Trails and Travails

Indeed it is. Had another one on today's second run. 7:45 pace at 134bpm for about 2 minutes on flat ground. Zen.

4 miles, 8:03 pace, slightly-more-than-zero (aka "easy") effort. I think I'm back. Right calf is still a little wonky, and the quads whine a little if I squat, but if they were all 10s on the pain scale before (they weren't quite 10s, but for the sake of this rating system...) they're probably 2-3s with the occasional 4 for the calf right now.

Fingers crossed that tomorrow's sorta long can actually have some GA work in it. Not gonna stress about it if it's not in the cards.

Sonds like a good run, Mike.

Recovery is definitely the key and it sounds like you wrecked yourself pretty good on the canyon run. Sounded like a blast too. I don't recover quite as slowly as Jerry does, but I definitely have to watch it after a hard effort. If it's there today, great if not, easy mileage never hurts!

Mike MacLellan wrote:young love sucks

Your situation(s) suck in the love dept. - hang in there. I'm sure it is pretty stressful.

Good deal that your legs are coming back to life.

Jim Lentz wrote:Sonds like a good run, Mike.

Thanks Jim.

mul21 wrote:Recovery is definitely the key and it sounds like you wrecked yourself pretty good on the canyon run. Sounded like a blast too. I don't recover quite as slowly as Jerry does, but I definitely have to watch it after a hard effort. If it's there today, great if not, easy mileage never hurts!

Definitely shredded my legs to pieces in the GC. Body recovered pretty quickly with some good sleep and naps thrown in the last couple days, but legs finally made their absolutely-sure debut today.

John Kilpatrick wrote:
Your situation(s) suck in the love dept. - hang in there. I'm sure it is pretty stressful.
Good deal that your legs are coming back to life.

Indeed it sucks. Fortunately, I'm able to rationalize pretty much everything without necessarily diluting it or pretending it's not important, which at least helps to keep things like this in perspective. Something along the lines of David Foster Wallace's meditation on "this is water" (it's a graduation speech he gave that he turned into a book).

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As I hinted above, the legs came out swinging (kicking?) today and didn't stop until I'd finished 15.48 miles in 1:55. That's a 7:28 average pace, with 11.52 "work miles" in the middle at a 7:16 average pace (average HR 149 for that section). Course was more or less flat (as flat as it gets around here), which means 1.5% downhill for the first half of the "work miles" and 1.5% uphill for the second half.

I went entirely by feel, just focusing on what I consider a "GA effort." Psychologically, this translates to a completely complacent easy run with a dollop of impetus thrown on top of it. Physiologically, it's feeling comfortable doing a 1in:12out breathing ratio (count on left foot strike). If this seems like really slow breathing, it kind of is. Since my cadence is around 90 strikes per foot per minute, that's just under 7 full breaths per minute.

Because my quads are still not 100%, they're slacking a bit with regards to pulling their share of the work, which did put a little more stress on my knees, hips, and feet today. Fortunately, the "pain" never got past a mildly obnoxious reminder that there's nerves in each one of these joints, and it's 90% gone now, thirty minutes after the run.

Great run - I see it didn't take too long for you to bounce back. Rackin the miles.....

Fortunately, not too long at all. I feel 100% back today, and any residual soreness in the legs I'm just attributing to being midweek and approaching my recovery day (tomorrow).

So, I thought the legs were firing all pistons yesterday... But today redefined what that meant. I don't know what got into me, but my body basically said "fuck this 2-mile-warm-up shit" and gave me a sub-8 first mile (unheard of) followed by sub-7 down the half mile hill that normally acts as my warm-up (I tacked on an extra .5 in my neighborhood first so the hill actually came around the 1 mile split). Knew this was only a 6-miler and decided to give my legs a bit of freedom. The run became a sort of progressive tempo, with the first 2 miles still counting as warm-up (just faster than normal), the next 2 at a 6:48 pace (6:36 NGP, 152bpm, as it had a fair bit of gradual incline and decline), the last 2 at 6:50 (6:22 NGP, 160bpm, as it included that .5 mile uphill @ almost 5%), then a .5 mile cool down.

6.52 total, 7:11 average pace. Felt great. Still does.

4 easy to come this afternoon.

Great run Mike. It's awesome that you were feeling it and decided to hammer a bit.

Hey Mike my ultra buddy! First off I'm happy to read that your trip to the Canyon was fun and you made it home in one piece! I was laughing my ass off about the bottom water thing.


Also what a great 6.52 mile run buddy, don't you just love it when things come together like that during a run?

Mike MacLellan wrote:my body basically said "fuck this 2-mile-warm-up shit" ......Felt great. Still does..

That is awesome. You know you are crazy, right . In a good way!

Excellent run Mike!!! It's awesome when the body just tells you that it wants to go...you ansered the call and put in some great splits!!

John Kilpatrick wrote:

Mike MacLellan wrote:my body basically said "fuck this 2-mile-warm-up shit" ......Felt great. Still does..

That is awesome. You know you are crazy, right . In a good way!

No Mike doesn't know he is crazy but thanks for letting him know he is John.

Alex Kubacki wrote:Great run Mike. It's awesome that you were feeling it and decided to hammer a bit.

Thanks Alex. I agree that it was a pretty awesome morning.

Schuey wrote:Hey Mike my ultra buddy! First off I'm happy to read that your trip to the Canyon was fun and you made it home in one piece! I was laughing my ass off about the bottom water thing.
Also what a great 6.52 mile run buddy, don't you just love it when things come together like that during a run?

Man, I wasn't laughing when she said that. I damn nearly poured that bottle out. Oh well, like I said, she apologized for being snarky. I do love it indeed.

John Kilpatrick wrote:
That is awesome. You know you are crazy, right . In a good way!

Takes one to know one!

Nick Morris wrote:Excellent run Mike!!! It's awesome when the body just tells you that it wants to go...you ansered the call and put in some great splits!!

Thanks Nick.

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So, that easy 4 was a not-so-easy 4.75. My dad's been shuffling around cars, trying to get one fixed so we can get it smogged, etc. etc. etc. If you know my father, you know that this whole process is made extremely complicated by the fact that he has to be unconventional in everything, has to argue with every stupid rule in existence, and is constantly late.

I get a phone call at 4 asking if I'll be around later to pick him up from the auto shop. I say yes, but I need to be home by 6. He says that's fine, it closes at 6 and he wants to get it in earlier than that anyway. Great. At 5:30, he walks in the door to switch his work car for the rental, which he has to take back to the dealership before picking up the car to be fixed (dealership wanted too much to fix it, apparently) to take it to the auto shop. A brief, curt conversation later, he walks out in a huff because, well, I have to be home by 6 and then I have plans tonight.

I realize that the auto shop is ~5 miles from home. I mapmyrun it, it's 4.75, and it's all a gradual uphill (which I knew beforehand). I call my dad, tell him I figured something out, and I'll be there at 6:30 or so.

4.75 miles uphill with literally no flat or downhill is not fun as a recovery run. The warm-up was really hard, but once I hit a groove, I actually pulled my average pace down to 8:07 for the entire run. This is where NGP is helpful, because there was a net elevation gain of 440' on the course... So my NGP was 7:25. Basically, I just ran a GA run with hardly any warm-up.

Whatever, it's more miles in the books, and tomorrow's a (truly) easy 5 miler for recovery. And that's it.

Gotta love when 'rents behave they way they do. My dad is the same way...nice job logging some extra miles!

What's having a car "smogged"? Is that an emmissions test or something more complicated and California-specific? All uphill recovery runs are definitely something other than recovery! Your Grand Canyon story had me remembering my own rim to river and back hike. I did it in college - just hiking, no running. Like an idiot, I started at noon in March so I was really needing to step on it by the end to get back up to the rim before sunset and darkness hit. It was a TOUGH hike and I wasn't going anywhere near your speed (probably a good 50% slower) so big props from me for your sub3 down and back run. On mine, it actually snowed during it! Crazy weather.

Chris M wrote:What's having a car "smogged"? Is that an emmissions test or something more complicated and California-specific? All uphill recovery runs are definitely something other than recovery! Your Grand Canyon story had me remembering my own rim to river and back hike. I did it in college - just hiking, no running. Like an idiot, I started at noon in March so I was really needing to step on it by the end to get back up to the rim before sunset and darkness hit. It was a TOUGH hike and I wasn't going anywhere near your speed (probably a good 50% slower) so big props from me for your sub3 down and back run. On mine, it actually snowed during it! Crazy weather.

We call it a smog test. Smogged I guess is a California term for it? But yeah, just that.

Fortunately, the uphill run was "allowed" to be an easy/moderate run, since T-Th are "work days" and M/F are the true recovery days.

It's definitely a tough trail whether you're running or not, though I think the actual effort level required to run down it is pretty minimal. It just tears your legs apart and takes a lot of concentration. Uphill... well, yeah, that sucked. Thanks for the props

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5.5 recovery today. 8:28 average pace, 129bpm average HR.

To put all these HR figures into perspective... My "tested" max is 195, though that's about 2 years old and I've never seen it above 190 since. Still, I think it's probably an accurate enough figure. My RHR - again, not "truly" tested, since I can't sleep with a HR monitor on - is probably ~50. Just sitting on the couch/whatever it's generally in the mid-50s, so I'm guessing that's an accurate figure. Using 195 and 50 also puts me in the right range (according to that chart - is it Pfitz's? - that's posted on here somewhere) for a tempo run when looking at my HR during runs at my race-calculated LT pace (6:24), so they've gotta be at least somewhat accurate.

That'd give me 66% max and 55% reserve for today's run. So, uber recovery.

Interesting note: using those figures, the middle of the range for my LSD runs should be ~154 bpm. That's, uh, close to sub-7s for me. Maybe I'm sandbagging my long runs?

Mike, that is a great HR for that pace.

Thanks Jim. Don't know how I kept it so low, but it happened.

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Today was one of the most mentally challenging (mentally challenged, too, probably) runs I've ever done. I'd put it on par with my BQ marathon, for the simple reason that I had absolutely no reason to keep going today, whereas I did during the BQ, so that offset the extra physical strain of the marathon.

In other words, today went from bad to worse to slightly better (but still pretty painful). I had absolutely zero motivation to lace up my shoes this morning. None. Zip. Nada. Other than the fact that it would've totally bruised my ego to skip a 3hr run, that is. So I laced up anyway.

Threw a couple granola bars in the Camelback, filled it to the brim with water, made sure I had my emergency mini roll of TP (haven't needed it yet, knock on wood...), ID, phone, and out the door. And already unhappy about it. The first 3 miles were absolute hell on my feet and shins (tibialis anterior). After that, I was able to take my mind off them because my stomach had decided it was going to be really weak this morning - okay, maybe I was overzealous with my carb-loading last night... - and tried to revolt back into my esophagus every time I hit a hill. Which happened every minute or two.

The rest of the first hour continued accordingly, and was capped with a monster hill (called "Dreaded Hill"... yes, that's the actual trail name) that averages 19% for .33 miles, 15.6% average by .66 miles, and overall averages 13.9% for .9 miles. Why the fuck did I make this route, again? I did a lot of power-walking on that hill (and one or two of the others in the first hour). And saw a gorgeous gopher snake. Almost picked it up to keep it, but I had 2 hours left to run.

The wanting-to-vomit sensation went away around 1:30, as I transitioned back from the trail to the road. Quickly hit the second trail and started the hills - now referred to as the "stupid fucking hills" - again. I had blown my legs up pretty good on Dreaded Hill, so I did some more preemptive walking on the steeper parts of these hills (which were nowhere near as steep as DH) just to make sure I could get 3 hours done. I really wasn't sure I could, at this point.

By 1:45, I was finally able - and wanted - to eat one of those granola bars, and I think that did a hell of a lot to boost my mood. At 2:00, I had finally found a groove, noticed I'd run a negative split over the last hour, and was finally on some very familiar trails. Decided that since this run had already hurt so much, I was going to continue the trend, so I made my way to every hill in the area. Took a different way to get back to my house (could've just gone flat from mile 18.5 onward) that included a bit more elevation change.

3:03:40 running time (plus about 2 minutes of pee/shirt off/shirt on breaks and 3 minutes bushwhacking from one trail [that dead-ended] to another), 21 miles even, 4k' elevation gain/loss, average HR 146bpm (75% max, 66% reserve). Might've felt like shit and beat the hell out of my body - tomorrow really isn't going to be fun - but it's in the books.

Hoping to do 7 miles in the first hour (8:34 pace) tomorrow, 7.5 in the second (8:00), and 4 in the last half hour (7:30). That'd put me at over 90 miles for the week.


Dreaded Hill. Looks pretty harmless in this shot, actually, but it's intimidating just to look at in person.

Just out of curiosity... where were you planning on putting the snake? The camelback?

Hahahahaha, if I had turned back there, I could've been home in <45. So probably would've held it.

Great run, you're doing some very solid training. That hill looks intimidating to me. But you're tough, and you did it even when you didn't feel like getting out and running.

The only friend I've ever heard of having a smog test for their car was in CA, too. Are they the only state that tests for that?

Don't know if we're the only ones, but it'd make sense. Damn California and its attempts to be progressive....

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Haven't gone on today's run yet. Looking forward to it a lot more than yesterday's, but uh, I'm really, really, really hungover. This is going to be hilarious.

just make sure you're hydrated enough!!

Four pints of water down already. Working on 2 more before I head out.

Please tell me you had something with salt and potassium, too? Like food? bananas?