Monday, July 28, 2008

Waay too hot

That's about the extent of it these days. The average high for this month in this part of CO has probably been between 85 and 95.

The result of this? It's been difficult for me to run lately. I end up getting up early (which is difficult for me, since my girlfriend both goes to bed and gets up a great deal later than I tend to) to try to run while it's still "cool." At this point, "cool" means anything below about 75 or so.

This Saturday, that meant getting up at 6:15, meeting my friend Jessica at 7:00, and then driving up up up into the mountains to do our run. Actually, I think this run only requires one or two ups. We ran at Betasso Preserve up the canyon a few miles. Instead of driving the whole way, we opted to take the Canyon Link Trail, which adds about 1.25 miles each way and maybe 500 feet of climbing. With two loops of the Betasso trail, that makes around 9-9.5 miles. And it took us somewhere around an hour and a half to do it. Not our best pace (we did about 10.5 in 1:20 last Saturday) but in our defense, it's not an easy trail.

Training over all? Not going quite as well as I'd hope this time of year, but there are signs that I'm getting better again. At the moment, I have two goal races: the Sombrero Trail Run, and the Golden Leaf Half in Aspen again. I'm leaving for a cross country road trip on Thursday, but we've scheduled time to run into that time, so hopefully that shouldn't be too much of a problem. We shall see.

The other goal for this year: Longs Peak. Late August.

Again, we shall see.