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.

Moab 100: a bit of an odd report.

As was clear from my last post, I went down to Moab with the sole intention of running a big PR for 100 miles. Having seen only this picture of the course: http://geminiadventures.com/24U.gif on the official website and not having found an official description, I was expecting a fast and easy desert loop where I could run somewhere around18 to 19 hours. I was quite shocked when I showed up, found out that picture was only relevant for the first and last quarter mile of each 5.37 mile loop, and that the rest of the course mostly looked like: http://twitpic.com/1bdoma , though it was typically much more uneven than this picture. The majority of the course consisted of slickrock or loose sand. Thinking about it, I very quickly realized I would not be able to run much faster than 21 hours on a course like this, so I immediately started debating whether or not to switch down to the 12 hour category and just run 50 miles or so (especially because the footing was awful for nearly the entire loop and I didn't want to risk injury at night). After a loop or 2, I comfortably settled into running with or around 3 guys from the Naval Academy (some of which I've had the pleasure of running or racing with before). 2 other 100 guys were way out front, and it stuck that way the entire time. Had I thought I could win, I'd have allowed myself to run a mediocre time and stayed in, but when the top 2 guys were still way out after 43 miles, I sat down for about 35 minutes to go to the bathroom again and make a few phone calls to get input on whether I should just switch and run 50 miles instead, and realized I was gaining nothing by running the whole 100. Sure, I'd get mental confidence from it, but running 100 miles for no particular purpose is quite detrimental on the body and could have potentially slowed down my progress in Badwater training an unacceptable amount, so I just switched categories, zipped off one more lap (once I actually started the lap, it was one of my fastest of the 9 I did) and then later just ran an extra 1.67 miles on my own to make it a total of 50 miles. My pacing for the 50 miles would've given me a 19:30 100 mile (low 18s had I not sat down and debated what do, which I wouldn't have needed to do), but despite the fact that my legs felt literally totally fresh even after 50 miles, I would've slowed down a lot at night due to the horrendous footing. In hindsight, I feel like I should be a little mad at myself now. It turns out the 2 front runners were both running out of their means and dropped out shortly after I left, so 2 of the 3 guys I was running with finished 1st and 2nd, while the 3rd had knee problems and called it a day after 54 miles. Hindsight is 20/20, but despite the fact that I feel like I could've hung with the top couple guys that finished, I still made the right decision based on the course. I didn't have to take any time off of training and was literally back at it the next day, not to mention that I got one heck of a Saturday long run in. I initially felt somewhat weak for dropping without any sort of injury or problem, but it stems from the fact that Badwater is simply so much more important to me than anything else on my schedule that I wasn't willing to risk the consistency of my training to run the same kind of time that I've previously run for 100 miles. That's about it. Kind of weird, but I'll take it long before I'll take a 22 hour 100 mile that puts me out of commission for weeks.

Another good week.

I'm feeling reasonably ready for the Moab 100 right now. I had a good week this past week. Highlights would include a solid 15 miler at a pretty high effort level today and a very solid 2x2 mile on Wednesday with a relatively long warmup and cooldown. I did the intervals at just a hair over 5:00/mile (keep in mind that I'm at 5000' elevation), so I was really pleased with it. Today's 15 had somewhere around 2500' of gain with really difficult terrain for most of it and I ran it in 1:53, a really fast time for me for that particular loop. To put it in perspective, I have 14, 15, and 16 mile versions of this loop, and 6 or 7 weeks out from the Fall 2009 marathon that never happened (which I was expecting to run somewhere around 2:40), I hit the 14 mile version in 1:44 and the 16 mile version in 1:58, so I'm pretty close to where I was previously (also, I ran 10 miles at exactly 6:00 last night after skiing pretty hard for a few hours, so I wasn't 100% fresh). I'm just running an 8, 7, and 8 miler this week, so I'll be really fresh going in on Saturday. I'm still seeing this as a bit of an early season test considering that I have no idea who the competition is, but I'm going to run it as fast as I can. I should have a big 100 mile PR next time I post. :)

Lots of running/skiing/sauna time on Sunday

Sunday was basically my last big day before the Moab 100. Karl had given me a 16 miler on roads on Saturday and 18 on trails on Sunday. However, the weather totally sucked on Saturday, so I kind of put my run off until very late. Still being a wet sloppy blizzard outside, I went to the gym and just put in my 16 miles on a treadmill, starting sometime around midnight, so I actually did the run on Sunday. I was supposed to be running moderately hard (but with enough left over to do a longer run on trails the next day), so I dialed in 6:40/mile and ran the majority of the run at that pace until cruising the last few miles in the mid-high 5s to finish at 1:44 even and a 6:30 average. I went home right away and went to bed, woke up, skied for 3 hours at the Snowbird Resort, came home, and immediately went out the door for my "18-miler". Feeling good near the turnaround of my out and back despite the incredibly sloshy conditions on the trail which often irritate my legs somewhat, I tacked on an extra 2 miles to make it a 20 miler. I ran the 20 miles with rolling hills the whole way and 3 very significant climbs (two around 7-800' and one around 500') and well over 4000' of total gain in a little over 2:50 for about an 8:30/mile average. An hour later, I jogged another 2.5 miles with Jess as a cooldown and finished everything up by doing some sauna time (sat there for 20 minutes at 175 degrees).

Oh, and the best part is that while coming back on the trail, I recalled that a FAMILY of mountain lions had been spotted on the trail I was running on and caught on a security camera in a parking lot adjacent to the trail several days prior. If I had remembered this, I would've taken another route, but it was too late to do that, so I just ran 4 or 5 miles through that area holding a sharp 2 pound rock in each hand in case I had a run-in, feeling incredibly sketchy every time a car drove by. I'm pretty sure I would've had a rather tough time defending myself against 3 mountain lions, but whatever, I felt slightly less afraid of dying while holding the rocks. haha...

Long story short, I did 38.5 miles of running, 3 hours of skiing (which is a very tough workout when skiing at Snowbird), and a decent sauna workout in one calendar day. Interestingly enough, my neck was slightly sore the next day, but everything else was fine.

Moab 100? Why not...

I was planning on running the Antelope Island 50 in a few weeks, but the registration somehow closed despite the race specifically claiming not to have an entry cap. I had originally considered Moab 100 instead of AI50 to begin with, so I just opted to get in a good 100 mile desert trainer. I know that my base isn't "exceptional" right now, but it's still pretty good and I was definitely in the best shape of my life before I broke my foot on Halloween, so I'm not too concerned about the distance.

What are my goals? Well, first off, to run well the whole way without ever really regressing to walking. Second, I want to absolutely nail my nutrition. Third, I want to have as close to even splits as possible. Fourth, I want to win if the race (assuming it isn't more competitive than it's been the last few years). I should say though that if I hit the first 3 goals and a bunch of competitive people show up and beat me, I will still be very happy.

I'm planning to start out around 10:00/mile and just hold that pace. I will aim to take incredibly minimal breaks, eat lots of high calorie foods (donuts, cookies, etc) at the end of every lap, eat 2 gels per 6 mile loop, take 1 salt pill per hour (it won't be that hot, but I will take more if necessary), and keep a steady pace and effort the entire time.

Badwater. It's on.

I've been accepted into the 2010 Badwater Ultramarathon. 135 miles, Death Valley, July.

In other news, I've been hitting lots and lots of good running. Starting to get back into the "lots of long runs" style of training, but building up to it slowly thanks to Karl's awesome coaching. I'm doing 6 days a week, 1 day off, with 1 easy day, 2 moderate days, 1 hard day, and 2 moderately hard long runs (both on the weekend). Last week I hit 14 and 18 through very hilly mountain trails on Friday and Sunday with 9 miles in between, this weekend I hit 13 and 20 with 6 miles in between. Next weekend I'll bump up to 16s on both saturday and sunday, followed by 16/18 the next saturday/sunday. I'm doing a 50 mile the last weekend of march as well as one in late april, and probably one in may, and somewhere along the way, I'll be up to back to back 30 milers, which sounds like a pretty aggressive way to train my legs to be ready for long runs. On the "hard day" side of things, I hit that 13.1 trainer in 1:13:28. Last week, i somehow managed to hit 5 miles at a 3% decline (1.5% would account for the elevation, the extra 1.5 made it about 40 seconds fast) in 24:55. I hit the first mile in an easy 5:25 then upped the pace in miles 2-4 to 4:54, 4:56, 4:54. Realizing I could squeeze my way under 25 if I pushed it really hard, I pounded out a 4:43 last mile and finished up in 24:55. Not too bad. I was in the low 27s in 8 months ago for a 5 mile split in a poorly run and somewhat downhill 10k (with a couple legitimate uphills thrown in). I could've probably eked out high 26s at the time for 5 miles, but this was a nice surprise. I'm probably right around the shape I was in right before I got injured at this point and now it's just a matter of building my base over the next 4 months without overtraining.