Go slow to go fast.

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.