Overall, May has been a great month. Unfortunately our record snow pack conditions have prevented me from getting up in elevation very far so I’ve tried to concentrated on increasing the quality of my training with a little better effort on my long runs, speed work, and strength training.

I started the month with a great 50 mile run with Victoria at Collegiate Peaks.

Victoria at the Collegiate Peaks 50 Miler

Got a couple good back to back long runs in with Nick’s Crosier Triple Bagger and the Round Up with Nick, Alex, Rob, Slush, Cat, and all the rest of the usual FCTR suspects.

Round Mountain Round Up

This weekend I got out to do some exploring to see how far up I could get from Dunraven. I made it up to 9750ft almost to Donner Pass before getting bogged down in solid shin deep snow. Hopefully the 80 degree days on the forecast this week will melt this off – I may make another attempt to get up and over the pass next weekend.

9750ft on the Donner Pass trail.

And here’s a really good reason that I should never attempt any solo route finding and probably shouldn’t ever enter the Barkley Marathons or any other race that requires the use of a map and compass. Nick and I tried to make it up Crosier via the Sullivan Gulch trailhead today just to try something new and have fun exploring. The trail disappeared after a mile and we spent the next several hours wandering around in circles in the fog. We "found" the trail again just by dumb luck. Our original plan to get in a nice 15-20 mile run ended up at 5.5 miles in just under 3 hours. Fail.

I’ve still managed to keep up with a regular running schedule with Animal House. This month I’ve been working with Mickey but he already has someone interested in adopting him. If it falls through, I’ll post more info about him later.

Mickey from Animal House.

Tomorrow is the start of the final count down to Hardrock. Next week is hell week. I’ll be running more than I plan to work to put in as many long, hard miles, as I can. After that I’ll scale back down to another 100 mile week before winding down a very gradual 3 week taper. If the race were next week, I think I could run it. So I’m feeling really good about having one more opportunity to push some quality training and several weeks to sharpen, taper, and rest up to be ready to go on July 8th.

Over the past week, just about everyone who had originally planned to attempt the full 6 Pack had either backed down or cancelled due to injuries, illness, and family obligations so I was a bit worried that I would spend the majority of my day solo. But thanks to our amazing FCTR group, I spent the full day on the hill in good company with friends. Nick, Sam, Bard, Victoria, Kristel, Ashley, and Steph all made it out for the 5am start. Slush, Jenn, Laura, Cherylin, Dave, Brian K, Gregg, Alex A, Brian, Aaron, and Eric all made it out later in the morning. Somehow I missed Chris out on the trail but found a note on my windshield that he’d run a lap sometime in the afternoon. And Mary made it up to meet Eric and I just below the summit of our last lap and jogged back to the finish with us. I’ve lost track of who ran what but most people ran 1 to 3 summits. Nick managed to get in 3 summits plus one partial lap excluding the final leg to the top before his 7 hour time limit was up. Eric joined in on my 3rd lap and completed 4 full summits.

For springtime in Colorado, the weather was actually pretty nice. We had some high winds at the top early in the day and later in the afternoon some nasty dark clouds blew over and started spitting snow. But as soon as we were half a mile from the trail head all layered up in warm clothes, the sun came back out and the skies cleared.

Here’s a video clip that Eric took of Steph, Dave, and I at the top on lap #3:

I was pleasantly surprised at how well I managed to hold together both physically and mentally for the entire day. I started the run extremely tired from a pretty big 2 weeks training push. On Friday, I barely managed to get through an easy recovery jog with Misty and was at the end of my rope barely able to stay awake and focus while trying to finish up my project deadlines for the end of the month. So it was pretty rough getting up and going for the 5am start but having good company to start with and a goal to catch the sunrise at the top helped get me off to a good start. I finished the first lap in just under 2 hours and took a short break at the trail head and headed back up just behind Nick, Sam, Slush, and Steph. I was feeling the fatigue from an early start after a hard week and since it was going to be a very long day I let them get ahead of me and decided to take my time. I finished this lap in about 2:10 and then took an extended 10 minute break to eat and refill water at the trail head. Eric, Steph, and Dave joined me for number 3 and we kept up a brisk social pace to the top. I finally got a little spring in my legs on the way back down Meadow and had fun cruising the final switchbacks down and finished this lap in just under 2 hours. After a quick 5 minute break at the trail head, I headed back up to grind out number 4 with Eric and Aaron. After a fun 3rd lap, this 4th trip up started to feel like work. But considering that just a couple years ago, I was completely beat after 3.75 laps I felt pretty good about my condition. And no matter how hard or tiring a run like this gets, it’s a great feeling to cross over into something new. After we cleared the meadow junction and made our way to the top of the 4th summit, every step would be a new furthest distance for me on this hill. I made it back to the trail head to finish the 4th lap in 8:38 – 10 minutes faster than the 3.75 laps I finished in 2008. The last two laps were a slow grind but I was still able to hike the steep sections fairly well and even managed to jog a couple of the easy switchbacks. The downhill off the summit was the worst part. There wasn’t any bend or spring left in my legs so I just had to be patient to slowly and carefully pick my way down the really technical sections. In the final descent off of the 6th summit, I managed to pick up the pace when the cows could finally smell the barn. I tried to imagine that if this were Hardrock, I’d only need to do 55 more miles of the same climbing to get to the finish. Honestly, that sounded downright horrible but it at least seemed doable.

The full Greyrock 6 Pack ended up at 45.25 miles with 15,361 vertical feet in 13:59:50. This ended my final 13 day vertical binge with 64,475 feet in 201.75 miles. On Thursday, I maxed out my 7 day vertical total over 40,000 feet. The full month of April ended up with 408.5 miles and 89,667 vertical feet. This included a 40 miles of Sanitas laps with 17,339 vertical feet and two other relatively easy 30 mile long runs. I slacked off a bit and didn’t keep up with my weight training as much as I should have. But I did manage to get a few good quality speed and hard hill workouts mixed in with the long slow miles and set a new 18:20 5k PR.

Overall I feel really good about my training progress for Hardrock. I’ve done some long hard trails that are probably much steeper and more technical than I really need to train on for Hardrock. But I think the long days and hard miles have really improved my strength and endurance. Spending 14 hours out on the trail on Sanitas and Greyrock this month really didn’t feel that bad. For May and June I hope to start getting up higher in elevation on the weekends and will start to mix up my training a bit more to add some more quality with a combination of uphill, downhill, and some flat speed work.

Here are some photos from the 6 Pack:

[Show as slideshow]

401.75 miles and 73,860 vertical feet (my biggest month for vertical ever)
3 consecutive 100 mile weeks ending with my biggest week of vertical (28,158ft)
50 mile and 36 mile training runs.
5:22 mile PR
And Rocket found a new home

I bumped up my mileage and vertical pretty quickly this month but other than a couple days of shuffling around like a zombie on my last 100 mile week, I’ve felt pretty good all month. I feel like I’m right on track for where I need to be building up for Hardrock.

Hopefully the weather will cooperate as nicely in April. I plan on doing more of the same training to grind out some good high volume weeks with a lot of hard vertical climbing. I’ll have at least 2 really long days planned with the Special Idiots InSanitas birthday run on the 22nd and the Greyrock 6 Pack on the 30th. And I’m going to try not to slack off as much on the speed work, Towers time trials, and weight training to add a little more quality effort into the mix.

I'll probably visit this a few more time in April.

Animal House is keeping me busy with plenty of dogs who need help. I’ll be posting more info about Misty and Mickey soon. Mickey will be joining our Tuesday social runs each week until he finds a home. Tomorrow I plan to run the Poudre River 5k which is a fundraiser for Animal House. And later this month, I’ll be at the Fast and the Furriest to show off one or two of the shelter dogs.

Oh and I need to get working on the Blue Sky Marathon to post our updated 2011 information and registration info. That came up quick!

I started the weekend with a nice run along the Poudre river with Rocket from Animal House on Friday evening. And I just heard today that there is an adoption application pending and possibly one more family interested in him. I plan to take him out on the Tuesday evening social run at Reservoir Ridge again but am crossing my fingers that he won’t be there when I stop by the shelter tomorrow. There are plenty of other dogs who need help and it’ll be great to know that Rocket has a permanent home.

Rocket taking a short break at Lyons park by the Poudre river.

On Saturday, Alex hosted our first FCTR March Madness run around Horsetooth Reservoir. I took the long way around and got in a really good 36.5 mile run followed by a fantastic cookout at Alex’s and beers with the trail runners. The map of the long route is online here and Alex’s report from the day is online here.

Top of the first climb of the day on Horsetooth. Drew, Ross, Brian, me, and Sam.

And to top off the weekend, I headed down to Boulder to rack up some vertical feet with a few repeats up Bear with Eric and Tressa. We finished 3 full laps up Fern plus another trip about 3/4 of the way up to get to my goal of 20,000 vertical feet for the week. In 2010 I only had 3 weeks where I exceeded 20,000 feet of climbing and that included the Wasatch 100. This week was my second week over 20,000 in a row so I’m feeling pretty good about the start of my Hardrock training. And despite the fact that trudging up Fern on Bear peak is ridiculously difficult, spending the day with friends with gorgeous weather and spectacular views made the time fly by. I had no idea how long we were out until I got back to my car. It took almost as long to run 18.5 miles on Bear on Sunday as it did to run the full 36.5 mile loop around Horsetooth on Saturday! I was pretty wiped out from the effort but in a good way. After 2 hard weeks of training, I’m a bit worn out and tired but nothing is hurting and I feel pretty good about tackling one more big push through the end of the month.

View of Longs from the top of Bear.

Yesterday I went out and trudged up and down some of my usual routes in Horsetooth but only managed to squeeze out an average 260 feet of vertical gain per mile. Usually I’d consider this a pretty good workout but for Hardrock, I’ll need to run an average of 340 feet per mile. For 100 milers, I usually aim to run the same or slightly more vertical feet within a 100 mile training week. Since I don’t live at the base of Green or Bear mountain in Boulder and can only squeeze about 180 feet per mile out of my backyard trails here in Fort Collins, this is going to be a real challenge.

So today I went out to give Greyrock a try. I was expecting to run through some nasty snow but was pleasantly surprised to find the trail almost 100% clear and dry.

Not bad for February!

It’s still much lower elevation than Hardrock but it at least has the 340-350 feet per mile of vertical that I need. So until the snow melts and I can get higher up into the mountains, I’ll be spending a lot of time on Greyrock. By April or early May, I plan to tackle the full Greyrock 6-Pack. I still need to redeem myself after failing to complete the full Greyrock Quad with Eric and Terry in 2008. After a nasty fall, I skipped one final summit so I only managed to finish 3.75 laps. A full 6 laps should be enough to put that day behind me for good:-)

I’m still trying to figure out the rest of my plan for Hardrock. I’m sure it’ll include several trips down to Boulder for some inSanitas laps, Bear bagging, and repeats on Green. Pikes Peak might be a good option later in the spring if the weather cooperates. And until I can get up in elevation and find enough vertical feet to run, I’ll continue to supplement my trail running with speed work, hill intervals and tempo/time trials, and weight training. But preparing for Hardrock is uncharted territory for me so I’m open to any suggestions.

So here’s the quick review for January.

Stats: 34 runs, 238.5 miles, 39 hours 55 minutes, 25,607 vertical feet, and one 35 min weight training session.

Overall, it was a pretty light month to start the year. The Ghost Town race was my big event for the month. And aside from having a great race, the rest of the month was probably a good example of how not to taper and recover.

January started with a severe head cold. (Which I probably deserved after overdoing it a bit with Festivus feats of strength and other shenanigans). So the week that I should have been focusing on sharpening up from my December base training was spent shuffling around waiting for my head to clear up.

I finally got rid of the cold a week before the Ghost Town race and rather than continue to patiently rest up for the race, I decided to cram in some last minute downhill speedwork and completely trashed my quads on two full speed descents on Towers. Fortunately my quads started working again a couple days before the race …just in time to trash my hamstrings.

After impatiently waiting a week for my hamstrings to recover from the race, I jumped back into a full training schedule and went back to the gym to do squats and dead lifts the first time in over a month. I forgot how hard it is to adjust to weight training and was nearly crippled for several days. Unfortunately I did this on a Towers time trial week and went out and ran a hard ascent on tired, stiff, and sore legs. I admit that I have a tendency to go a bit overboard every now and then but this one was a real doosy. On the way back down Towers, my legs were complete jello and I started getting a pretty bad dizzy sick feeling. I even stopped to walk a couple times on the way down.

For the last weekend of the month I had some grand ideas for 2 days of long runs to finish out nice 100 mile week in preparation for the upcoming Moab 50k. My Saturday long run ended at 13 miles feeling worn out, sick, and completely out of gas. I went home early and ended up sleeping most of the rest of the day.

So aside from having a great race, the rest of the month wasn’t the most productive training. I think I’ve finally gotten off to a good start for February so I might be able to squeeze in one more week of decent running before resting up for Moab. And the Hardrock lottery is this weekend so I’ll finally be able to determine what my plans are this year.

Unfortunately it didn’t go quite as well as I hoped. All of my usual running partners stayed home to sleep in so I was stuck running these solo. And the weather didn’t cooperate dropping to the low 20′s.

I broke up the intervals in sets of 4 with a 200m recovery in between intervals and a 400m recover in between sets.

I started out a little tired from a big mileage weekend and the cold made it hard to get going at full speed. But I still managed to run the first 16 at a decent pace averaging 1:25, 1:24, and 1:25 for the first 3 sets. On the next 3 sets, I slowed down a bit to average 1:27, 1:27, and 1:28. After the 24th repeat, my legs were pretty shot and I averaged 1:34 and 1:35 for the final 2 sets.

After the 32nd interval, I decided to try to take a short break to try to warm up in my car. I went out to attempt a few more repeats but only managed to jog around the track once before I was shivering again and decided to call it quits.

Aside slowing down considerably, my legs really didn’t feel that bad. So I’ll have to schedule a rematch with the track sometime later this spring when it’s a bit warmer.

For the rest of the year, I don’t have any more numbers to push for. Last year I put in a 252 mile 8 day streak to finish the year with a nice round 3,650 miles. I should be able to hit that number this weekend.

So I think my final challenges for 2010 are going to include a track workout on Tuesday, the vertical beer mile on Thursday, and hopefully a new 5k PR to end the year on Friday.

It’s going to take a lot more work to shave 2 minutes and 9 seconds off my 24:36 finish time. I know I’m not in the same peak condition that I was in last spring leading up to Western States. But regardless of overall fitness, I definitely feel like I’ve hit my top speed at this race.

The speed workouts that I ran this last month may have helped slightly but I don’t think I started these with an adequate running base to work from. Looking back, I think I would have benefited more from the extra speed work if I hadn’t completely bottomed out after Wasatch. I don’t think that adding speed work while building or re-building a base fitness level is the best approach in the long run. But now that I’ve ramped up my running back to a normal volume, I’m going to keep focused with regular cycles of track work through the winter. Since my 800 pace isn’t much faster than my 3 to 4 mile race pace, I’m going to stick with 400′s or shorter intervals until I can successfully run the longer intervals at a faster average pace.

For ultra marathons, very few people put much focus into speed work. Personally I think it’s the last exercise on the list of training priorities to add to an ultra training schedule. Most fitness and performance gains can be achieved through sheer volume and consistency over time. Adding hills – hill intervals, hill tempo runs, long slow hills, hiking hills, …pretty much any way you can run, hike, or crawl your way up hills is going to improve your cardio fitness and strength. Speed work ads a lot more stress and impact and increases the risk of injury and burn out. So when in doubt, I’d recommend skipping the speed work just to play it safe. A small performance increase isn’t worth the risk of losing your long term consistency.

But after building a solid running base, I think speed work can be incredibly beneficial to help train for ultras. The obvious benefit is that it will eventually increase your speed at all levels. With very small doses of speed work, you can increase your normal cruising speed at ultra marathon pace. Dropping an average easy pace from a 12 minute mile to an 11:24 minute mile will knock a full hour off a 100 mile finish time.

I really think that the most important benefit from speed work is the mental training. In all of the track workouts I’ve run, my legs really weren’t that tired throughout the full workout. The biggest limiting factor was my motivation and concentration level. After a number of intervals, I just really didn’t want to push myself through another. The physical ability was there but it took a huge mental effort to repeat the interval. And to maintain speed through the full interval, it took even more concentration. This is exactly the same mental battle that you go through in the end of any hard ultra.

My next ultra races aren’t until Ghost Town in January and Moab in February so this gives me plenty of time to focus on a couple good quality cycles of speed work in the next couple of months. Since both of these courses are very fast and runnable, I hope the effort will pay off with a couple new PR’s to start the year.

I’ve decided to focus on something a little shorter – the Fort Collins Thanksgiving 4 Mile. They offer some prize money for the top finishers so it draws a fairly competitive crowd with about 4,000 participants. I won’t be anywhere near fast enough to win any money but I have my sights set on winning an age group pie which go to the top 3 finishers in each age group.

Last year I finished 5th in my age group and if I can shave a couple minutes off my time, I think I have a shot at it this year.

Unfortunately, this guy is in my age group:

So there goes at least one pie.

Based on last year’s results I’ll need to knock about 2 minutes and 13 seconds off my 24:38 time to get within pie range.

I rarely put much focus into any formal speed work but while I’m running a relatively light volume of trail miles this fall, I figured this would be a good time to try to sharpen up. In the past I’ve done a little of this and a little of that every now and then on the track. I usually get bored with too many intervals and jump around between 400′s, 800′s, and mile repeats. This time around I’ve decided to just stick with 400′s. Mostly because I suck at them. Last year I came to the realization that my average pace for everything from 400 to half marathon was almost the same. My cardio fitness and endurance is always pretty good but I just never had the patience to focus on anything short to develop a little more leg speed.

So the goal for the next month is to stick with the 400′s until I’m satisfied that I’ve been able to run them well. …which of course might involve running at least one full Quenton Cassidy interval workout. Or since Festivus is right around the corner, I might even consider seeing if I can survive a full Emil Zataopek workout of 90 400′s (I’m sure I’ll be considerably slower ….probably a full day).

So far I’ve managed to get to the track 4 weeks in a row to run 10, 12, and 16 solid sets the first 3 weeks. Today I just didn’t have the mental focus to run a full set and decided to call it quits early. I may actually need to rest up and put as much focus into these as I usually put into my long weekend runs for a change.

My split times are a bit slow for my 4 mile goal time – at least according to McMillan’s pacing calculator. But I’ve run plenty of fast races on a lot of slow training before. So it’ll be interesting to see how this latest training experiment turns out.

At the very least, it’ll be a fun race. This was the first race that I entered when I first started running here in Ft Collins. Even if I don’t win a pie, it’s fun to look back at where I started with a 35:29 finish in 2006.