Week of January 14

Weekly run-down.

Monday: off.

Tuesday: Tempo run. 2x up and down Sanitas Valley, about 1.1 miles each way. About 7 miles of total running. I think this may become my go-to workout on Tuesdays, whenever I’m not running with the BTR Tuesday Tempo group or the BTC MUTs team. It’s a good, tough workout that I can easily do from work in about an hour (or a little more if I decide to do more repeats), and it’s easy to mark progress.

Wednesday: 5 miles easy up Boulder Canyon.

Thursday: 5 miles, 750 feet up Flagstaff a ways. I had planned to go the whole way but ran out of time.

Friday: 5.5 miles, 1000 feet up Anemone from work. I have never been quite sure what the elevation is on this run, but I think 1000 feet is a decent estimate. This is a short, sharp run that I can do quickly from work, and last fall became one of my staple runs.

Saturday: Off. G and I toured the Stranahan’s distillery in Denver, then headed to the National Western Stock Show for the afternoon and wandered around for several hours.

Sunday: 14 miles, 900 or so feet. Dirty Bismarck loop around Marshall Mesa. I had originally in tended to go about 10 miles, but at 5 miles felt much better than I expected and decided to keep on going. I ended up running the loop in 1:51 which, despite having ramped up my training the last couple weeks and being more tired than I had expected, is 6 minutes faster than my previous record for this loop. Some time when I’m a little more rested I’d like to give it a go and see how fast I can run it.

In the afternoon on Sunday, I added in a short swimming workout. My GF has decided to try her hand at a triathlon, and I’ve opted to join her at least for the swimming workouts, and probably some of the running and biking ones as well.

Overall, this was a solid week of early-season training for me. I dropped in a more significant tempo run on Tuesday, and was fairly tired for the couple days afterwards, but I think I’m getting back in o the swing of training more intensely.

This week will follow mostly the same pattern, except that instead of a long run on Sunday, I’ll be racing twice up in Estes Park. The Frost Giant races are set up so you can run a 5k at 11 followed by a 10k at non. I have never doubled like this before, so it will be interesting to see how my body responds to it. It sounds like the course itself is pretty tough, so I won’t exactly be expecting any Prs, but it should be a good early fitness test, and it will knock out two of my 13 races for the year.