Go slow to go fast.

This morning started as a slow easy run up table mesa to skunk canyon, to mesa.  Then at the top of the hill, 30 minutes and 3 miles in, I realized I only had a little over 20 minutes to get back home in time for Nan to take Abe to school.  I still had 3.5+ miles to go on my loop.  It was all downhill though, so with a little more steady effort of a 5:31 and a 5:40 mile in the middle I made it back with plenty of time.

6.5 miles - 53:29 - 8:13 avg - 910' vert 

Green Mountain.  1.5 mile warmup up and down gregory trail.  Then ran a steady effort up Green via gregory/greenman (the middle route up green).  Turns out flat speed training doesn't seem to help when it comes to running up steep mountains.  Not that I thought it would.  I definitely don't see any progress in climbing speed lately.  But that makes sense since lately I have only been doing a solid hill climb once every couple of weeks.  But I'm going to shift gears slightly now with Logan peak coming up at the end of next month.  I'm going to start doing a lot more vertical each week.

8.5 miles - 1:47:00 - 12:35 avg - 3190' vertical

Gorgeous morning.  50 degrees at 6 am and sunny and calm.  Ran over to lower big bluestern, up to the upper bluestern, to mesa, down north shanahan and home.  Could have stayed out there running all day today it felt like.  Except I thought I was doing an 8 mile loop to get home in time to help get the kids ready so Nan could get out the door, but it was actually a 10 mile loop.  Oops!  Hard to correct for that when you're 5 miles away from home and you don't know that.  I opted not to do the accidental tempo run and try to cram 5 miles into 25 minutes since I have a speed workout planned for tomorrow.

10 miles - 1:21:36 - 8:09 avg - 1100' vertical

I met up with Brendan pre-sunrise this morning for an interval session out on the lower Bluestern trail.  Bummed that Schlarb is getting deployed to Iraq this week...but I'm glad to have Brendan wanting to get together for weekly speed sessions now.  He had to be home by 7, so 5:40 am we were on it.  The cool thing is that sunrise is already nearly upon us by that time.  It is really nice getting out that early now that its already light.  By the time we finished our warmup at 6am the Sun was out.  I love this half of the year (just a little bit more than I love the other half)!

The workout today consisted of the following:

warm up ~21 min. then stretch a bit

3 or 4 strides.

Then the following, with 2 to 3 min down hill recovery between each

• 1/2 mile up hill - 3:03 - 50' ascent
• 1 mile - 1/2 up, 1/2 down - 5:53 - 70' ascent, 70' descent
• 1/2 mile up - 3:06 - 55' ascent
• 1 mile - 1/2 up, 1/2 down - 5:56 - 80' ascent, 80' descent
• 1/2 mile up - 3:05 - 65' ascent
• .3 mile - 1:46 (5:53 pace) - up and down pretty steep with 27' net ascent

Then we cooled down easy across lower shanahan and down lehigh street.  

11 miles -  1:24 - 7:43 avg - 700' vertical

It was weird to be getting home from my workout at 7 am when the family was still just finishing breakfast.  Nice though to get after it early.  The workout felt great too.  

4 miles barefoot easy and slow this morning on the bike paths.  Didn't have time to go any farther because I woke up too late...oh well.  It was a nice 36 minutes anyway.

Picture rock trail at Heil Ranch, looking toward Lyons 

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!  

(Interpretation: that was half scream-of-summer-mountain-running-joy and half sigh-of-winter-abated-relief)

Such a gorgeous day to be out running through the mountains.

A section of the nicer smooth single track at Heil 

The new-to-me single track at Heil Ranch was pretty cool.  A bit rockier than I like best, but still pretty cool.  It did have tons of sections of just smooth rolling single track that were really nice.

Came within inches of stepping on this guy.

About 30 inches long

I prodded him off the trail with a stick and he got freaked out and started rattling like crazy as he slithered away.

I'm really happy about the 75 degree May sunshine right now.  And I'm also stoked that Abe and Breanne learned to ride without training wheels this week on their bikes.  This weather calls for our first official bike ride together for sure.

Weekly Total: 58 miles - 8 hrs 46 min - 8400' vert

April Totals: 199.5 miles - 28 hrs 30 min - 17000' vert - 975 push ups, 390 pull ups, 6 days core workout