Week of 7-11-11

7-11: 34 miles of pacing at badwater, most of it was stovepipe wells to panamint springs, 5000' gain

7-12: 18 miles of pacing at badwater, mostly a good chunk starting around mile 100, ben finished in 41:14, no significant gain

7-13: off, after race

7-14: 5 miles, rattlesnake plus pipeline with holly, 1000' gain

7-15: 4 miles, very difficult climb most of the way up gobbler's knob from alexander basin with holly, stopped when we hit snow, which she's not good in. Hahaha... 2000' gain

7-16: off, saving for Sunday :)

7-17: 19 miles with mark, very hot and arduous run, big water to dog lake, almost down to big cottonwood fork on butler fork, up mill a fork (this climb suuuuucked, though we ran into some other dudes training for speedgoat 50k and ran it with them), west on desolation trail up to raimond/gobbler's knob saddle, back on deso trail to dog lake, back to big water, parked a half mile out from trail due to crowding, so first and last half mile was road. 6000' gain. 3:45 of a bit of easy trails and a ton of technical trail, was hot but I survived on 20 oz water and 380 calories.

Total: 80 miles and 14000' gain. Now that's what I'm talking about. :)

Week of 7-4-11

7-4-11: Skiing at Snowbird for the 4th of July, no running. :)

7-5-11: 11 miles, Pipeline with Mark, 1000' gain

7-6-11: 5 miles, Upper Big Water with Jess and Holly, did an extra mile by myself at the end while Jess and Holly waited for Jess's parents to get back from their hike (happened to see their car at the top), 1000' gain

7-7-11: 12 miles with Mark, Upper Big Water to Desolation Lake and back, really good run, 1:56 for a quite difficult, technical and mountainous run, ran quite hard and didn't walk a single step, despite really wanting to (especially coming back up Mill D to Dog Lake on the way back), 4000' gain

7-8-11: 7 miles, St George with Matt Taylor, 1000' gain

7-9-11: Off, helping Ben prep for Badwater

7-10-11: Off, helping Ben prep for Badwater


Total: 35, 7000' gain, easy week. haha...

Week of 6-27-11

Monday: Quick 5 miles on Rattlesnake Gulch and Pipeline Trail with Holly. It was 88 degrees when we were running and she really isn't such a fan of the heat, even with her own full puppy water bottle, so we kept it short, 1000' climb.

Tuesday: 7 miles, upper Pipeline out and back, 1500' climb.

Wednesday: 10 miles with Mark, upper pipeline out and back plus a bit more the other way out and back. Lost my key in the last couple miles, took 45 minutes to find on the trail, Mark's 1984 Toyota Pickup started spewing radiator fluid right before the run, so I had to take him to Auto Zone for a new radiator hose afterwards as soon as I found my keys, 1500' climb

Thursday: Off.

Friday: Opening day for upper Mill Creek, did an easy conversational 7 miles to Dog Lake and back with Mark, 1500' climb, low point of 7800', high point a little over 9000'.

Here's a couple nice shots of the trail I used (not my pictures):




Saturday: Long-ish 16 mile day in Upper Mill Creek, Upper Big Water to Dog Lake, down to Mill D trailhead in Big Cottonwood, back up the trail and up to Desolation Lake, along a rather snowy 9900' ridgeline, and back down the north side of the loop via the Great Western Trail down back to Upper Big Water, pretty quick for the distance right now, a bit over 2:40 despite a ton of snow on the north/east halves. 4000' gain, low point of 7300', high point of 9800'.

Desolation Lake, as seen from the ridgeline, near the top of the Canyons Ski Resort (not my photo):
I think it's pretty obvious why I'm so excited to run in the high country.


Sunday: Off

Weekly total: 45 miles, 9500' climb. Not a bad week, would've liked to have gotten one more run in there, but it's all good for now. This current week is bumped up a bit so far, though I imagine I'll only get 5 days of running in once again (skied on Monday, the 4th of July), and probably won't be able to run on Sunday as I'll be helping Ben Clark prepare for Badwater that day.

Oh, and just for kicks, here's a more accurate picture of how Desolation Lake looks right now wi:th a bit of snow left (not my picture, once again):

Last 3 weeks

I've apparently forgotten to post my updates for the past few weeks. I've had a couple bumps already getting back into things that have slowed the progression of mileage (a ridiculously annoying moving process, which really sucks when you drive a Honda Civic and can barely fit anything in your car, in addition to an ear infection)

Speaking of moving, my new place is in Olympus Cove, right between Mill Creek Canyon and Mt Olympus, so I have very quick access to Mill Creek, Neff's Canyon, Mt Olympus, Big Cottonwood, and Little Cottonwood, which is very exciting. :)

Week of 6-6-11:
Monday: 8 miles, AM, 1500' gain, Bonneville Shoreline from City Creek to about halfway to U of U and back
Tuesday: 8 miles, same
Wednesday: 7 miles, running in City Creek with Holly, 1000' gain
Thursday: Off
Friday: 9 miles, Mill Creek Canyon, Pipeline, Terraces, and Canyon road, 2500' gain
Saturday: 9 miles, Attempt to run Mill D North Fork, only got to Dog Lake before it got really annoying with deep snow, turned around, went up a ways near and around Donut Falls instead, another 3 miles with Jess in the PM, 1000' gain.
Sunday: Ear Infection was annoying :(
Weekly Total: 44 miles, 7500' gain. Wanted 50 and would've had over that without the ear infection. Still a build from before I guess.





Week of 6-13-11 (week was hampered by moving + ear infection)
Monday: 7 miles, running in City Creek, ear infection was annoying, tried to ignore it as best as possible, 1000' gain
Tuesday: 9 miles, with Holly, up to radio towers from City Creek base, back to partway between the peak and Bountiful, back. Holly was panting heavily but didn't seem to want to drink much from my hand on this day, so I've since then gotten a bottle that comes with a dish so she'll have something better to drink from. 2000' climb total
Wednesday: 8 miles, Road + Terraces + Pipeline in Mill Creek, 2500' gain
Thursday: Busy Moving
Friday: Busy Moving
Saturday: 7 miles, running in City Creek, 1000' gain
Sunday: Busy Moving
Total: 31 miles, 6500' gain, moving ruined it, plus the ear infection


Week of 6-20-11
Monday: From new home near the base of Olympus Cove on roads via a very roundabout way to Neff's Canyon (I didn't know exactly where it was), all the way up Neff's to one of the ridges at about 9000'. Took a couple "wrong turns" (I guess it's not really a wrong turn if it's an exploratory run) in the canyon since I wasn't exactly sure where to go and then had an almost equally roundabout way home (roughly 2.5 miles on the road both ways instead of a possible 1 to 1.5). 13 miles with about 4500' cumulative gain (4000' net between start and midpoint) and some ridiculous snow (last mile on the way up took over 45 minutes, literally crawling on my hands and knees in snow and mud to a peak on a rather steep route), so it actually took a hair over 3 hours. Kind of sad for 13 miles, but not as bad as it sounds given the terrain.
Tuesday: Too busy moving to run. :( Lame.
Wednesday: Up most of the way to the meadow in Neff's with Holly, 1800' climb, 5 miles
Thursday: Up to the meadow in Neff's, 2500' climb, 6 miles.
Friday: Busy finishing up the moving. Suckage.
Saturday: Neff's Canyon to Mill B pass (top of Big Cottonwood), 3600' net climb to midpoint since I started higher than my Monday run, maybe 4000' total with a bit of rolling. Went with Mark Lehmkuhle and a grad student from Denver named Douglas that he had just met. Douglas hadn't been training much lately, so we were a bit slow on the uphills, but it was still fun. The whole thing is supposed to be around 7.5 total to the pass, but there was no trail above the meadow due to snow and our route proved rather indirect. What was supposed to be .75 miles took about an hour, despite terrain that wasn't particularly steep. I didn't have my GPS, but I'd peg it around 9 miles total with all the weaving around above the meadow. I also happened to see a pretty big moose on this run, which was pretty cool.
Sunday: 3 1/2 hours of skiing in the morning tired me out, no running. Also, my dad was in town, so no time even if I wanted to.
Weekly Total: 33 miles, 13300' climb. Kind of a joke for mileage, but tons and tons of climb. Will have less distractions from getting in mileage in the future, which is good.



Mileage will definitely be in the 50s this week (especially with a 5-6 hour run planned for Saturday).

Training "for real"

I'm a few weeks late starting to post my weekly training updates. I haven't had any problems with the running, but I've had a few pretty busy weeks with grad school and other stuff, not to mention a nasty throat and stomach virus that took me out for about a week, so it took me a couple extra weeks to get back into things. I had a couple more non-serious-3-runs-a-week-25-mile-weeks, and then decided to get serious last week.

Knowing how dumb I can occasionally/always be, I decided it would be a great idea to run a 60km trail run off of absolutely no training, so that's how I started my training back. Since last July, my longest run has been 14 or 15 miles, so 37.2 wouldn't be bad, right?

Well, I started the week of Monday the 23rd by not running on Monday or Tuesday. On Wednesday, I did a nice run of about 90 minutes on trails that were way too steep for me to run at even a remotely respectable cadence, so it ended up being around 8 miles with Mark Lehmkuhle. On Thursday, I did a quick 5 miles with Holly (the 5 1/2 month puppy), her first run with me, and Mark. Holly did pretty well and actually pushed the pace until the last mile, when she started to get tired. I took Friday off running and drove up to Pocatello for the Pocatello "50k+", officially 36.2 miles, but the last 2 sections were even slightly longer still, so it was about 37.2. hah...

I had no intentions of running fast at Pocatello and didn't even commit to the race until something like 16 hours before it started, so after arriving at 10 PM the night before and sleeping in my car, I woke up, almost missed the start, and took off, immediately falling into a slow hike up the first climb of 2500' in 5 miles. Throughout the whole day, I wasted around 3 hours in aid stations, I walked every single uphill, and barely jogged the downhills and some of the flats (I still walked some). After having to go a fair amount off the course for a bathroom break at one of the aid stations, I'm officially giving myself 38 miles for the day. Those 38 miles, however, took around 11 hours, 4 hours slower than a 50 mile race that I completed despite breaking my foot, so it's not really anything to be proud of. haha... That being said, the course had 8000' of climb in 38 miles and roughly 75% of the course was either mud, snow, or a stream, so I'd imagine this effort would've correlated to a roughly 8 hour performance on a more standard road type course, to give it a little perspective. Still slow, but not mind-blowingly awful to the most extreme degree.

In any case, my serious lack of testicular fortitude on the course in terms of pushing myself led me to fully recover in under 24 hours, so after taking Sunday-Wednesday off to "play it safe" (ie, get a few more lazy days before really starting to hit the training), I started up training "for real".

After a ridiculously lopsided 51 mile last week, I ran Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday this week. On Thursday, I decided it was time to run fast, so I hammered 60 minutes of tempo on the Bonneville Shoreline trail with 1500' climb/1500' drop as hard as I could. I had to use every last ounce of strength to bring home the last few minutes, so this was about as legitimate a tempo run as one can do, effort wise. The distance was about 7.5 miles for this run.

On Friday, I decided I wanted another run up Grandeur Peak (I had had a crappy run there with Mark a couple weeks back). In any case, the snow still covered the top few hundred vertical feet rather heavily, so I ran 2500' of the 2800' of climb (about 3.25 miles from my car out on and a little up the canyon road), so I managed a whopping 6.5 miles on this run. That being said, the 2500' 3.25 mile climb was extremely difficult right now, especially considering that I ran the vast vast majority of it (other than a couple very difficult technical sections), so the way up was nearly as all out as the day before, and I consider this a great run. To give an idea for the difficulty this posed for me right now, I ran pretty close to as hard as I could the whole way up and the 6.5 mile round trip still took 78 minutes. Ouch.

On Saturday, a running buddy of mine, Adrian Shipley, was in town, so we did 15 miles together in and outside of City Creek in about 1:56. Adrian is a fair amount faster than me at shorter stuff even when I'm at peak fitness, so he definitely pushed me to this time (honestly would've been 2:10-2:15 for this particular course if I was running solo). Total climb and drop was close to 2k, so it was never particularly steep, but it was up or down at least a bit at all times.

As for tonight, I just ran an moderately easy 5 miles in 40 minutes with Holly. I would've liked to have run with her more since the first run, but she got spayed 5 days ago, so today was her first day back to activity. She was actually pretty hyper again ever since the day after the surgery, but we had to keep her pretty contained until today...

In any case, that makes the last 2 weeks 51 miles and 34 miles. For this coming week, I'm planning a more consistent 6 ish days of running with roughly 50 miles and I plan on building from there once my legs become comfortable with running everyday again.

Leadville is looking like something that I would be capable of in August, but, unfortunately, my PhD qualifying exam is 9 days afterwards, so I'll likely have to give up my spot despite probably being ready to at least bring it home under the cutoffs. Oh well, there's always a lot of other races to run now that I'm healthy and have things under control. :)

Continued Progress

I've gotten my long run up to just over 2 1/2 hours with absolutely no side effects and I plan to up that again tomorrow. I'm only running 3-4 days a week so far, and my weekly mileage is still ridiculously light (~30 miles) to allow my feet to break into not using orthotics, but I'm starting to pick it up (this week is likely to be around 40), not to mention that my weekly 2+ hour long run has been consistent for a few weeks now, so things are looking up. I still have to get down to competitive racing weight, but that ought to resolve itself naturally before I race anything serious. I'm planning for a 3:15-ish run tomorrow and the biggest climb of the day will start around 2:15 and last for 30-35 minutes, so it'll be a tough but fun day out on the trails. I'll make sure to start posting weekly summaries starting this weekend now that I'm actually doing something interesting at least once a week.

While my mileage isn't huge yet, the fact that I managed over 2:30 of running in one session last week without a bonk or any post-run problems leads me to believe that my health problems are finally behind me. I'm of course upping my mileage slowly to be sure of this, but I'm very optimistic right now.

One other note of interest is that I'm now registered for the St George Marathon this fall. I didn't get in via lottery the last 2 years (kind of fortunate last year as I wasn't running at all when the race happened), so I'm guaranteed entry this year. I doubt I'm going to be in my absolute best marathon shape by October 1st, so I'm planning to use it as an early tune-up in a serious fall training schedule for a more serious run at the marathon in Las Vegas in December. That being said, I'm planning to run no slower than 2:59, just so I can at least be able to sign up for Boston 2012 in the 2nd registration group and not risk being shut out from the race.

Like I said, I'll try to remember to start posting my training each week as I build back up to peak fitness.

Kicking butts and taking names

I started running again a couple weeks ago and I just went out for a moderate effort 67 minute run (my 2nd longest run back so far, time-wise, longest being 80 minutes). I have no idea how far it was, but I do know that I started at 4500' and hit a peak of 6500' after a 30 minute slog up a mountain. I also know that the last 2-ish miles were on a road and that the pace on that section was 7:06 (timed it and mapped it out on mapmyrun). The 7:06 was smooth and the 2000' climb was smooth. I may not yet be kicking butts and taking names as the title implies, but I'm getting back into shape. I'm still a complete fata$$ right now, but that should work itself out in time and my pace will quicken with dropped weight. My mileage is still very low (3 days into 30 miles / 4 runs for the current week right now), but for the first time in what feels like an eternity, running at a moderate or even hard effort levels feels right and it feels good.

I've ditched the orthotics upon coming back and gone to only New Balance Minimus / MT101s and I can actually tell that my feet are getting stronger. I'd wanted to get rid of the orthotic addiction for a really long time prior to the mono incident and now that I'm very slowly building mileage, I was able to do it without all of a sudden changing the way I treat my arches at 100 miles per week and wrecking my feet. If I can ride over the initial wave of occasional foot-bottom and joint soreness from mostly using the Minimus, this ought to help me become even better about avoiding injuries in the future (I still consider my track record of only one minor stress fracture since becoming serious about running 6 years ago to be pretty solid).

I'm starting to feel that competitive fire growing with each run and I can tell that I'm going to want to be racing again in late Summer / early fall. I can't yet say for sure what's going to happen with any of my races specifically (besides Miwok, which I canceled about a month ago), but I'm definitely going to be doing something racing wise starting in August. For now, just being out on the trails is enough though.