Wheeler Farm Loops

AM - 5.2 miles of running / ice skating. It was probably the worst running I've had since the last couple miles of the Philly marathon, mainly b/c my stomach was killing me. Lesson learned - only eat 1/2 as much pizza at The Pie as you think you should :-)

Skied all day up at Brighton. A couple feet of new snow is now covering up most of the rocks and branches. Finally! Andrea skied circles around me all day and made me look like a total amateur. Great to be up in the mountains, though. And my ski legs will come back eventually.

PM - 6.7 miles.

AM - 6.1 miles. Easy run from home. This is a scheduled lower mileage week. I don't feel like I need it right now, but unfortunately I'm smart enough to know that gains are made in recovery, and I need to give my body a chance to absorb the work I've done over the last month. Boston is 12 weeks from now, so its a good time to back off a bit and let the batteries get fully charged for the first cycle of marathon training. This week will be a major test for me mentally - probably a lot harder than just banging out 20+ mile days.

PM - 8.5 miles. Warmed up one mile and then went straight into a 5 mile MP tempo on a nice, flat, no-traffic loop close to home that I measured out yesterday that will now be known as the Winder Loop. Its just over a mile and perfect for shorter tempos. Splits were 5:18, 5:20, 5:18, 5:13, 5:05. Every lap the snow seemed to be coming down harder, and that made it was pretty fun! Cooled down 2.5 miles back home. For whatever reason, I really enjoyed this run. I think its just that I know I'm starting to gear up for another marathon again, and that makes me excited.

AM - 7.3 miles up to work. Slushy, slippery... wet shoes.

PM - 7.3 miles home. Dry shoes.

AM - 10.3 miles. Ran w/ Bryan from the HCI - Sunnyside/Wasatch out & back. Gotta get him on the blog so he can be on our team for Boston. He's gonna be ready to PR this spring. Legs felt good... I'll do a short, light workout this afternoon when its nice and warm out.

PM - 7 miles. Warmed up a mile, then went right into the workout - 10 x 1/4 mile w/ 1/4 jog recovery. Average for the quarters was 69.4 seconds, and I kept the "jog" at ~6:20 pace. I did this on the same loop from my tempo run on Monday. Today was the first time I changed the settings on my Garmin 110 since I took it out of the box last summer - I used the auto-split every 0.25 miles setting instead of the standard 1.0 mile setting. Pretty useful for days when I can't get on the track. Breathing felt a little off because I haven't done any running at this pace in a while, but my legs felt nice and snappy. I'm reaping the benefits of the down week.

I've been saying this forever - don't wear high heels! :-)  

AM - 7.3 miles up to work. 

PM - 7.3 miles home. Lightly misting. Some younger girls playing in their yard on 1700E yelled out "hey - there's the orange guy!" 

Blue Kinvaras surpassed the 1000 mile mark today... still going strong! 

Andrea has a co-worker visiting from Brazil, and she has never seen real mountains, so we are going to take her up to Alta on Saturday afternoon to snowshoe around a bit. Anyone is welcome to join us - we'll try to meet around 1-1:30pm and then carpool up. It probably won't be very difficult hiking, being that she is from sea-level and has never really even been in cold weather before. But the weather looks good, and its always nice to hike up towards Twin Lakes or Catherine's Pass and look back at Superior and LCC. Hard to beat this view...

AM - 7.1 miles. Ran the first 4 miles easy, then did 11 x 30 seconds @ 5K pace with 60-90 seconds between efforts. I was shooting for ~8 reps, but completely lost count of how many I'd done about halfway through. It was too early in the day for math.

The first "big" marathon (other than the OT) of the year was today (or yesterday, or whatever day it is over there) in Dubai. Four guys you've probably never heard of ran 2:04. Yowzers. I liked this quote from Letsrun, about the winner: "From 39km to 42km, the guy ran an 8:29 split. That's 9:03 3,200 pace. Think about that for a minute."

PM - 3 miles shakeout. Headed to the Brad Paisley concert now.

Offer still stands - if anyone wants to head up to Alta for some snow fun tomorrow afternoon (~1:30PM), let me know. 

First race of the year this morning out at the Saltair Palace. Great weather for a January race... it was pretty warm by the 10am start time.

Warmed up with Rob, did a few 30 second efforts, then we were off. Fritz and I ran together for the first mile. We had a nice tailwind and hit the mile in 4:46. Then Fritz dropped off a bit, and once we hit the turnaround (and headwind) I backed the pace off to more of a threshold effort. I felt like I had a few more gears in my legs, but just didn't mentally feel like suffering. I'm a baby!

Next two miles were 5:00 and 5:01. Last 0.1 was 31 seconds. Finish time of 15:20. I looked back at all the old results posted online from the winter series, and this ties the fastest time run on this course. I should have listened to Andrea and pushed the last bit a little harder! Fritz ran well and finished in 15:50.

Cooled down 6+ miles w/ Emily B, Devra, Allie, and James. A nice showing for the blog today - top 3 guys, Rob winning the masters race, Emily and Allie going 3-4 in the women's race. And Devra winning was great too - she's not on the blog but we run w/ her enough that she is still part of the crew!

This was a good first race of the year for me. Very controlled effort - I'm in a good place right now as I start the buildup towards Boston. Way, way, way ahead of where I was at this point last year.

Won a $100 New Balance gift card for my efforts (although I can't wear New Balance stuff... haha). And this was also apparently the RRCA state championship - so I'm the Utah State 5K champion, and I have a coaster to prove it! :-)

Fun morning. Andrea took a bunch of pictures. Here's her full gallery: SLC Track Club 5K ... Allie's pics from the finish are especially good.

PM - Busy afternoon! Came home, wrote this race report, then went to TCBY and met up with Allie, James, and Andrea's co-worker from Brazil. We filled up on Fro-Yo, then went up to Alta for the afternoon. They all snowshoed and I played around on my rando skis. Really nice to be up in the mountains on a beautiful afternoon. I have some good pictures and will post them tomorrow. Once we finally got down the canyon (traffic was a mess so we stopped at Snowbird for a while and got some hot chocolate), I got out for a 4 mile shakeout run and it felt good to stretch out my legs.