Back to Basics

After taking a week (mostly) off and another week easy, I jumped back into training this week.

Summer running is now in full stride in Colorado, complete with smoke from the numerous fires burning in the state. I got up into higher country this past weekend with a brief foray into Rocky Mountain National Park with my fiancée.

Oh, did I mention? I got engaged the day after my 50k. There’s a story there, but it will never appear in any of my blogs.

As I said, I took a brief hike up in RMNP last Saturday. We had intended to hike up Flattop Mountain, but a fire burning just west of the Divide convinced us that we should take a different route. We attempted to hike up to some reportedly very pretty falls in the Wild Basin area, but were turned back when there proved to be no parking within two miles of the trailhead. Instead, we parked right near the entrance, and hiked up towards Sandbeach Lake, close to my misadventures on Meeker last year.

Unfortunately, being unused to such things, my fiancée forgot to take off her ring, and we turned around once we reached an elevation where it pinched too tightly around her finger.

We camped with friends that night near Allenspark, and the next morning, while the rest of the group was either still asleep or barely stirring, I took off. I ran down the canyon our campsite was perched on, to the North St Vrain River and back up. Unused as I am to heading downhill first in a run, it felt like a major slog running the 1200’ back up to the canyon rim. Nonetheless, the Bright Trail, perhaps named to resemble the much more famous Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon, is an excellent little run.

Weekend adventures aside, the last two weeks have been more about revisiting my daily training ground and setting, or re-setting, baseline standards for the routes I do most often: Anemone, Sanitas, Flagstaff, and Boulder Canyon being my primary testing grounds, along with Sunshine Canyon, which is fast becoming a favorite for both fartleks and easy runs.

I have turned a corner, becoming more focused on my training after the Dirty 30. I have no long races planned for the rest of the summer. Rather, I plan to focus on training during the week for shorter, half marathon or thereabouts races, and escape as much as possible into the mountains on the weekends.

With that in mind, I’ve started adding more specific workouts into my schedule. I don’t think I plan to do any real interval workouts, unless it consists of hill repeats on a trail. I will focus more on those workouts that a) I enjoy (using that term loosely as I’m always suffering during intense workouts) the most and b) give me the most confidence. These are primarily fartleks, hills, and tempo runs (generally up a mountain).

Adding in hikes and longer, genuine mountain runs most weekends will hopefully get me in the kind of shape I want to be in for the remainder of the year. 

And it should also allow for more pictures.