Go slow to go fast.

Easy, slow recovery run.  Marshall, bluestem, lehigh - 400' vert. 1:03  

Legs feeling fine...minor stiffness that warmed up within a half mile.

easy 8 miles barefoot on the paths

Really great run today.  Mostly the last half.  I felt pretty normal the first half, but the second hour I felt really good.  especially the last half hour.  It was surprising.

the workout called for 1 hour steady, 10 X 90 seconds marathon pace, 90 seconds easy, and then 20 minutes steady.

Steady, in my mind being somewhere within 10% of marathon pace.

These were my last 4 mile splits of steady running were uphill on the way home after 90 minutes of decent paced running:  6:25, 6:14, 6:21, 6:35.  I felt really good.  The miles didn't feel strained or difficult at all, and it was all up hill.  It was a motivating way to finish the run.

totals: 18 miles - 2:01:55 - 6:46/mile avg - 525' vert. 

Making visible progress which is nice. 

Happy Labor Day!  And what a fantastic Labor Day it was...at least in our neck of the woods.

Kind of a bummer that Nan is injured and couldn't race at the New haven 20K today, because she's still in 3rd place on the US running circuit ranking, and she would have put herself in first with just a top 5 finish.  But it was also not looking that competitive this year and if she were healthy I bet she would have won her first national championship race.  Oh well...it was not meant to be this year.

But the good news was I got to hang out with her and the kids all day!  We camped up at West Magnolia off the peak to peak highway, then took the kids kayaking at Gross reservoir all day on a super gorgeous late summer day.  It was a ton of fun.  And Nan even took her first running steps post surgery!  That was cool to see.  Albeit it was only few hundred feet and slow...but it was running!

Ran 5 miles easy in the morning at 8500' on the west mag trails.

Then another 7 easy at 9pm after getting the family all tucked in.  Legs feeling pretty darn good. 

I decided not to do the 45 minutes of threshold running that was on the schedule for today.

I felt minor stiffness in my left foot when I woke up that went away after a minute or less.  Not a huge deal.  But I prefer to hit hard workouts when I feel perfect or pretty darn close to it, and excited to go attack the workout.  I don’t like going into workouts questioning at all whether I should be doing them.

My body and mind told me that an easy run would be the best thing for me today, so I complied.  Even though that means my running will be easy all week and I probably won’t get any solid workouts in, just a bunch of easy runs.  Tomorrow I’m driving to Utah to pace at Wasatch, Friday I’ll be crewing at Wasatch, and Saturday I’ll be hiking/running all night at Wasatch with Steve. (Which i’m stoked about)

I’ll still get in about 70 miles this week.  But here are my thoughts:

Training plans are great.  As long as I know they are meant to be broken as dictated by my body’s response to them.  I hear too often and have seen too many people follow training plans exactly only to end up injured.  So I am pretty determined to not do that.  I would much rather arrive to a race or event somewhat under trained, than not arrive at all.  Or arrive with big question marks in my mind on whether I will damage myself by doing the race.  Or be dealing with the super annoying task of minor injury recovery along the way.  Much better to take the conservative path and run easy and do proper therapy/recovery until I feel really good, then continue hitting the solid workouts.  I believe I will perform better over the long term.  So I’m sticking to my motto:  Go slow to go fast.

As a result today, after 9 miles/1:23 of flat easy and slow running my body and mind feel invigorated and I don’t feel any stiffness or tightness anywhere.  I’m guessing by the time I get time for a workout next Monday/Tuesday I’ll probably be fired up and ready for a solid performance enhancing effort.  And my body should have had plenty of time to make use of the work I did in my last few weeks of solid workouts by then.

easy early run before heading out to Utah

After dropping off Steve at the start line at Wasatch 100 at 5:00 am I went back and went to sleep for a couple hours.  Then got up and ran for an hour or so with my buddy Layne who we were staying with, before resuming my crewing duties for the day.

EPIC!  

What a cool experience it was to crew and pace at Wasatch.   Made even cooler because my runner was incredibly fast and running up front so I got to witness the race for the win all day long.  Then at night I got to run it in with him for 25 miles.  So much fun.

See full report and pics here. 

After running 25 miles of the wasatch 100 on Friday in my old trusty New balance 101's I've concluded I'm done with those shoes.  The 3 pairs I had did their job for 1500 miles I put on them, and they were the best shoe I could find at the time, but its time to move on.  My feet were just not happy about me bailing on my altras.  After 320 miles of pure freedom and comfort to move about the cabin as they pleased, my feet rebelled a bit at the constriction that was imposed upon them when I put back on the 101's.  They were sore and Had a couple blisters on the left side.

6.5 miles slow and easy today.  Top of the glutes a bit sore from all the slow downhill running over the weekend. 

Great feeling workout today.  It was a pretty easy workout, which is odd, because I used to think that doing 20 X 400 meters would be a pretty tough workout.  Well, I guess it would be, just depending on the pace.  It was easy today because the workout just called for 5K (80-82 seconds) pace.  If I was doing mile pace (70 seconds) for 20 quarters I don't think I could have pulled that off and that would have been extremely difficult after the first 10.  As it was, I averaged 80-81 seconds per quarter and did 20 of them with about 60 seconds of jogging 200 meters between each.  The 60 seconds was plenty of recovery all the way to the end, which indicates I was hitting a sustainable pace for that workout.  

14 miles total - ~1:40  with 3.5 w/u and 3 c/d.

A lot of fast runners were out running around the track at Fairview today.  Kenyon Neumann and Jeremy Freed did their workout of 7 X 3, 2, 1 at the same time as me, then Tyler McCandless, Pat Rizzo and Matty Reed showed up with Brad Hudson to do their workout of 8-10 x 800.  Among a bunch of other people roaming around.  It tends to be more enjoyable to do track workouts when a crowd of fast folks are out busting out the repeats at the same time.  Another reason why being a runner in Boulder is pretty much the bee's knees.

easy run, marshall, down sobo creek, up past golf course and home on bear creek

9 miles -  1:09 

Today's workout called for a threshold run, 3 miles easy, 2 x 10 min @ half/10k pace w 2 min active recovery, 2.5 miles easy.

I felt great and well recovered during my warmup so I went forward with the workout.  I never know on a given day if I'm going to feel recovered enough for the next workout.  But Tuesday's workout was pretty mild, so I'm sure that made a difference this week.

 Paces for the 2 x 10 min intervals running up 1 mile, then down .65-.75 miles on marshall road were 6:02 & 5:43.  I felt a lot more solid on the second interval just from having warmed up on the first one.  2 X 10 minute intervals is hardly enough to get the juices flowing...it seemed like I should be doing 3 or 4 of those.  But actually I like that it was an easier workout, because I'd rather be more recovered for the really big indicator workouts and harder long runs.

I decided to bail on the Santa Barbara marathon and do my own marathon at Altitude in November instead.  So now I'm really looking forward to starting doing marathon pace workouts on my newly contrived 4 loop marathon course, starting with Saturday's long run.

Easy barefoot hour on the bike paths.

 Today for my long run I wanted to test-run my new marathon loop to see how I like it and test the mileage out.

The verdict was that I like it a lot.  Its a really fast and smooth loop with no stops anywhere.  And the loop runs through really nice flat trail sections in boulder and through some really cool neighborhood roads. Some of the course is rolling slightly with ups and downs under bridges and roads, which makes it nice for some variety.  But there are no significant hills to climb or descend on the loop. Its slightly downhill a couple of the miles, and slightly up a couple of the others, but it's so minor that I hardly noticed.

According to my GPS device though the loop is only 6.3-6.33 miles long.  Not the 6.55 that MapMyRun suggested.  That could be because I'm losing reception on the many tunnels, or because I'm running the tangents.  In any case, I need to slightly revise the loop or measure it better so that I know that I'm running a loop that covers the full 6.55 miles necessary to make four loops a marathon.

For the run I did a 4 mile warmup to the course.  1 easy lap around the course.  Then one moderate to steady lap around the course.  Meaning I wasn't going to try to hit marathon pace, just run it somewhere between easy and marathon pace. 

1st lap: 47:23 - easy pace - 7:31 avg

2nd lap: 41:24 - moderate to steady pace - 6:34 avg 

Splits for 6 miles of the second lap: 7:19, 6:37,6:22, 6:15, 6:19, 6:15

I was surprised at how easy the 6:15-6:20 pace felt as I was running the 2nd loop.  But after the run I could tell it was a decent effort as I was dripping and a bit stiff after I stopped for a bit.  The real tests are going to be the two different marathon pace runs I do when I test out 2 consecutive loops at pace one run, and then three, or close to three, on a different run.  If I can hold 16-18 miles at marathon pace 3-4 weeks out from my goal date, and then I taper, I believe I'll be able to do it.  Time will tell though.  I can predict that 3 loops at marathon pace is going to a challenging run.  The first loop will be straightforward enough, but after that, well, I guess we'll see.

Slow and easy 14 miles early with Ryan T and Don C. up Boulder Canyon and back.  2:01 - ~500' vert.  A nice brisk morning.

Spec endurance intervals, 3 mile easy warm up, 6 x 800m  @5k pace w 2 min (400 m) active recoveries, 3 miles easy cooldown - splits: 2:38, 3:37, 2:37, 2:38, 2:38, 2:37

Standard zoo of runners showing up at Fairview track this morning as I was wrapping up the workout.  

Today's workout was relatively easy, and it definitely was pretty comfortable.  Its interesting to compare this workout to an 8 X 800 workout I did last January.  I averaged 2:39 for those back then, but it was totally maxing me out to do that.  Today the 2:37-2:38 just felt smooth and comfortable.  And back then I needed 3 full minutes of recovery, where today I was fully recovered after jogging 400 meters in 2 minutes even.

I like workouts like today, because they are a lot easier to recover from than those max effort workouts, so I'm able to get more of them in in a week (not to mention the fact they are easier to do since i'm not bordering puke level the whole time). Right now I am saving my legs and system for those key long workouts at marathon pace where I attempt to run 6:05-6:10 pace for 80 to 120 minutes 

I really like this loop for my current training situation on easy days.  Its got some really nice trail and then finishes on the road and is a nice length for an easy jog.

Threshold run, 3 miles easy,3 x 10 min @ half/10k pace w 4 min active recovery, 3 miles easy, splits: 1.525 miles (6:33/mile), 1.725 (5:47), 1.75 (5:43) - Did the 10 min. intervals out and back on marshall.

I was feeling like I was still warming up a lot on the first one, didn't push it at all and was just slow.  Then I felt solid on the next two sets and went a bit faster on the last one. 

It was a solid feeling workout.  I may do an easy 5 tonight because tomorrow I'm going mountain biking with a bunch of guys all day tomorrow instead of running.  Heading up to get some high country single track in on the monarch crest trail before the season comes to an end. 

Rode the monarch crest trail today with a few guys.  Totally epic trail starting at 11000 feet and ending at 8000' from Monarch pass to poncha springs.  Awesome ride.

Ran for one mile during the ride to try and catch up to the guys because I was out of air and I pinch flatted and was way behind them. 

Easy 10.75 miles. 1:27 - 550' vert. Decided against the spec. endurance long run.  marshall to Community ditch trail, back on mesa/lower bluestem lehigh. 

Was going to try to go long this morning, but had even less motivation than saturday.  Went slow and easy again.  really slow.  Kept walking intermittently because i felt totally sluggish and weird.

Felt a lot better today.   Went back to my routes and ran trails up mcclintock, across mesa, and down bear canyon.  It felt really good to be running hills again, I realized I have missed it.  I'm definitely enjoying the challenge of the marathon training, but I think I'll be pretty ready to go back to trail running 7 weeks from now.

8 miles - 1000' vert 1:15 

Threshold run, 2.5 miles easy, 5 miles accelerating from marathon pace to 10K pace 6:05, 5:55, 5:43, 5:53, 6:20, 3 miles easy - 6:56 avg for the run - 10.5 miles - 1:13 -  300' vert

I felt really good on this run....until the last mile and a half when it starts going back up hill.  Ouch.  Totally fell off pace the last mile.  I ran this threshold run on my marathon course, and the first few miles I was getting more and more psyched about nailing the loop.  Then I just started struggling, and it got me concerned about my ability to hit my goal on that loop come 6.5 weeks from now, of running 6:06 pace for 4 loops.  I guess I was running a lot faster than that this morning, which is why I got clobbered the last mile.  I'm going to run the loop at marathon pace next time and see how it feels.

I ran with a new playlist that I made for pumping me up while I ran and I really enjoyed that.  I haven't been running with music for a while, and it was nice to have some music getting me motivated.  The playlist consisted mostly of Less Than Jake, which is my favorite music to run fast to.  Its pretty easy to have fun and run fast listening to that stuff.  Maybe its just the nostalgia for me taking me back to high school and my punk/ska band days.

Very nice cruise on the trails in south boulder.  Ran lower bluestem, mesa around the south end and back down north shanahan.  Ran into a lady named Ellory as I got onto Bluestem and ended up running and chatting with her for an hour.  Enjoyable run.  First run in a fresh pair of altras.  My others are still in great shape with 400 + miles on them but I wanted to start rotating in another pair.  I absolutely love altras.  Best running shoe for me ever.

10 miles - 1:34 - 1000' vert. 

Easy hour run early.  Slow, recovery run.