Ilanarama!

Just under 40 miles running (because I forgot to check to see how long I needed to run to make exactly 40!) and about 19.5 miles cycling.

Monday: easy 4.6, felt kinda creaky since I'd run long the day before.
Tuesday: 8.7 with 5 tempo miles. Aimed on the slow side for the tempo and averaged 8:08, which is...a little slower than I wanted. HR was also a little low. But I feel like it was a good workout anyway, and built confidence.
Wednesday: rest. Normally I bike up to get my CSA veggies at the college on the mesa but it was hot, so I got a lift from Britt, who was going up to check on our house, and then hiked down.
Thursday: 9.6 in the morning, started out a little late and it got hot, so it wasn't very fast. In the afternoon I did 4 miles of biking to pick up eggs and some peaches and corn at a farmstand.
Friday: 4.6 trail running with Britt, rather slow but a pleasant run.
Saturday: 12.4 miles with surges in the first minute of miles 5-12.
Sunday: 15.5 miles mountain biking. We did part of this route back in April and I was much faster this time!

Next week will be a mulligan of sorts for my half marathon training, as we're taking a mini-vacation to Telluride to go mountain biking (and incidentally for Britt's birthday, which is August 1st). So Monday through Thursday will be biking rather than running, but I'm sure I'll get lots of exercise in.

Look, I'm actually getting a post in after only one week! The rains have indeed started to fall in the high country, so we no longer have smoky mornings and I can run before breakfast as I prefer in the summer.

This week I still had 35mpw on the plan, but I ended up running 40mpw (which I'm going to try to keep up), and it felt good.

Monday: 8.1 easy outside (yay!) with 6x10 sec hill sprints.
Tuesday: 7.9 with tempo. I'd penciled in 2x2.5 tempo as a treadmill workout, but since I could run outside I decided to do the same I did last week on the treadmill, 2x2 with 3 min jog. Tempo miles averaged 7:52, HR smack dab HMP HR.
Wednesday: biked to pick up CSA and run other errands, 5.7 miles mixed trail and road, 450' vertical.
Thursday: Easy 5.3 with strides, cut short from planned 6.3 because I got a call from my dentist's office (while running!) offering to move my afternoon appointment to get my permanent crown to the morning.
Friday: Easy 6.3, which came out at 9:20, a fast pace for me, probably because I started earlier than usual and it was nice and cool.
Saturday: 12.5 on a moderately hilly route (not as hilly as last week's) which I did as a progression since I wanted to make sure I had energy for the whole thing. Started super easy, last three full miles between 9:15-9:20, then an easy half-mile warm-down.
Sunday: 10-mile MTB ride consisting of about 1500' climb (with a lot of hike-a-bike) over an often-steep, often-rocky 4.5 miles of old forest service road and singletrack (and old forest service road that had deteriorated to singletrack) followed by a long downhill on a dirt road. The view from the top was worth the climb:



Total 40 riding, about 16 of biking. It all looks very good on my training log program, especially when I looked back at my log from this time last year, just before I ran Kendall Mountain and gave myself a stress fracture - in fact my paces are quite similar, including my tempo runs. But I was running higher mileage then, and doing trail running (which I haven't started up again), and I still only ran 1:47 at the 2017 Steamworks Half last June despite thinking I was in 1:43 shape. In my post-race analysis, I attributed this to 1) a hot day, 2) being overly-optimistic about my fitness and going out too fast, 3) failing to recover from a race two weeks prior, and 4) tapering poorly.

At the end of my race report from that half, I wrote: Anyway, I think it comes down to this: Now that I'm an old lady, I can't just half-ass my training and still improve. I need to allow a lot of recovery after races, I need to get and keep my mileage (relatively) high, I need to be conservative with my taper, and I need to be realistic about my goals. I think it's good that I was inspired to revisit that report, because these are the things that I will need to keep in mind going into the Thirsty Thirteen in six weeks!

At the end of May I posted about training to run a half marathon in August as the next step in my comeback from the pelvic stress fracture I suffered last July. I began my "official" training program the following Monday, three weeks ago. (I should point out that I don't use canned plans, but instead write my own "unplanny plan" based on the principles and workouts in Brad Hudson's Run Faster, which I have been doing since - gosh, 2009? By "unplanny" I mean that, rather than having specific distances and workouts for each day, I list only a mileage goal, a long run distance goal, and key workout(s) for each week. Actual distances and the days I do them may vary. Also per Hudson, I may change the plan as needed along the way.)

I started the plan with 31mpw the week before on 5 days running (all easy, one run with strides, another with hill sprints) and a longest run of 8 miles, plus two biking. I've maintained the 5/2, and last week bumped up to 35mpw (well, actually 34, but the goal is 35), which I will hold for a while before bumping up to 40mpw mid-July.

Week 1 plan: 30mpw, 8M LR, key 6x0.25 with 3 min jog recoveries, plus hill sprints and strides. ( Week 1 went pretty well except the LR became a hike. )

Works out to 23.5 miles running (with the 7.6 hike that gets me 31.1 miles on my feet) and 11 miles riding.
No hill sprints or strides, oops.

Week 2 plan: 30mpw, 10M LR, key 4x0.5 with 3 min jog recoveries, plus hill sprints and strides. ( Week 2 was largely on the treadmill due to smoke. )

Total was 32.9 miles running and 6.2 miles riding. The city and county had closed all the trails due to the fire danger, so there was nowhere to actually go for a ride, and the smoke was pretty bad all week. (I bought an N95 respirator mask for wearing to ride to the gym. It's okay for easy effort but I can't imagine running with it on.)

Week 3 plan: 35mpw, 12M LR, key 0.25/0.5/1/0.5/0.25 ladder with 3 min jog recoveries, plus hill sprints and strides.( Week 3 back on the roads and trails, yay! )

Total was 34.2 miles running and about 17.2 miles riding. And no hill sprints or strides, bad me.

The fire's perked up again as we've had hot, windy weather. I couldn't start today's run until 10:30, as I was waiting for the air quality to get decent, and by then it was really warm and my heart rate was too high for the slow pace I had to run. So it's back to the treadmill, sigh. No rain in the forecast, either.

I haven't posted since Thanksgiving, oops. So here's the short version:

• After returning from hiking and biking over Thanksgiving, I had a great week of working out, a combination of walking, mountain biking, and the elliptical at the gym. I also started doing short sessions on the indoor track at the gym, alternate loops of a slow jog and a walk, after elliptical sessions, just to ease into running again.


• Then I had a not-so-great week, though I am not sure why - I think I must have been sick - but after a ride on Wednesday I didn't do any exercise until the following Wednesday, when I went for a walk. I got back up to the rec center for some more elliptical and mini-jog on Thursday, December 14th. I also called my mother, as it was her birthday; she was in a nursing rehab facility recovering from a fall the week before, and my father and some of their friends were there, giving her a little party in her room.


• Then it was time for my own party, as Britt's company had scheduled a holiday weekend in Telluride! Since it had been so warm and dry, we packed both ski stuff and bike stuff. On Friday afternoon we left work early and mountain biked at Phil's World, which is more or less on the way (we rarely go there because it's a long drive, so we took the opportunity!) and then when we arrived in Telluride we had just enough time to shower before meeting the rest of the group for drinks and dinner. Saturday was for skiing, which was only possible on a small subset of runs with man-made snow, but for what it was it was fine, and the relatively warm weather meant we could have lunch on the mountain at the outdoor French restaurant Bon Vivant. Stupid expensive for lunch, but really excellent food, and the view couldn't be beat:
  
  ( cut for photo )
  
  
  After a few more runs, we decamped to the hot tub, then went to the big company party. Sunday (December 18th) we had a leisurely breakfast with a couple of friends and then drove back home, taking a detour through Cortez to buy a picnic lunch to take on the Canyons of the Ancients Loop in Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. We'd done this ride a few years ago, also during an unusually warm and dry winter. This time, on our newer bikes and in better shape, I think we managed a lot more riding and less bike-pushing!


• We got home, put away our gear, showered, and sat down to dinner...and my phone rang. It was my youngest brother, telling me that my father was in the hospital, having just suffered a cerebral hemorrhage...and my mother was due to return from the nursing rehab center the next day! He and his family live fairly close to our parents, and they'd been helping out while Mom had been in the nursing center, but having simultaneous health crises with both parents was a bit much to cope with.


• And so I flew out to Maryland on a one-way ticket the next day, after spending the morning on the phone with my brother, checking flight schedules online, and emailing my (extremely understanding) boss. Four incredibly difficult but rewarding weeks later, after getting the situation more or less stabilized, I finally came back home. That was two weeks ago.

I'd brought running shoes and exercise clothes, but I only managed three very short runs (15-20 minutes, the last on a treadmill) due to things being in continuous crisis mode. (I also brought my laptop and key cards so I could do work...I did zero work.) So my fitness level is basically back down to zero; I've managed to run pretty much every other day now that I'm home, but I'm very slow and my endurance is pathetic. (The good news is that my stress fracture must be completely healed by now?) We went skiing once, but the winter is still unusually warm and dry, and conditions are not very appealing. I'm hoping to take advantage of the weather to run and bike and slowly get myself back into shape - we've got a White Rim trip on the schedule in mid-May, and we'd like to do some backpacking this summer.

Anyway, that's the scoop. I'll have more to say about that crazy month taking care of my parents, but for the most part, I hope this marks a return to frequent posts about my outdoorsy pursuits!

I haven't been posting in a while, bad me, so you're forgiven if you've forgotten that I'm doing the Kendall Mountain Run tomorrow. I'm a little less prepared than I'd like to be, mostly because I fell really hard while trail running twice in successive weeks, then also fell hard mountain biking, and so I've been more cautious and doing less trail running than I really should have been. But I have been hiking and biking and running!



( Read more and see more photos )

So, tomorrow I am getting up way too early and going up to Silverton (it's about an hour's drive) with a friend who is also running. Now that I've seen what the course is like (we drove the first three miles to get to the trailhead of our late-June overnight backpack) I don't think I can make sub-3; I'm hoping to come in somewhere around 3:30. But my main goal is to NOT FALL.

Our friends Ryan and Steve organized a White Rim trip again this year, and this time we were the only other people on it. (We did it with them last year, and also in 2013. We also did it twice in the 1990s with friends from Boulder, where we lived then.)



( Read more! See more pictures! And there's even a linked map! )

Or just look at the Flickr album.

Moab, in Utah, isn't very far away from Durango. We go there three or four times a year, for the Canyonlands running races in March and October, for the nearby backpacking when our mountains are too snow-covered for access, and for the world-class mountain biking. It takes a bit less than three hours to get there by car; how much less depends on your willingness to exceed the speed limit, and your need for gas and bathroom stops.

Or you can bike there in seven arduous days, over 215 miles of secondary roads, jeep roads, and trails, up mountains and across desert valleys along the route set up by San Juan Huts. (Here is a map Britt put together, showing the route - click "->7.5' Topo Maps" and zoom in to see it more clearly.)

Want to guess what we did? Yeah. Strenuous climbs, scary descents, rain, heat, mud, and mosquitoes - also killer views, deserted roads, and cold beers enjoyed with good friends. I call it a win.



( Day by day trip report, with lots of photos )

All the photos (119!), none of the blahblah

( Advice I'd give to anyone contemplating this trip )

I've been biking a lot lately. This isn't because I've fallen out of love with running, or because I'm too injured to run - okay, I'm a little injured, but it doesn't keep me from running. But Britt and I, and four friends, will be doing the San Juan Huts Durango to Moab ride at the end of the month: that's 215 miles over 7 days, mostly on secondary dirt road, with a whole lot of elevation gain and loss. So we've been getting our butts in shape by riding a lot of steep high-elevation jeep roads and dirt roads, and a bit of single track.

( So have some photos. )

Well, as you do in southwest Colorado when you're having an unusually warm, dry winter. We usually go skiing every Friday, but we punted the last two weeks because our ski day on January 30 was the last time it snowed up at Purgatory, our local resort. But Valentine's Day fell on a Saturday this year, a great day to take off and do something special with my sweetheart...so why not go mountain biking?

Here in Durango the trails are still muddy, with snow lingering in the shady spots, but I had learned from the website of the local trails advocacy group about trail conditions elsewhere, and so I decided we ought to go to Sand Canyon, in the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, which is about a 1:15 drive from here. The canyons here are south-facing and on a broad mesa about 1200 feet lower than Durango, so it's even warmer and drier. If you scroll down on that link you'll see a map; we rode to the first dotted-line connector trail, then rode around East Rock Creek Trail in a counter-clockwise loop and back to the connector, and back to the trailhead. It was mostly easy riding, but we had to frequently stop to walk through steep, rocky sections, particularly at the head of the canyon.



( More photos and a few more words )

Got up to 50 miles last week, as planned! While all my Facebook running friends were grousing about the snow and/or their treadmills, we had another week of beautiful blue skies.

Monday - 7.3 miles with 5 half mile repeats with 2 min jog recoveries. Not great, not horrible. Definitely slower than they were in autumn, though; the first 4 averaged 7:02 pace and I kinda blew the last one, 7:23.

Tuesday - 4.4 miles trail running with Britt in the afternoon, as I spent the morning judging a middle school science fair. 11:17 pace.

Wednesday - Easy 10.5 up a canyon road and back down, 9:15 average pace.

Thursday - Another of the alternation workouts I linked in my previous post: this one was 2 miles of warm-up followed by 5 miles alternating 0.35M HMP (7:16) and 0.65M HMP+35 (7:50) and then easy running home for a total of 9.7. It was supposed to be 7 but I knew I couldn't do that; this Thursday I'll extend the same workout. Overall average 8:17 pace.

Friday - normally ski day, but we haven't had snow in two weeks, so instead Britt and I took off early from work and bicycled down the Animas River Trail all the way to the southern end, then back up the frontage road to Ska Brewing and had pints of stout. :-) About 12 miles total (which I know because this is one of my running routes - minus the beer).

Saturday - Long easy run, 14 miles at 9:03 pace.

Sunday - Another trail run with Britt, 5.4 miles, average pace 11:32. We stopped at the top of our little in-town ski hill to watch a couple of pairs of racers in a freestyle (moguls and jumps) competition. Weird to see the snow formed on the run with bare hillside all around it!