Ilanarama!

I ran my first (and so far, only) 50K a little over eight years ago, in October 2014. It was the inaugural run of the Dead Horse Ultra, and I finished solidly at the top of the bottom of the very small pack, in just under 6 hours. I also herniated a disc - possibly because I'd run the Durango Double (a trail half marathon on Saturday and a road half marathon on Sunday) the weekend before - and was injured enough that I ended up sitting out the Boston Marathon the following April. Still, I wanted a rematch, both with the distance and these particular jeep and mtb trails.

It was not to be. I had a long and slow come-back from injury, complicated by menopause and the onset of osteopenia (the precursor to osteoporosis) setting me back with a stress fracture, and I haven't even run a marathon since, let alone an ultra. But last month my internet-friend K, who lives in Boulder, told me that she'd been inspired by the beautiful desert photos of my race report to sign up for the Dead Horse 15K; I hemmed and hawed and considered that 1) I had just recovered from covid-19 and 2) I have done approximately zero trail running since mid-summer; but on the other hand a) 15K is about 9.3 miles, which is a typical long run distance for me, and b) it would be a chance to meet K - and the alphabet won. So about ten days ago I signed up for the race and reserved a hotel room, and on Friday afternoon I drove out to Moab. I had a nice and relaxing dinner at the fancy-schmancy Desert Bistro (the salad was beautiful, the wine was delicious, the main dish was a bit too salty for my taste, alas), went to bed early, and slept reasonably well, waking before my 6:30am alarm.

In the intervening years since I'd run the 50k, the Dead Horse had been taken over by another race management company, moved about a month later, sprouted additional distances, and become much, much bigger. The second running, 2 years later, changed the 25k to a 30k and added a 50-miler; this 2022 running included the 15k for the first time, which attracted 175 runners - more than three times the total number of runners in both distances combined in 2014! I drove up to the starting area on Saturday morning - the thermometer in my truck said it was 25F - and parked in the overflow area. This meant I couldn't wear extra clothes and then stash them quickly in my vehicle, so it was a cold wait for the start: I'd worn capris, a short-sleeve tee in jersey-like fabric, thin arm warmers, thin gloves, a thin buff around my neck and a fleece headband around my ears. (Spoiler alert: this was the right way to dress for the race, if not for the standing-around.) I met up with K and the other friends she'd talked into doing this race (K is a very enthusiastic promoter of things she likes) and we chatted until I realized it was just a few minutes to the race start, at which point I quickly got in the starting chute, positioning myself about the halfway point of the group. (The race does a self-seeded wave start, with three waves starting 5 minutes apart, and K and her friends planned to run in a later wave.)

And we were off! I ran around the parking area and up to the slowly-rising dirt road at what I hoped was approximately half-marathon effort level, trying not to push too hard at this early stage, trying not to feel bad about people passing me at this early stage. It wasn't too hard to remind myself to keep things under control - all I had to do was look over to where the road became 4WD-rough and turned steeply uphill. My first mile clocked in at a 9:10 pace, but pretty soon I was alternately walking and jogging up the ~450' hill, and mile 2 was a much more sedate 12:10.

After cresting the summit, the road swooped back down in short segments, a little down, a little up, a little more down, and so on, and I turned up the speed, though I had to watch my balance and footing on the rough terrain. When mile 3 checked in at 8:25 pace, I noticed that I'd run the first 3 miles in (barely) under 30 minutes, a 10-minute pace average, and set the arbitrary goal for myself of attempting to average under 10-minute pace for the whole race. Though it depends on terrain, my trail runs are typically between 11:30-12:00 pace, so I figured that I could improve that by a couple of minutes per mile with a race effort.

And so I kept up my pace and effort as I headed downhill, passing a few of the people who had passed me earlier, and even catching up with the slowest 30k runners and walkers who had started 20 minutes before me. Mile 4 was at 8:30 pace. When the road started to flatten out, getting less rough but sandier, I started seeing the leaders coming back from the turnaround at mile 4.8. I was carrying my handheld, so I didn't stop at the turnaround aid station, just rounded the marker and headed back the way I'd come.

The turnaround was only 10 feet higher than the start, which meant I had to climb back up the huge hill I'd just run down! But just as it had gently swooped down, it swooped up more gently than the initial climb, and I was able to run mile 5 at 8:50, mile 6 at 9:22, and mile 7 and 8 both at around 10:40 pace. I was still on pace for a sub-10-minute average...and now I was going downhill! Mile 8 was actually about half up and half down, but the roughness of the road kept me from really letting loose once gravity was helping rather than hurting; the road got smoother in mile 9, though, and I clocked 8:15 pace, and then 7:55 on the last bit, just under half a mile of almost imperceptible downhill by my Garmin, down to the parking lot, and through the finish chute at 1:29:39, a 9:28 pace which blew away my arbitrary goal (but made my new goal of sub-1:30 which I decided on at the moment I saw the finish clock from 25 yards or so away).

I immediately went to get some water - I'd finished what was my handheld during the last climb - and then just breathed for a while, as it had been an all-out effort at the end. I went to watch the finishers for a while, but started getting cold; I wanted to watch K and her friends finish, though, so I didn't dare hike back to my car to get my warm jacket in case I missed them. I lucked out, though, because one of the guys waiting at the finish line was holding an extra down jacket for his friend who was running the 50k, and I begged him to let me wear it until either his friend finished, or mine did! So I got to see K's friend Jenn finish, and then she and I cheered K across the finish line, and then I handed back the jacket and took the very very long and cold walk back to my truck. (I'd parked in the "wrong" overflow, just across the highway from the start, but the traffic which was minimal before 8 am was now heavy, and the traffic controllers sent me down the bike path to the underpass which led to the "correct" overflow...then I had to walk back along a service road, into the wind, to my parking area. Maybe a total of 3/4 mile - I was shivering, teeth chattering, by the time I got to my truck! Fortunately solar radiation had made it nice and toasty inside.)

I drove back to my hotel room and took a very long, very hot shower, then drove into downtown and met K, K's boyfriend, and Jenn for lunch, where I ate a burger the size of my head and about half of the huge helping of fries, washed it down with a draft beer (draft beer in Utah is limited to 5% ABV) and plenty of water, and made it home by 5pm, before dark. My butt hurt a lot (glutes are what drive you up the hill, and then I sat on them for three hours!) but otherwise I felt fine, and today I really didn't have any DOMS.

Final numbers: I won my age group! Which feels like a particular accomplishment since this race uses 10-year age groups and next year I age out into the next. I was first out of 14 in F50-59, 14/105 women, and 37/176 human beings.

And now I'm thinking about another 50k sometime...

My racing history in Moab goes back to October 2009, when I ran The Other Half with my RW Forum friend Karah - we'd met in person the month before at the Imogene Pass Run, and she'd encouraged me to come do this one (and share a hotel room) - and came home with a new PR of 1:41:44 and a trophy. Over the next seven years I raced both The Other Half and its sister race, the Canonylands Half in March, nearly every year (along with two other Moab races, the Winter Sun 10K twice and the Dead Horse 50K once); I brought home more trophies and other awards most years, as well as my all-time half marathon PR of 1:35:55 at The Other Half in 2013.

And then in 2017 I didn't feel I had enough training to register for Canyonlands, and I got a pelvic stress fracture at a trail race in July, so I didn't do The Other Half either. 2018 was mostly very slow recovery and ramping up my fitness again, though that was also the summer of the 416 Fire which made training a challenge. I signed up to do a local half in August but strained a muscle in my groin mountain biking, so I bailed on that race. In early 2019 we were feverishly finishing our new house, so no Canyonlands Half for me that year, though I did run a local half in June, after we'd moved in. Our trip to Spain in the fall conflicted with The Other Half, but I signed up to do the Canyonlands Half on March 14th, 2020 - which was canceled due to the pandemic, as were many races over the next 18 months. I again signed up for the August half here and again had to bail due to mountain bike injury. (I should probably learn a lesson from this...)

Which is why, when I toed the metaphorical line on Saturday at the Sandy Beach river access pull-out on Highway 128 along the Colorado River, I had not raced a half for nearly three years, and had not raced in Moab for five and a half years. But I had ten weeks of solid, careful training, and a good taper week; I had reasonable goals and excellent weather. I was ready.

( Running the race )

( Final numbers and placement, and a photo of the ridonkulous medal )

( Analysis and musing )

Anyway, all in all, I am super happy with how this race went!

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!

Earlier this week I posted my goals for this year's Steamworks half: I did not make my A goal, coming in about 50 seconds slower than my time two years ago with a 1:48:10, but that time satisfies my B goal of sub-1:50. I think I might I also ran a much better-paced race this year, which was really my primary goal, so I'm quite happy with how things went.

I biked to the finish, which from my new house is mostly a downhill coast followed by a half mile of gentle uphill, and then got on one of the buses for the start. I shared a seat with a guy named Tim who was running his first race of any distance, and if I hadn't already been fired up, his enthusiasm would have done it. At the start I saw quite a few people I knew, including Allan, who lives an hour south in northern New Mexico and comes up for a lot of our races. We first "met" via the old Runner's World forum, and it was fun to discover that we were sorta-neighbors. Allan is 62 and just ran Boston (and set a PR!) in April.



Heading from the staging area to the start. I'm in the white visor with my head turned, in the center front.

I was determined to not go out too fast this year (which is alas very easy to do, as the start is subtly downhill), so I placed myself well back from the start line. The start line had been moved back some distance this year; this has always been a short course, with my Garmin showing 12.9-13.0 at the end, but this year I think the distance was about right (I recorded 13.09), though the intermediary mile markers were too close early and too far apart late (which threw my pace math off like whoa). I kept a close eye on my watch and clocked my first mile at 8:06, a few seconds faster than my goal of 8:08 for the first miles but not bad. Second mile at 8:09, third at 8:12. Heart rate just a little higher than my easy-pace HR, a good sign that I was relaxed and not expending too much energy.



Still happy at mile 3!

Mile 4 went uphill, though, and my speed dropped as I strove to keep my heart rate under control, giving me an 8:33. But the next miles had more downhill, and I got my pace back into the 8:10-8:15 range I had been aiming at. My HR slowly rose into what I consider my HMP HR range.

Somewhere in the third mile I had seen Allan not far ahead - I hadn't realized he'd gotten ahead of me as we'd started fairly close to each other, and he'd told me he was aiming at 8:20 pace - running alongside a slender woman in a yellow shirt, and eventually I caught up and said hi. The three of us ran more or less together for the rest of the race. Occasionally one person would get ahead and then get reeled in. I walked at all the aid stations (and actually turned around and went back at the 8-mile aid station because they had gummi bears, and I had missed them and wanted some!) but Allan and the woman in yellow didn't, so after each aid station I worked on catching up. This was not just because I like Allan. It was because after glancing at the face of the woman in yellow, I was pretty sure she was in my 50-59 age group, and damn it, I wanted to win!



Just behind Allan and chasing my temporary nemesis

After the hill at mile 9 I decided that I had enough energy to start pushing, so I did. I started gaining on Allan and the woman in yellow, and passed them at the last aid station by not slowing to a walk. I used the downhill of mile 11 to push even harder, clocking my fastest watch-mile at 8:03. (The "miles" I'm listing are based on the mile markers, but as I mentioned they were pretty far off in places, so every once in a while I manually hit the lap button on my watch to bring things into sync. Mile 11 on my Strava record came out at 8:06, the same as my first.)

I was pushing partly to pass my temporary nemesis, but also because I knew that the dappled shade of the downhill would soon give way to a sunny uphill stretch, which I always dreaded. Possibly because I had controlled my speed well early, or possibly because it hadn't heated up as much as expected (it was only around 66° F instead of 70° as it had been last year) it didn't seem nearly as bad as usual, and I passed a few more people, including a man I'd noticed at the start because he was wearing a Shiprock Marathon shirt. I was definitely getting tired, though, and I could feel I was slowing down as I reached the last turns. I saw the finish clock and knew I wouldn't beat my time from 2017, but gave it a burst of speed anyway. The announcer called my name as I crossed the timing mat, and then called out Allan's name - it turned out he'd been gaining on me for the last few miles and he finished only three seconds behind me! (If the race had been longer he probably would have passed me!) The woman in yellow was next, about 15 seconds later, and indeed she turned out to be in my age group. The man in the Shiprock shirt came in ten seconds after that, and he was in Allan's age group. So it turned out that both Allan and I won, but it wasn't a gimme for either of us.



Sweaty and happy at the finish! Allan is visible behind my left arm, and Yellow Woman just coming into the finish chute. #233 was one of the early starters - walkers and slow runners are given the option to start 45 minutes early - which is why she looks so fresh!

Despite coming in nearly a minute slower than I did two years ago, I'm much happier with this race. In my 2017 race report I compared my average pace over portions of the course with my 2009 race, which was the first time I ran it with serious training. Comparing those segments with today's run it's clear I paced much better:

segment	2019	2017
mile 1	8:06	7:37
miles 2-3	8:11	7:50
miles 4-11	8:15	8:18
miles 12-13.1	8:30	8:57

So, I'm still slowing down, okay. But I'm still a (relatively) fast old lady! For my first place AG finish, I got a $50 gift certificate to a local running store, which incidentally is the same award I got for winning the 5k in April. As it turns out $50 only makes a small dent in the price of new running shoes, and so when I used that award I actually paid more out of my pocket than I usually do for discounted older models online. But hey, I like to help out the local businesses, especially ones who sponsor our races, and I am sure they made some money off me. (The second place prize was a 6-pack of local beer, which I considered trying to trade for, though then I saw that it wasn't a flavor I was fond of. Oh, well!)

Allan gave me a ride home, which was good because otherwise I was going to text Britt and have him pick me up - I was not thrilled about the idea of biking up ~300 feet in the noonday heat after running a half! But this should be the last time I have to worry about biking up the hill to our new house (or feel bad about running errands in the car) because...as I've been planning ever since we decided to move, I finally finished my extensive research on e-bikes and ordered one, and it should arrive sometime next week! SO EXCITED. I will post more about it when it arrives!

Yesterday I ran the Kendall Mountain Run in 3:17:45, making both my goals of a) under 3:30 and b) not falling. I felt a little guilty when I proudly announced my time on Facebook and a few people thought it was a marathon time (26.2 miles), since it's about five minutes under my marathon PR and a plausible result - at least if you didn't know that I haven't been training for a marathon, or that I've had a big slowdown in the past few years. So then I hastily added that it was for a 12-mile race, which immediately had people boggling in the opposite direction, considering my half marathon PR (13.1 miles) is less than half that time! But it becomes more understandable when you see the elevation profile:



The course runs up a freakin' MOUNTAIN. (And back down again.) I didn't take pictures, but for some historical background and video shots of runners on the course (all much faster than me) from previous years, the organizers have put a nifty video on Facebook.

( Blathering about the run )

My final statistics were not actually that great. I came in 188th overall out of 236, 62/87 women, 5/6 in my 10-year age group (nearly an hour ahead of #6). Actually there were only four women older than me in the race - the F60-69 AG contained one 68-year-old - and all of them beat me! Oh, well. I have not been running nearly as much as I was back when I regularly ran this type of mountain race, so I'm not really surprised. I'm happy enough that I beat my nominal goal of 3:30, and most especially, that I didn't add any new scabs to those currently healing on my knees!

Now, my legs hurt like you wouldn't believe, though I don't think I actually injured anything, just overused the muscles of my quads and glutes. Hopefully everything will feel good by next Saturday, when we head out into the wilderness for a week of backpacking. Then it will be time to turn my exercise attention to mountain biking in preparation for the Telluride-to-Moab ride in September. But I'll still be running 3-4 days a week, including attending the club track workouts, and hopefully by the time October comes around, I'll be ready to run a decent half marathon, and maybe even sign up for a late fall/early winter marathon.

Like I did last year, I signed up for the Narrow Gauge 10 Mile at nearly the last minute, when it was clear we'd be spending Memorial Day weekend in town. I figured that I'd be able to improve a lot on my time of 1:21:44, since last year we had been on vacation a lot and I was biking more than I was running, in preparation for our epic Purgatory-to-Moab ride. This year I've been gradually increasing my mileage since my long string of illness in February, averaging over 36mpw, as compared to last year's 23mpw over the same period. I've also been riding, though not nearly as much.

Spoiler alert: I ran 1:22 flat, 16 seconds slower this year. (I still would have come in first in my age group, if there had been age groups. Also I'm pleased to see in the results that my "age percentage" of 71.0, which I assume is some form of age/sex grading, puts me in 10th place by age percentage!)

Why did this happen? Am I in worse shape now than I was then? Was all that riding actually more beneficial than running more miles?

( Short answer: possibly poor execution, definitely lack of taper. Long answer under the cut. )

So I think that what happened is that I just had too much residual fatigue to sustain a hard 10M race, and ran out of energy. Which is an object lesson for me with Steamworks coming up, especially since...I'm doing another White Rim trip the week of the race, unless the weather is too hot (which it might be, Moab in June). I knew it wasn't going to be a goal race anyway, and some old friends invited us on the trip, and even though we just did it last month we would like to spend time with them, and hey, White Rim's pretty awesome. Hopefully if I do a very short run on Friday when we're back home, just to remind myself how to run, I will be okay for the race on Saturday. Because even if it's not a goal race, I would like to finish strong!

Anyway, it wasn't really a failure. I enjoyed myself, I had a good workout, and when I finished, I had beer AND ice cream - for breakfast!

My running's been sporadic over the last two years, after my herniated disc injury, much lower mileage than it used to be, and alas much slower as well. But after a spring and early summer more devoted to mountain biking than to running, I've started to get serious again.

Though I've run a dozen races post-injury, I didn't really train for any of them, and of course that shows in my race times. In 2013 I set non-downhill 5K (21:43), half (1:35:55), and marathon PRs; post-injury my best 5K was 24:12, my best half just under 1:44, and I haven't dared run another marathon.

But I'm a competitive person. I like to race because I like to do well - and I don't like not doing well. I registered for The Other Half Marathon, one of my favorite races and the course on which I ran my half PR (these things are probably related :-) with the idea that I'd have 12 weeks after our Weminuche backpacking trip to train. I wrote an "unplanny plan" - a skeleton layout of weekly mileage goals, long run goals, and key workouts - and started doing it. And now I'm halfway there!

I'd been running 20-35mpw most weeks, with occasional weeks of 10 miles or less when I was doing other things or sick, so I decided to start out with three weeks at 40mpw, followed by three at 45 - though the second week of this included most of Labor Day weekend and our Rio Chama raft trip, so my actual mileage that week was only 38. I also started incorporating speedwork: first strides and hill sprints, which I'd done occasionally in the previous month but now do weekly, and then formal intervals, followed by tempos.

Now I'm about to ramp up to 50mpw for the rest of the cycle, and I feel pretty good about it. The more I run, the more comfortable I feel running. I also find that consistent mileage (which I haven't had in a few years!) improves my fitness quickly. And I got a reminder of that when I ran a 5K this past Saturday morning.

I was a bit handicapped by the loss of my Garmin. Well, I didn't really lose it; the strap broke when I took it off my wrist after Tuesday's run. I ordered a new strap kit from Amazon that was supposed to arrive on Friday, but somehow it ended up getting sent to the wrong transit center, causing a delay. (It's still not here. The tracking page says Wednesday. So far it's gone from the Garmin warehouse in Phoenix AZ to two different places in California, and is now in Salt Lake City...)

The day after my strap broke I had a 2x2 tempo run (after my usual two-mile warm-up: 2 miles tempo pace, 2 minutes easy, 2 miles tempo pace, where 'tempo' = 'more or less hoped-for half-marathon pace') and I thought maybe I'd try it by feel, so I put what was left of the watch in my pocket and set out. Unfortunately I couldn't feel the watch buzz at the first mile mark, which meant I wouldn't be able to tell when my intervals started and stopped (okay, I know this route so I pretty much know where 2 miles is, but still) so I took it out and held it in my hand as I ran.

My next run two days later was an easy run, so this time I did just keep the Garmin in my pocket the whole time. And what do you know, my pace - retrieved after the run - was pretty much my usual easy pace. By then I had gotten the notification from Amazon that my strap wasn't coming in time for the race. I decided that it would be good practice in racing by feel, since I knew I wasn't in PR shape so if I failed, I wouldn't be too upset. My goals for the 5K would be: a) get a new valid HRmax, b) pace reasonably despite not being able to look at my Garmin (I kept it in my pocket), c) come in 1-3 and get an award (no age groups), d) break 24 minutes.

I ran the 2.4 miles to the race as a warm-up, with my Garmin in my pocket; checking it later, I was a little on the fast side but not bad. The race itself was a typical small Durango race, though with both a 5K and a 10K starting together, so I had to look around and see both who else was lining up near the front, and which course they were running, according to their bibs. One of the fast women I know was out of town, according to her husband Steve who was there (he won the men's 5K) and I didn't see anyone else that looked definitively faster than me, so I was feeling pretty confident as we took off.

I knew I couldn't keep up with Steve, nor with the other fast men who were at the front, so I didn't try. Instead I attempted to keep a hard-but-not-brutal pace and not let any women pass me. The course went gently downhill for the first mile, then there was a short uphill followed by a steeper downhill to the 5K turn-around. Unusually for a small local race, they'd gotten three bands to play along the course, which was fun and motivating, especially since after the guys had taken off I was pretty much running by myself. Every so often I'd glance over my shoulder but never saw anyone there other than one guy who passed me about a half mile in.

When Steve passed me going the other way we yelled cheers and encouragement at each other. At the turnaround I saw there was a woman maybe ten seconds behind me, but after I glanced around at the next curve she was gone, so I figured she was running the 10K. The second half of the course was net uphill, since it was an out-and-back, and I concentrated on holding what I thought was a reasonably fast pace without blowing up.

Since my Garmin was in my pocket I had no idea what pace I was going, and so I was pleased to see the finish clock reading just under 23 minutes as I approached; I sped up to try to get a 22:xx but the seconds ticked over inexorably, and the clock read 23:06 as I hurtled myself past the finish line and then tried to catch my breath.

As far as my pre-race goals, I'll give myself 2.5 out of 4. On the negative side, my heart rate data was not as unambiguous as I would have liked, with no real legitimate max, but I think I am fairly comfortable saying that it supports the numbers I've been using for HR training. My pacing felt okay while I was doing it - I didn't feel like I was dying halfway through - but my splits were terrible, though part of that's likely due to the down-and-up course profile.

On the other hand, I smashed my sub-24 goal. Still nowhere near what I used to do but my best 5K in two years. Oh yeah, and I won. First overall woman, 4th or 5th person. Which basically means that the fast women didn't show up, but hey, I got two $50 gift certificates, one for each of the running stores in town, so that's a $70 profit on my entry fee investment!

Now I'm looking ahead to the half marathon in six weeks. While I'd like to run under 1:40 again, this 5K result is not as good as I'd need for that; plus, while my tempo workouts are indicating I'm in better shape than I was before my last half, they're not supporting the sub-1:40 either. Of course, I still have six weeks. But I'm okay with not hitting that goal, which is arbitrary anyway. I mostly want to improve on my last half time of 1:43:46, and if possible, beat the time of 1:41:44 which I ran my first time on this course.

The Canyonlands race in Moab, UT in March is one of my favorites, a beautiful course along the Colorado River, and I've done it every year since 2010. After running the 5-mile course last year due to injury, I was happy to get back to the half marathon at Canyonlands this year, even though I hadn't trained nearly as much as I would have liked. I paced well and felt good despite the windy, warm weather (not as windy as 2011 or 2012, though), and though this was one of my slower races, it is my "best slowest race" compared to others run on similarly low mileage and little specific training. I hope this means that if I can get back to the kind of miles and workouts I ran in 2012 and 2013, I will be able to get back to similar race times.

( Training )

( Weather )

( The race )

Final stats

My chip time was 1:43:46 (one second less than on my watch which I must have started a little early) for the 13.18 miles I ran by my Garmin. Which means my work on running the tangents paid off, as usually this race comes in at 13.2-13.3. I was 2nd of 85 in AG 50-54F, just 15 seconds behind the winner - darn! - and actually, I also came in faster than every woman in 45-49 and all but one in 40-44, who won the Masters award - with a time over a minute slower than my best time on the course, which got me only a 3rd in AG in 2010! (I also beat all the girls under 20, but that's not as significant.) I was the 48th fastest woman out of 1083, and the 165th fastest person out of 1801. Despite all this, this was my second slowest time of five doing this race; but despite that, I feel good about it.

I do have to admit, though, that the placement is only so good because there were not many fast women running - or many at all. The race has shrunk over the six years I've been running it; in 2010 there was a lottery to get in, and over 3200 runners, but for the last several years all entrants have been welcomed and this year there were only 1800 runners. (According to a friend, the drop, which seems to have been most acute between 2014 and 2015, is because Moab hotels have become too expensive.) It's okay - I don't mind being a medium-big fish in a medium-small pond! Or a medium-fast fish, anyway...hoping to get faster!

I haven't posted much about running over the summer, partly because I haven't been running a whole lot. I spent early summer slowly building up my miles (which were also slow! :-) to about 40mpw - then we left on our roadtrip vacation, and I only ran three times in four weeks. The week we got back I managed 32 miles, last week about the same. Oh, and on Saturday I ran a half marathon. *whistle*

Back in April I mentioned that I was thinking of registering for the Thirsty Thirteen, a local half in its second year (I worked an aid station last year). After an email from the club warning it was likely to sell out (it's limited to 500 racers) I went ahead and registered. It's a point-to-point massively downhill race (though with a few significant uphills), it is on scenic country roads with views to a reservoir, and it ends at SKA Brewing with a free beer - and a ticket for the San Juan Brewfest in the afternoon. What's not to like?

Other than the fact that I was massively unprepared, of course. Granted, massively unprepared means different things for me than it does for most people, or even compared to how I used to approach racing when I started, over ten years ago. I probably ran 2-3 times a week, 15mpw for my first half marathon. My second, I only started running again after a long layoff, and I ran maybe twice a week. (That time remains my Personal Worst.) Once I started getting serious about running, proper preparation for a half became 35mpw...then 40mpw...then 45mpw, at a minimum.

So clearly my 20mpw over the past several months wasn't going to cut it. Also, my last run over 10 miles was six weeks ago. On the other hand, we did a lot of hiking on our Canadian roadtrip, including two hikes of half-marathon distance or longer. My last long run might have been only 9.5 miles, but it was a trail run that took me over two hours, longer than I expected to run in the race. I did a test tempo run with a three-mile section at 8:20, and my heart rate was about where it should be for a half, and the effort felt right, too. Of course, I didn't know how much advantage I could reap from the enormous downhills, nor if I had enough endurance for the distance, but I figured I could reasonably aim under 1:50, which would be an 8:23 pace. Considerably slower than my 1:36 PR, but I was okay with that.

( Race report )

( Stats and splits )

So, what's next, you ask? Well, as it happens, some friends of mine - some I've met in person, some I only know online - have put together a team for Reach the Beach, a ~200 mile relay from Bretton Woods to Hampton Beach, New Hampshire in mid-September, part of the Ragnar series of relay races. And one of the women had to drop out, so...they invited me. I warned them that I wasn't in my usual shape, but they swore it would be okay, that I wouldn't even be the slowest person on the team.

I was still hesitant, since a) it's on September 18-19, which includes my birthday, and b) Britt isn't generally keen on me larking off to run races without him. But just as I was dithering, he got a phone call inviting him to give a talk at a conference in Grand Junction that weekend. So - I'm going to be on a relay team, woohoo!

My expectations for the Canyonlands 5-miler were pretty low. Not only would this be my first race after the disastrous Winter Of Back Injury, I also caught a bad lung-rot virus on March 4th (ironically, the day after I posted about looking forward to this race!) and didn't run for 8 days. Still, I was hoping to win my age group, or at least top three, since except for a few short-distance specialists, the 5-miler is mostly run by people not fit enough to run the concurrent half marathon (which I usually do), so the level of competition is pretty low. I also hoped to clear out the cobwebs and jump-start my fitness with some (relatively) fast running, and get a read on just how out of shape I am.

When my lungs finally cleared, I did a few short, easy runs, and then a test speed run on the Thursday before Saturday's race: I ran an easy warm-up mile, a second warm-up mile with strides, and then held a tempo-ish hard pace for a mile, something that didn't wear me out but felt hard. Based on my recent easy pace, I figured this pace would be something around 8:15, and sure enough, my test mile came out at 8:08. I can work harder in a race than I can in training, and Canyonlands is about 2500 feet lower in elevation, which also gives me a little advantage. So my plan for the race was to go out at 8 to 8:05, hold that if I could for the second mile (which had a nasty hill) and then push as hard as I could without blowing up.

( No plan survives first contact with the enemy )

( By the numbers )