The sun is up, the air is fresh, the stone is old

Off day in Idaho fishing for crawfish, cooking steak, and jumping from the trampoline into the swimming pool.

My redneck weekend

Sweet trail run all the way up Mt. Logan Peak.  Really strong today and so I've decided to run the Des News in the morning.  Today was one of my better feeling runs lately.  Just really strong!

8th marathon this year and this one went great.  Another one just under 2:40 which seems to be a rut I'm stuck in.  I started out really slow today on the down hills and everybody quickly gapped me.  There must have been 30 people ahead of me, but I didn't want to be hauling down these hills with the injury this year.  It was too dark to look at the GPS but I noticed at mile three the split was 16:38 which was pretty conservative considering the hills.  Miles four and five were about the same.  This may have cost me a few minutes in total race time since I banked nothing in those miles.

At what felt like mile six I looked at my watch and it was gone.  It fell off somewhere between five and six.  It felt great to just run the rest of the race at whatever felt right.  At mile 20 I started picking it up again since I really felt good and I think about turning down State Street I caught up to Albert and passed him.  Rob then joined me which was just awesome.  I had been alone the whole race.  I'm sure that saved me a minute or two, even though Rob kept telling me that the first woman was gaining on me, and yelling at the spectators ahead that he was pacing the first woman so they should start cheering.  Then Walter joined us with a mile to go and running with those two just gives you a smile!

 Now three days until Timp Half and actually pretty excited about putting in some speed.  I've been much to slow this year! 

Dropped the kids off this morning after two weeks of time with them without going to work at all.  So glad to have a job that has flexibility when we need it.  I took a trip to Orange County Ca for a nice afternoon on the beach.  Surprisingly I wasn't sore today at all, just some overall deadness in the legs so I ran one of my favorite beach courses, Balboa, Newport, up to Huntington and back down.  I'll probably pay for this tomorrow.

8 miles in the morning along Huntington Beach.

6 miles late afternoon in Denver on the way home

8 miles on the Logan River trail with Kristi

6 miles on the Mt. Naomi trail in the afternoon from Tony Grove

Started this race with not enough sleep, too much playing the last few days.  I immediately fell asleep on the bus and slept the whole way up today.  When I got off the bus I had a cramp right in my calf muscle, WTH? Before the race even started...  I swapped out of racing shoes and into my 16 ounce "fat man" Kayanos and did a mini warm up.  I decided this was what I was running in today.  Just too risky 4 days after a marathon to use flats.  Once we got going I let the lead group go and instead of hitting the early downhill miles fast, I ran them just under threshold, today that was about 5:25, and I didn't change the pace much through the race.  I did catch Walter around 4 miles which came as a surprise since he is just running so well this summer.  I also expected to hit a wall with the legs after Des News, but felt great the whole race.  What a beautiful half course!