Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Week ending March 22

Monday: 16 miles (2500 ft), Foothills trail out to Reservoir Ridge and back with the Laporte dam ascent/descent.

Tuesday: 8 miles (1000 ft), Foothills trail. 90 minutes heavy weight training.

Wednesday: 18 miles (3000 ft), 2x Mill Creek repeats. Starting at the Arthur's Rock trailhead, I did two laps up and down Mill Creek+Towers Summit.

Thursday: Off. 90 minutes heavy weight training.

Friday: 10 miles (2000 ft), Foothills trail + Laporte dam ascent/descent.

Saturday: 37 miles (6500+ ft) March Madness Horsetooth Reservoir circumnavigation, via Pete's insanity route, tagging Horsetooth and Arthur's Rocks along the way for a good chunk of vertical. Ran with Mike Hinterberg, Mike Aish, and Nick Clark for a bit until about mile 22, when I started to feel a bit dehydrated. Took a break at Lory Visitor's center to chug water and slogged it over to Reservoir Ridge with Sam for a bit until I felt better. I caught back up to Mike H. and brought it home under the scorching sun. Beer never tasted so good.

Sunday: Off.

Total: 89 miles, with a respectable 15,000 ft of vert and lots of quality technical trail. I'm not shooting for a weekly mileage at this point, just want to feel like I'm working hard and getting quality runs in at a variety of distances without feeling wasted by the end of the week. I think next week's mileage will be a bit reduced, but not much. A trip to Greyrock plus the Round Mountain Ladder will probably up the vert at the expense of mileage, but that's good. I need everything I can get - Quad Rock, Bighorn, and Bigfoot are races with big ass climbs and relentless terrain. This sort of weekly mileage with 20,000 ft of very would be ideal and I think it's on the cards next week.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Training

My calendar is more sparse this year than in the past, but the races from here on out are ballbusters: Quad Rock 50 in May, Bighorn 100 in June, and the insane Bigfoot 200 in August.

I've retooled my training a lot to focus on three things:
-Long runs at a variety of paces
-Building muscular strength and general body-hardiness
-Raw mileage

My workouts vary incredibly in distance, intensity, and focus from day to day, and this has allowed me to pack on quality miles and workouts without getting injured. It's like microcycling within microcycling, or basically what every coach probably tells their athletes to do - whatever, reinventing the wheel works.

The past couple of weeks I've been pushing harder and harder, without feeling exhausted or over my head. The pi-day group run up and down Towers Road 3.14 times (for just shy of 22 miles and 6000ft of gain) was sandwiched at the end of a high-mileage week:

Sunday: 6 miles to the gym, 90 minutes of lifting.
Monday: 12 miles out to Reservoir Ridge and back, easy
Tuesday: 10 miles on the Foothills trail, 5 miles at tempo
Wednesday: 14 miles out to Reservoir Ridge and back, easy
Thursday: 6 miles to the gym, 90 minutes of lifting
Friday: 8+4 miles double, both easy
Saturday: 22 miles up and down Towers @ 35-40 min up, 30 min down.

This past week has been equally intense. I followed up the Towers long run with repeats up the Mill Creek climb, the infamous, body-destroying penultimate climb of Quad Rock. I think I'll keep hitting that and Spring Creek hard in the coming months, sort of a weekday grinder.

I've put on about 25 pounds since I started weight lifting a year and a half ago. I've focused on deadlifts, incline/decline bench, shoulder work (rows, hanging pulls, Arnold press), and a miscellaneous assortment of other free weight movements. I think deadlifts, more than anything, have helped me get to the point where I can train at high mileage and remain injury free. I just needed more back, glute, and upper body strength to balance my legs and strengthen the entire running motion chain.

Quad Rock is coming up, and the end of March and April is shaping up to a big mileage month with lots of vert and miles - March Madness (37?) miler, the Crosier Triple Bagger, Quad Rock training run, and Round Mountain Ladder are all on my agenda.

I'll be doing the Zion Traverse about 10 days after Quad Rock, followed up by some high-er country runs to get those big climbs/descents I need for Bighorn.