It's that day

Merry Christmas!

Did I run today? Yes.

It was a short one, though. It still hasn't gotten above 15 degrees since I got home.

Training Shift

The last two races I've done (the Golden Leaf and the Summit for Life, both in Aspen) have had several things in common. They both occurred in Aspen, on a Saturday. They both began, and in the case of the Summit for Life, occurred in its entirety, straight up a ski hill. Both went far better than I ever would have expected. And I didn't wear a watch for either of them.

For a long time, I was a bit of a slave to my watch. I used it to time my slow runs, my tempo runs, my intervals, even my fartleks. I paid more attention to what the numbers on my watch were saying than I did to my legs and the rest of my body. I would time each mile of a race, trying to make them consistent. And more often than not, I would start faster than I thought I would be able to run, and ended up slowing down quickly, psyching myself out that I couldn't run as fast as I was.

I didn't intend to run without my watch in either of the above races, I simply forgot to bring it along with me when I went to Aspen. And it worried me for the Golden Leaf. As it turns out, despite only a month or so of solid training, I only ran three minutes slower this fall than the year before that. I think that, had I looked at my watch on points up that first hill, I would have psyched myself out again, and slowed down thinking there was no way I could pull off a decent time. I didn't have a watch, so I couldn't look, and I ran a good time.

So now I'm trying a bit of an experiment. I'm no longer wearing my watch even to train. Rather I'm listening to what my legs are telling me, and trying to gauge my effort rather than my time. And in fact as I sit here in DIA, waiting to go home to the Great White North (northern Minnesota) for Christmas, I just realized that I once again did not even bring my watch with me.

So far, what this change of tactics has done is made me come up with different ways of getting the same results. I have a couple new styles of workouts at my disposal, and several modified versions of older workouts that will work without a watch. Hopefully, as I train and relax (yes, they go hand in hand for me) I will have the chance to describe some of them here.

Until then

Almost Like Home

I woke up this morning to four inches of snow on my deck, and the snow still coming down pretty well. Took a look at the temperature: 1 degree F. While the pic above was not from this morning (I believe that was Tuesday last week), it captures some of the essence of what it looked like outside this morning.

My friend Jessica and I had planned on doing a Flagstaff run this morning, but with the snow and cold, that didn't seem likely, so we took to the creek path, along with seemingly every other runner out this morning.

It ended up being an absolutely fantastic run. We took it pretty slow, chatting and, yes, gossiping as runners inevitably will. Maybe I'll write a post about that some time. It seems to be a universal truth about runners. In any case, since the creek path is always the first area plowed in Boulder, seemingly every runner in Boulder was out on the path this morning.

And nobody else.

All the guys who had any sort of facial hair had a frosting of white around their mouths. My eyebrows kept freezing to my sunglasses (ouch). And everybody seemed to be having a fantastic time, shouting out hellos to anybody they did, or didn't, know. I love it when runners are happy, and they certainly were this morning.



That's a self-portrait following the run today. I haven't actually had the time to shave lately, since I've been so swamped with finish up my semester at CU. I'm kind of glad of it today, though. What would this post be without that picture?

Now, unfortunately, it's back to work. 1.5 exams down (I had a 3.5 hour monster yesterday) 0.5 exams and 1 final project to go . . . Wednesday can't come soon enough.

Results are up!

Results for the Summit for Life are up at their website.

For some reason, they still have me listed as having started 45 minutes earlier than I actually did (quite impressive, really). But, if you subtract 45 minutes from the time they give me, I end up in precisely 10th place, with a time of 59:50.

Obviously, they got it right for the team competition, otherwise there's no way we would have won . . .

The Winning Team

As promised, here's the winning team of the 2008 Summit for Life in Aspen. I'm still not sure what actual place I got, as there was some confusion with my time. Apparently they had me in the non-competitive wave at first, which added 45 minutes to my time. But they obviously got the time right in their results, as the overall team time was 2hr 57min. I do know, though, that Shanna placed second in the women's division and Lucas placed second overall, behind Rickey Gates and ahead of Bernie Boettcher.

I'll post some pics of my run this morning later today. We got another 8" of snow last night.

A Successful Summit

I got into Aspen with no real trouble on the roads. There was a little ski traffic going up to the tunnels on I-70, but there was no real weather to speak of so it moved pretty well most of the time. I got to Aspen a bit past noon, and sat around at Shanna's doing homework (glad I got some of that in) until she got off work at four, when we headed off to check in and get our "shwag bags." Apparently this race is well sponsored, as you'll see later. The non-competitive race took off at 5:15, and we followed 45 minutes later. For those who might know some names, I had some heavy competition from names like Bernie Boettcher (who runs 50 races a year and wins many of them), Rickey Gates (US mountain running champion, 12th in the world), and Lucas Franz (all around athlete and fortunately my teammate).

I ended up wearing Kahtoola Microspikes, which are pretty much a heavy duty version of YakTrax (with chains and steel spikes on the bottoms instead of metal rings). It worked perfectly. The race goes straight up a groomed ski run, so I took poles and mostly did a type of ski walk, reminiscent of XC ski training back in the day, most of the way up. Where it was "flat", I picked up the poles and started running, but for the most part that wasn't even possible, let alone efficient.

The entire race, I had no idea where I was on the course, how far I had come or how far I had to go, or how long I"d been going (I forgot my watch again). But I got in my rhythm and just went, apparently rather quickly. A bit before halfway up, I started passing the non-competitive wave, and that worked out well, since I didn't know where I was going, either. I started just having fun with the race, clacking my poles and cheering people on as I passed them. Any way, because of the severe slope of the hill, I didn't know I was right at the top until I was about 50 meters from the finish, when I picked up my poles and sprinted in.

At that point, while I was collapsed, leaning on my poles, gasping for air and trying not to throw up, one of the race volunteers told me to take of my timing chip, which was strapped to my ankle. There was no way that was going to happen, and I think I scared the poor girl with the look I gave her until she just decided to take it off herself. I don't think she'd volunteered at a race like that before. And yet somehow, after about two minutes, I was skipping around and waiting to cheer Shanna in. I think I still have some remnant of my XC training from high school, or at the very least my body remembers it.

Turns out I made my goal of under an hour, by about a minute or so. I ended in the top ten racers, which supposedly won me a pair of boots, but there was some confusion there, and I may have to get those later. The big news is that Lucas (mendioned above), and Shanna (the friend I stayed with) got 2nd overall and for women, respectively. I came in about 10 minutes behind Lucas and 5 ahead of Shanna, which is pretty good for coming in from Boulder. And, since I was on a team with both of them, our team won that competition with a total time of 2hrs 57 minutes. As Lucas said "We totally stacked it!" Any way, for that, we won a dinner party for 6, and we each won a pair of (really friggin nice) sunglasses, along with a few smaller prizes. They do well passing stuff out.

So the race ended at the top of the Gondola on Aspen mountain, and it was followed by a dinner and party at the Sundeck up there. They put on a good party, along with everything else. They had a great Funk band, which turned out to be the same one that plays for Shanna's church. So we hung out there for three hours, and then headed down into Aspen and hung out for a few more hours.

Next morning, we went skiing, despite somewhat sore legs from the night before. Unfortunately, as soon as I got to the top on the Gondola, my binding broke as I was strapping my skis on. So I had to ride the Gondola down again, go to the mountaineering store, and get those fixed But within an hour or so I was back up, and skiing with 5 other Telemarkers. This marks four times that I've Tele skied, and one thing I've noticed is that Tele skiers are always excited by a convert, and are willing to a) wait around for you while you're learning and b) give you lessons. In fact, it's hard to avoid the latter. I was kinda getting the hang of it by the end. We skied for about 3 hours, by which point we were all exhausted and decided to head down.

My original plan was to stay another night, and head back Monday morning to avoid ski traffic, but there was a storm coming in that night, so I opted to leave last night, and got back to Boulder around 7:30, time enough to do four more hours of work and head to bed.

Now, on Monday morning, I am having some significant trouble moving at all. I think an ice bath may be in order later today.

As soon as I upload it, I post a pic of the winning team (Cross Roads).

All in all, it was the perfect way to end a racing year.

And I'm off

I'm off to Aspen tomorrow morning (early?). Summit for Life is at 6PM. Thank you so much to all who donated!

Snow Run

I think I wrote about this phenomenon last year at a similar time, but running in the snow is mentally fundamentally different than running any other time. Granted, it is also physically different, seeing as there's suddenly that whole "slipping and falling" issue that usually doesn't come up quite so dramatically (I recall one run in undergrad where there were 6 of us trail running in the snow, and we came in 45 minutes having 13 falls total. No injuries thankfully.) But it's mentally where I notice the most change.

After I was done with my various meetings yesterday, I took the bus home (maybe the last time I do that this year. I am not patient) and went up Sanitas for a short run. The snow had just really started coming down, so there wasn't much on the ground by that point, but there was plenty flying in your face.

I think that's really what does it. The flakes look like they're coming at you so fast. It felt like I didn't have to put any effort into running at all, like my legs could carry me as far and as fast as I could possibly want.

And that's what it always feels like in the snow. It's the closest thing I know to flying.


On another note, we awoke to 4 inches on our deck this morning with 15 degree temperatures. Of course, after my annoyance with the bus yesterday, I was not about to do that again. My roommate opted to drive (seems pretty silly to me, and probably takes longer). I, true to form, got out the bike and got to school before him. That may seem surprising, but it's really not that weird. You see, this is Boulder, where they are extremely good about plowing and sweeping the bike paths, but seem to ignore the roads.

And I am not complaining.