with Badwater 16 days after that.

Training over the last few weeks

Training has been going well lately. I've been getting in an unbelievable amount of climbing and my last big climb-oriented running consisted a 3.1 mile jaunt up (and 3.1 back down) Grandeur Peak (2800' of climbing the way I ran it) on Friday followed by a really high effort tempo run out of city creek on Saturday with an initial climb of 1000' and lots of additional rolling along the way. The important thing in all of this is to keep myself running and never hiking no matter how steep of terrain I'm on. When I'm running at 8000'+, already very fatigued, and continuing to run at inclines that can easily surpass 30%, it builds an incredible amount of mental strength (not to mention quad and calf strength) to keep going. Some of these peaks, especially Grandeur Peak and Mt Olympus give an incredible view when you reach the peak though, so it's totally worth it. Here are a couple shots from the peak of Grandeur on Friday (I've started running my big climbs with a camera in my water bottle hand-pouch):



(click to view full image)



Saturday's run, I had a pretty bad slam rocking the descent back into City Creek. There are lots of bikers on those trails, so at one point, I glanced over my shoulder to make sure I had no oncoming traffic, tripped over a rock, and slammed hard going a little over 5:00/mile, cutting up my shoulder, hand, elbow, hip, and knee simultaneously. Lots and lots of fun that was...

Other than that, I've had a bunch of really high quality long runs, my favorite recently being a climb from the bottom of Big Cottonwood Canyon, on the road 4.5 miles up the canyon (climbing 1300 feet), then straight up the Mill D North Fork trail. I aimed to get up to Dog Lake, but there was a little too much snow to make a pass near the top and I had to turn around after 2200' of climb on that trail. For an idea of how awesome running in Big Cottonwood is, here's what the road looks like at one point:
(sorry, you have to click it to get the full image, not taken by me)

Up on the trails, you get some beautiful views like this:
(not taken by me)

Another on the road:
(click to view the whole image, not my photo)

Big Cottonwood is quickly becoming one of my favorite places to run, so I'm looking forward to all the snow melting up there in the coming weeks.

Beyond the long runs and pure climbs, I've gotten in some good speed and tempo work. I ran a half marathon a few weeks back that became a lesson in pacing and a good session of "how much pain can you endure". I went out way too fast, hitting the 5k in not much above 17 and started suffering when the big hills kicked in around mile 5. By the end, my legs were really destroyed and I ended up with a super slow 82 minutes. Even factoring a similar performance at sea level (converts to 78:xx), it was a pretty awful time for me, but I'll chalk it up to a poor job pacing and take the tempo workout it gave me (HR around 180 the whole time). Beyond that, I nailed a really solid 3x3 workout recently and just last night hit a flat 8 miles at 5:47 pace. Yesterday's run was fairly painful by the end, especially considering that 5:47s over that distance up here is equivalent in effort 5:35-5:40 at a lower elevation. Workouts like that show me the benefit of starting easy. In my recent half marathon, I went out at 5:30 for the first mile and that became my undoing by the end, but in yesterday's run, I started out in an easy 6:08 and just dropped the pace from there, which helped quite a bit for my ability to maintain the hard effort.

I'll leave you with a view of a mountain I'm craving to run as soon as the snow is gone. Mount Olympus has a straight 4200' vertical over 3.1 miles, no joke. This is the steepest and nastiest climb imaginable with an average gain of 25.6%, split into 2 miles around 20% gain and a last 3.1 at around 35% gain. The last 1.1 is absolutely BRUTAL, but I'm still looking forward to running this again.

(not my photo)

Wildlife on today's mountain run!

I went out for something like 12 miles today with a pretty huge amount of climb (the total climb was around 3000', while the biggest climb went from 5000' to 5400' in the first mile and then abruptly steepened, climbing another 1100' to 6500' or so in the 2nd mile of the roughly 2 mile ascent).

A section of today's climb (not taken by me):


I expected the run to be very slow despite a pretty high effort level, but what I did not expect was to lose a fair amount of time in a stare-down with a handful of elk. 3/4 of the way up the biggest climb, I happened to glance over a ravine up to a peak about a hundred feet higher than where I was and see a massive elk staring down at me. Elk are generally not very aggressive, especially this time of year, but they can be, and it didn't really seem scared of me. It really couldn't have gotten to where I was very easily, but having a huge muscular animal easily capable of mauling me watching over me while running made things feel a little eerie. 3 mountain lions had been seen within a few miles of where I was just a couple weeks back, so my nerves were up already, and I paused until it eventually walked out of view. A few minutes later, 20-25 elk suddenly bound across the trail about 100-200 feet in front of me. A few more sauntered past and a few of them stopped and just started staring at me, apparently trying to figure out what I was doing on a fairly unused trail way back in the middle of nowhere. I just stood there for a minute or 2 waiting for them to move, but they didn't. After a couple minutes, a few of them started walking down the trail towards me, which definitely made me feel fairly uncomfortable. I shouted at them, but it didn't make them run off; it more just made them pause to reassess the situation. They continued back down towards me, so I eventually just grabbed a couple rocks off the trail, threw them in their general direction, and they finally turned and ran off with the other ones. I'm honestly a little unsure why they would just walk down the trail towards me at a leisurely pace. If they were being aggressive, I would've expected them to do more of a charge then a walk, but if they were particularly scared of me, they wouldn't have approached me.

Nice friendly looking elk (these things weigh up to half a ton...):

Another 15 or 20 of them ran past after the more aggressive seeming ones passed by, but none of the rest seemed to want to stop to look at me. Either way, I was a little spooked for the rest of the run and once I reached the turnaround point, I hauled it back down the trail as fast as I could (though, admittedly, that part of the trail was particularly rocky and tough and there were large sections of the descent where I couldn't break 10 minutes a mile since the footing was so treacherous). I'm really used to running a number of areas of the Bonneville Shoreline Trail, its offshoots, and various trails in Mill Creek at this point, and it's easy to think you know everything about it really well, but after hearing about the mountain lions on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail and having a bit of a frightening situation (even if it was me just being a little sissy), I've realized that I really have to be careful and pay attention to what's going on as much as possible when I'm out on these trails.