Ilanarama!

As I mentioned in my Canyonlands Half race report, Britt and I went out with another couple and rented a VRBO; while Chuck and I ran the race, Britt and Anita went hiking in the Canyonlands National Park's Island in the Sky district. Then on Sunday, the day after the race, we did a scenic drive, taking Sand Flats road from highway 191 south of Moab up into the La Sal mountains, then turning north to return to highway 128 (the road along the Colorado River we raced on) via Castle Valley. Along the way we did some short hikes, and then a longer one at the Fisher Towers, which is a popular rock climbing area. (The towers are impressive but the rock itself doesn't inspire confidence!) On Monday, we left early-ish and drove down to the Canyonlands National Park's Needles District to hike there, and visit Newspaper Rock (a rock with a lot of pre-Puebloan pictographs) before heading home.

A small photo album (14 photos) at Flickr, with captions.

(If nothing else you should look at the Hamburger Rocks photo - they really do look like hamburgers!)

I think I've trained as well as I can for my race (this Saturday! Eeee!) and I hope that, as the saying goes, proper preparation prevents poor performance!

Over the past 8 weeks I've averaged 42.5mpw. I've done 6 runs of 12 or more miles, with two of 14 and one of 13.7, and run a tempo pretty much weekly with two 9-milers with 6-mile HMP segments, both of them averaging right around 8:13 pace. Today's 3x1 mile on the river trail (a traditional pre-half last workout of mine) averaged 7:37 for the hard miles, but each one got faster, ending with a 7:22 mile. (Admittedly, the first one was net uphill and the second two were net downhill, but none of them had a lot of elevation change.) Most importantly, I've come to terms with my age-related decline and am not, repeat, not, going to be overly-ambitious and push too hard early! (I hope.)

The weather at this point looks decent - a little warmer than I would prefer, but that's offset by a prediction of overcast skies. There will be a headwind, but the race is starting earlier this year than it did back when I ran it before, so I'm hoping the wind will stay fairly light (which is what's currently predicted). So the goals I set back in January still look good. 1:46:45 (about an 8:09 pace) is really a stretch goal, and I doubt I can actually hit it, but if I can average a 8:13 pace, as in training, it will bring me in under 1:48, which will make me happy.

The biggest wildcard for me is the course, since it's been changed since I've run it. We start by running UPcanyon, and then there's a turnaround, and we run back past the start and down the canyon to the finish; I don't know how steep (in either direction) the first part is going to be. The old course had a very steep downhill near the beginning, which is now going to be more like mile 3, and quite a bit of uphill between 7.5-8.5 and 9.5-10.5, which will now be later in the race (when I'm tired). On the other hand, it's all 2000-2500 feet lower than my training, so hopefully I won't even notice the hills. (Wishful thinking.)

Think fast thoughts in my direction on Saturday!

2021 has ended; it was a better year than 2020 (at least for me) but that's a pretty low bar. Have a meme (or at least some meme questions from which I have picked and chosen).

( Looking back, looking forward )

And my year in activities:

Running: 1404 miles, which pleases me, though I'd like to ramp up still more. I ran two 5Ks and the RTB relay; DNS a half marathon.

Biking: Garmin Connect doesn't distinguish between biking and e-biking, but, I'm using my e-bike a lot for transportation (even now, in the winter) and am up over 1900 miles on it. Mountain biking I've done a little less this year, but in addition to local rides we did several fun trips (our spring circumnavigation of the 4 corners, a trip to ride western CO dirt roads with a couple of friends, and our Thanksgiving trip to Arizona).

Hiking: I didn't post about it, but we finally got out to backpack this summer after a few years thwarted by fires, viruses, and injuries. It was great! We did six days in the Weminuche Wilderness with a group of friends, though not everyone had the same itinerary, which actually worked well because we e.g. spent one night with some people, and then did a side trip with some others, and when we got back to our "base camp" the couple that started the day after us were there. Unfortunately I was not in as good shape as I wanted to be, and some of us did an ambitious day hike that was...a little too ambitious for me, I almost broke down in tears a few times, but I made it. I feel like I'm way slower than I used to be, though, and I hate that. But I love backpacking and we have some spring and summer trips planned!

Skiing: Last season I got out quite a bit, which was great; I went several times with my friend June, as well as weekly with Britt, and it was a lot of fun despite the covid-19 precautions that meant that we had to eat our lunches outside (sometimes while being snowed on). After a week of storms between Christmas and New Year's, this year has been dry and sunny, and we've only been skiing once in December and once in January so far. There's no snow in the forecast for the rest of the month - we may end up just going mountain biking in New Mexico the way things are going.

I will try to revive this journal and post more! (See: New Year's Resolutions. :-)

Last weekend I ran Reach the Beach for the third time (2019, 2015). As usual, it was super fun and I got very little sleep!

( bla bla and photos )

Today I raced for the first time since the Reach the Beach relay in September 2019. I had planned to run the Canyonlands Half Marathon on March 14, 2020, but that was the weekend that the pandemic officially came crashing down on the US; the race was canceled only a few days before. Most races since then have either been canceled or reinvented as "virtual races", which I have no interest in because I'm not capable of sustaining a race effort without other runners ahead of me to (maybe) catch and behind me to (hopefully) not let catch me. But now racing is on the scene again, and I figured it was time to dust off the shoes and blow out the cobwebs.

It's not as though I haven't been running, but I haven't been running a lot. I've been maintaining 25-ish mpw, though recently I bumped it up to 30, and in mid-April I started doing track workouts about once a week. For me that's really not enough mileage to feel comfortable running a longer race, so I had originally planned to skip the Narrow Gauge 10-Miler, which I've run three times in past years. But then I saw they were also holding a 5K, and so last weekend, ignoring the fact that I really hate 5Ks, I impulsively registered.

This year's race started and finished on the college campus, only a little over a mile from my house. In past years the 10M started in town, ran up the ~350' mesa to the college and around campus, then back down to the finish; the change in start location meant that the racers started off going around the campus and then downhill, and had to climb back up over the last two miles, which IMO sucks and is another reason I didn't want to do the ten! Fortunately, the 5K stayed up on the mesa and so there were no huge climbs or descents. Not that it was flat - nothing around here is flat - but it wasn't bad.

At least, not in terms of elevation change. In order to make the distance (and be moderately flat) the 5k course was a lopsided figure-8 with about 3/4 mile of gravel road and dirt-and-gravel trail, both of which were sufficiently pockmarked with shallow depressions made by past puddles to require a bit of care to not twist an ankle. The race also started and ended on a grassy field with steep but short banks between it and the (higher) roadway.

I rode my e-bike to the start, did a short warm-up on the dirt and gravel portion in order to check it out in advance, and lined up not far behind the hotshots at the front. And we were off! I controlled my pace on the early downhill, and then passed the kid ahead of me (literally, it was a 10-year-old with her dad!), about a half-mile in. I could see a very fit-looking woman ahead, so that put me in second. Shortly after we got back onto pavement around mile 1.25 another woman caught up with me, a local runner of about my age, but I put on a burst of speed and managed to keep her from catching me. (She finished about 25 seconds behind me, whew!) Just before the 2-mile marker a different woman passed me, putting me in third place where I remained for the whole race.

I crossed the finish line at 25:46, with 3.17 miles on my Garmin, for a pace of about 8:08 - considerably slower than my marathon PR pace, and about the same as my average pace over the 16 miles of my 3 legs at RTB a year and a half ago! Oh, well. I took solace in knowing I was the fastest woman over 50, as the two ahead of me are both in their 40s. (Interestingly enough, the top five male finishers were, in order: 15, 12, 68, 12, and 64! And all of them faster than me, sigh.)

I'm toying with running a half at the end of August, which should give me enough time to get my mileage up and rebuild some more speed. And then - in September, I'm running Reach the Beach again!

As I mentioned earlier this year, we signed up for the San Juan Huts ride again this year - we did it in 2016 - but with all manner of things being canceled due to the pandemic, we were unsure whether it would actually happen. Well, we were notified last week that they will be allowing trips to go! There are a few extra safeguards (in particular, we have to carry our own sleeping bags rather than using the ones at the huts, and apparently there will be new cleaning/disinfecting protocols) but it's happening, hooray!

Fortunately we (and our friends who we invited along - we have three others going for sure, and possibly 1-2 more) have been doing our best to get in shape, because it's a challenging ride. I have definitely felt lucky to be living in rural-ish Colorado rather than in a city during the pandemic restrictions, so we've been able to run, hike, and bike; our friends in Barcelona, for example, were only allowed out of their apartment to go grocery shopping until quite recently. My strategy over the past several months has been to run 5x/week (30-35mpw with one track workout) and bike twice a week (one 8-12 mile lunch ride on a weekday, and one 22-32 mile ride with a lot of vertical on a weekend).

So mostly we've been preparing by riding up steep mountain dirt/4x4 roads. This is still early season, so our turnarounds are often determined by "oops, too much snow to keep going!" For example, yesterday:



We (Britt and I, and our friends Rolfe and Kristen, who are going on the hut trip with us) rode up a nearby canyon from about 8100' to 10,700', at which point we hit...this. If you can't tell, it's a deep, swift, relatively long stream crossing, followed by a snowbank. We dithered about trying to continue (and by 'we' I mean mostly Rolfe; the rest of us were, "yeah, time to turn back") until some hikers came by, heading to their vehicle which was parked at this corner (out of the picture to the left) who told us that things got pretty well snowpacked around the next switchback. (And as is not unusual around here, we knew one of them!) So that was a sign to head back down, hurray.

( A few photos of me from our recent rides: )

Our hut trip starts on Saturday, June 20th - that gives us only another three weeks (and another two weekends) to get in shape. Hopefully we will be ready!

So today I was going to run the Canyonlands Half again, for the first time in some years, but (probably to nobody's surprise) it was canceled due to the need for social distancing. The company that has taken it over, Mad Moose Productions, offered runners the choice to run 13.1 on their own and send in the GPS track or Strava link to receive a medal and t-shirt, or a 65% credit on a future Mad Moose race up to and including next year's Canyonlands, which is what I opted for as I'm terrible at making a race effort on my own. We had originally planned to just go to Moab anyway and go mountain biking, but the weather's terrible, off-and-on rain with hail and lightning all day, and really, it's not so bad being stuck in our beautiful house watching the storms go by. This is a photo from off our back patio earlier in the week, sunrise fog rolling through the valley:



I've been riding my e-bike a lot again, and it's great; also running, and last weekend we got out on the mountain bikes and did a little dirt-road riding. The ski area claims 11" from these past storms, after pretty much zip for the last three weeks, so maybe we'll go skiing again on Monday! ETA: Nope, Governor Polis has closed all ski resorts for a week. At first I thought that was silly, because how do you spread/catch a virus when you're all bundled up in mittens and parkas? Well, duh, when you stop for lunch at the restaurant, or use the restroom, you take off your ski gloves - and lift lines (not that we have them at our tiny place) and chairlifts put you closer than 6 feet to other people. So I'm bummed, but I get it.