Going With The Flow

AM - Wow, slept 10.5 hours last night - I must've been tired! Another brisk morning in Huntsville. It took about a mile for my legs to loosen up (hamstrings felt especially tight), but felt better as the run continued. 5.6 miles ~7:35 pace on the quiet farm roads.

 PM - Mountain bike ride up Wheeler Canyon, East Fork to Middle Fork loop, and back down Wheeler Canyon this afternoon. 11 miles, 1400 ft. Nice ride, good to get a little workout without any pounding on the legs.

Tomorrow Jake and I are going to run the XTERRA National Champs course at Snowbasin. They just posted it yesterday, and it looks brutal! 1100 ft climb over 3 miles. I'm more worried about how my legs will handle that downhill. So we're going to check it out. Anyone else planning to run XTERRA?

AM - Ran the first half (6.6 miles) of the XTERRA National Champs course this morning up at Snowbasin. 8:40 pace - this run felt more like 8 miles! Definitely not what I would call easy. I was planning to run the entire course, but my back started to hurt. With all the back pain I have had in the last 6 months, I was not willing to irritate it again. So I stopped and Jake did the rest of the course without me (see his blog for elevation profile if interested). 

We really enjoyed being up in the Huntsville area - it's a nice quaint small town with lots of outdoor fun activities. We especially enjoyed the axe toss at the place we were staying! Here's a video (I'm not very good!) of my attempts. Jake was much better at it than me, seen here! Good times...

PM - 4.5 miles, horsepark loop. 7:45 pace - felt tired. I probably need one more day before the tempo workout. Spending the rest of the evening watching Friends on Nickelodeon! haha

AM - 9.2 miles around Millcreek this morning. Took a couple miles to get moving, but then eased into a nice pace. It was dark when I started, and I am not ashamed to admit that I'm afraid of the dark! It lightened up after about 20 minutes, but the amount of daylight is definitely shrinking.

This is a great post by Jenny Barringer-Simpson that won the 1500 at the World Champs this past weekend. Definitely motivating -

http://www.flotrack.org/blog/38345-Alchemy

PM - 1.5 miles around the block, just to loosen up. Wore my Saucony running skirt for the first time today and actually liked it. I'm not really the girly or trendy type but I have to say, it's pretty cute!

AM - 5.5 mile tempo run at Liberty Park. It was very windy!! Jake was nice enough to pace me this morning. The goal was marathon pace (6:20ish pace), but we ended up running a little faster with splits of 6:15, 6:13, 6:10, 6:13, 6:10, 6:13 (equiv for .5 mile). The pace didn't feel too hard, definitely not easy though! 2 mile warm-up and 1.5 mile cool-down. Glad that one is behind me!

This is a great excuse to not work too hard at your job - Tired brain can slow performance

PM - 2 miles, easy. Tired.

AM - 10.3 miles around Sugarhouse with Allie and Jake. 7:30 pace. Windy, but perfect temperature.

Jake and I are doing a long run (me 17-18, Jake 21-22) on Saturday at Jeremy Ranch Road on Saturday at 8am. Probably 7:30ish pace. Let me know if you want to join!

PM - 2 mile shake-out.

AM - Track workout. 2 x 200 then 8 x 400 w/ 200 jog between reps. 200s in 40, 42 and 400s in 83, 82, 81, 82, 81, 81, 80, 80. I hit my goal of a little faster than 5k pace (84 seconds for 400s). My legs were fatigued from the week, so I didn't push it too hard. Long run tomorrow is more important!

I haven't been sleeping well the last few days; I don't feel like I'm getting into that deep sleep - just lots of dreaming.

PM - 2 mile shakeout run. I got new Saucony Kinvaras today (had to go up to a size 10.5 - ouch) so I wanted to try them out. They feel good!

AM - 19 mile out-and-back run at Jeremy Ranch Road. This run is very challenging - so many steep ups and downs with about 950 ft elevation gain overall (at 6000 ft). Jake and I stayed at a comfortable pace the entire run (avg 7:19), mostly discussing whether I should go for the marathon OTQ this fall. This is about a 2 hour conversation, so the run went by pretty fast! I was planning to go 18, but after getting a little G2 at the 16 mile mark, I decided to go for one more mile. 

This is two weeks of long runs - 20.6 last week and 19 this week. My body handled both of them very well which is pretty exciting. I'm going to have so much more endurance at Long Beach Half in a few weeks that I had at TOU Half (where I PRed), so I'm definitely looking forward to that race. I'm 80% going for OTQ this fall.

We put our legs in the cold creek in Park City after the run - I can already tell that it helped a ton!