Two Weeks Summary: Feb 11 - 24

Monday: 6 miles, 700 feet. Sunshine Canyon from work. A little shakedown after the Green/Bear pairing the day before.

Tuesday: 7 miles, 400 feet. Tempo up and down Boulder Canyon from work (4.5 miles of tempo). 16 minutes up, 13 minutes down with a 5:30 last mile. Felt good to get the legs turning over again.

Wednesday: 8 miles, almost no elevation. BRC run plus some extra with Trent Briney.

Thursday: 5 miles, 500+ feet. A slow, snowy trip up Sunshine Canyon from work. Added in a 300 meter swim and additional 2 miles of running in the evening.

Friday: 6 miles. 700 feet. I must have gone up Sunshine again, judging by the stats, but I cannot for the life of me remember this run.

Saturday: Did a quick hike with the gf up around Chautauqua. Flatiron Access loop.

Sunday:  An unexpected summit of Green with Chris and Matt. Met a couple other friends at the top and added the to our group on the way down for a while. Total of 10 miles and about 2750 feet by the time we finished the loop.

After the rather long weeks the previous two weeks (long for me in any case) I opted to take this past week easy. So a quick rundown:

Monday: off.

Tuesday: 6 miles and about 700 feet up Dakota Ridge and down Sanitas Valley.

Wednesday:  7 miles. BRC run in the snow. Still managed a good 7 minute average, with the last two more around 6 minutes despite 3 inches of fresh snow on the paths.

Thursday: 5 miles, negligible vert. Ran up Boulder Canyon for a bit. Threw in another 350 meters of swimming at night.

Friday: 5+ miles, 700 vert. A different route up Sunshine Canyon from work. Clearly this has become a staple of mine. Despite being a trail that very definitely leads nowhere, it's a mentally easy way for me to get some miles in from work. I am hoping to mix it up a little more as the weather gets nicer and toss in more trips up Flagstaff and Anemone. With my race schedule, I think I will definitely need it.

Saturday: No running, but a good two hours of ice skating.

Sunday: 3 miles of deep, blizzard running. Added in 200 meters of swimming and some climbing at the Rec Center.

As I mentioned, this was a bit of a recovery week for me. I had intended to run a bit more, but with the blizzard conditions today my gf had the day off of work and I opted to spend a little more time with her than I generally have the opportunity to do on Sundays. We still goofed around at the rec center for a good two hours, which is a workout in itself.

The training has generally been going well. I put in about 47 the week before last, with a decent amount of vertical, and I think I'm on the right track, inserting a little extra intensity into my training in the form of tempo runs and hill workouts.

That said, I have a schedule for this year that includes thirteen races, for which I only have myself to blame. Not only that, I have the two longest, most difficult races I have ever attempted on the calendar. First is the Golden Gate Dirty Thirty 50k on June 1st (followed shortly by my first tri a week later), which has nearly 8000 feet of vertical. The second is Dakota Jone's Telluride Mountain Run August 10nth, a 55 mile, 20000 foot epic, should it make it through the permitting process.

So it's time to crank it up another notch if possible. I would like to hit 50 miles a week solidly, pushing 7500 vert each week as well. Assuming that goes well, I can keep increasing the intensity, adding in a few shorter races here and there just as a fitness test.

That's the plan going forward. As ever, we shall see how it goes.

Weekly Summary: Feb 4 – Feb 10

Monday:  4 miles followed by 1.5 miles with G. Did a loop near my apartment after realizing that I had forgotten my running gear at home. This was remarkable only because I saw no fewer than 5 Red Tailed Hawks hunting during the run.

Tuesday: 11 miles, 1500 feet. Met up with my friend Justin for a loop around Flagstaff. Halfway up Chapman I turned it up a notch and tempoed the remaining 1.5 miles to the top, then Justin led us for a quick descent.

Wednesday: 5 miles, maybe 500 feet. Went after work with my coworker L. She and I were both tired from tempos the day before so we kept it short and easy. Even so, it was dark and raining by the time we got back to the office.

Thursday: 5.5 miles, 1000 feet. Went up Anemone from work. Easy 16 minute ascent from Settler’s Park. Threw in a bit of scrambling on Red Rocks for the fun of it. Evening: 250m swimming at the Rec Center.

Friday: 6 + miles, 1500 feet. Drove up to Boulder early for a 7AM run with Scott Jurek, Matt, and Bryce. Went up the East Ridge and down the backside to Sunshine. Good way to start the last day of the work week and good to see Scott again after not running with him for a while.

Saturday:  off, save for a bit of Line Dancing at the Grizzly Rose. Hopefully we’ll make it back this Sunday too.

Sunday: 12 miles, 4000 feet. Bear followed by Green from Cragmore TH. There was a bit of a dusting of snow on the ground. Just enough to make it slightly slick going up Bear. But I never wished for more traction.

I made a conscious decision not to push it at all on Sunday, since I only had to run 4 miles to equal my biggest week so far this year. Clearly I moved beyond that. I made a lackadaisical summit of Bear in 52 flat, followed by a less lackadaisical traverse over to Green in 43 minutes. I was forced to take it a bit easier on the descent down Bear Canyon because the snow was just deep enough to cover the ice patches. Still made it back in 2:30.

Just how easy did I take this run? Well,  I stopped three or four times on the way up Bear without stopping my watch (took of the jacket, made a pit stop, and tied my shoes) and never hesitated to stop and chat with anybody who was coming by. It felt good to just enjoy my run for a change.

Overall my training is coming along. I didn’t get a chance to do any hill repeats or fartleks this week, but I definitely pushed up my mileage and my vert. At this point, number geek that I am, I am 20 miles down on last year, but over 10000 up on vertical. I’d call that a more than fair exchange. This week, I’m planning on inserting a little more speed and mileage, but dropping back on the elevation a bit. We’ll see how it goes.  

West from Bear, you can see the Flagstaff Fire burn zone.

East from Bear.

Look at all those mountains!

Weekly Summary: January 28 – February 3

I know it's almost a week late now. This week should be more interesting, though.     

Monday: 6 miles easy. Shakedown run up and down the Canyon from work. Went to the Rec Center after work for an easy dreadmill jog and 250m swimming.

Tuesday: 7 miles, ~1000’ hill repeats. 4x800m hills up Sanitas valley. I decided to  ut in some shorter, sharper hills this week. I found them unfortunately inconsistent, in that my first and last hills were about 7 seconds longer than my middle two.

Wednesday: off. My left (knee tendon. Figure out what this is) was bothering me more than usual, so I headed home and took an ice bath. It helped more than I anticipated.

Thursday:. 6.5 miles, ~750 feet. Up Sunshine Canyon trail from work.

Friday: 6.5 miles, ~750 feet. Same as Thursday, but I injected a little tempo into the workout along Sunshine. Felt pretty solid.

Saturday: AM: 250m Swimming, climbing at the Rec Center. PM: 4 mile bike ride.

Sunday: 11.5 miles, 1500’. Longinsh run around the Doudy Draw area. Took Flatirons Vista South to Doudy Draw, split off on Spring Brook South. From there I looped Goshawk Ridge back to Spring Brook North and Doudy Draw again. Then took Flatirons Vista North back to the car. I thought about adding more on, since my legs were still feeling pretty good, but this had already been my longest week this year, and I had a Super Bowl Party to prepare for, so I called it short. (And for your information, the Superbowl was not the 49ers versus the Ravens. It was Gryffindor vs Ravenclaw)

Overall the year seems to be shaping up fairly well. My left (knee tendon) is feeling better and better. Running does not seem to exacerbate it. If anything, movement seems to help it loosen up and sitting still with my leg bent (ie working) is what causes me problems. But the rest of me seems to be coping well with the increased mileage and introduction of tempo and hill repeats into my training. I have higher hopes for this year than I have in the past.

I am a nerd. That statement will not surprise those who know me. Those who know me only by this blog may or may not be surprised. I say this because, on my Sunday run, I took a ause to admire some of the more interesting geological features around the North Spring Brook trail. During the late Cretaceous (if I recall correctly) much of this area was underwater: the shore of  ashallow, inland sea.

After a few million years, there was an upthrust that created the Rocky Mountains. In the process, this pushed sedimentary rock, which formed on the bottom of the aforementioned sea, up at a sharp angle. This upthrust created features like Red Rocks, the Flatirons, Garden of the Gods, and Dinosaur Ridge among others.

Along the North Spring Brook trail, there’s a long stretch of exposed yellow sandstone that still shows the ripples laid down then the area was still a sea shore. It reminds me vividly of swimming as a kid in Lake Superior, where the wave action always left similar ripples in the sand. Somehow, in my prior runs in this area, I had completely missed this feature, to my detriment.

I only wish I had taken pictures rather than just continuing on, but such is life.