Saturday 022815

Home.  Hip that I landed on hurts pretty good but only in certain directions.  I ran on it because, for the most part, that direction ain’t too bad.  11 miles, but slow due to the hip and the snow and ice here.  As odd as it may sound I think the running helped clear some of the issue up.

Much of today’s run included EP podcast stuff, including brain training stuff with the Sweat Science guy.

February wraps with 293.7 miles, 10300 feet climbed and 39.7 hours and 1 day off.  On the year I have 594.6 miles, 79.28 hours, and 19965 feet and 3 days off.

We try to have some sort of meeting with each of our kids each week to have a bit more of a formal (but still informal) conversation on what is going on in their lives.  Agenda items this week including things like what is going on in school, what classes they are going to take next year, going over work schedules, Scout commitments, the plan to the driver’s license, what is happening for Spring Break, college search, wisdom teeth removal, summer planning …and whatever else comes up (and a lot does).  These meetings can be easy, but sometimes the kids completely flip over whatever topic (e.g. when they lose their cell phone) and they can become quite draining.  I was tired after our sessions this AM and took a little cat nap.  Apparently others needed a nap too.

Friday 022715

Okay – that sucked.  Headed out this AM, fairly motivated to explore to the south a bit more and get in a few more miles as I had a larger AM window to play with.  Took a digger shortly into the run on the black ice and whacked my left hip pretty well.  Ugh.  After that it was a shuffle as I was dealing with the hip, not wanting to be up on the snow plow covered pile of frozen crunch on the shoulder of the roads, not wanting to be on the road given the icy margins and traffic.  I should have treadmilled it but I am somewhat stubborn in wanting to avoid that these days.  Stupidity.   5 miles …

Gonna queue up the new Jay Johnson podcast for the ride home today.  Amazingly only five guys have ever won the Footlocker (or Kinney) XC HS championship and the NCAA XC championship.  3 have gone through CU.  And one is Cheserek, and he might end up winning multiple. Jay interviews the four other than Cheserek over this series of podcasts – it includes Kennedy as well.

Late breaking – will also listen to this interview with JV,

Thursday 022615

AM – 5 miles.  We got about 5 inches of snow in the Durham area.  It pretty much shut the area down.   It was rather pretty.
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Slow crunching through that stuff.

My daughter was quite miffed that we got more snow back in Colorado and yup, schools were open. 
Schools in the NC area were closed.

Scooter D weighs in on the pot and running conversation.

Wednesday 022515

AM – up and at them and hearing that little voice in my head telling me to enjoy that I can get up and get at them and I would feel better once I did.  And I did.  5.1 miles.

Bob and I were out running on Sunday last week and the temp was in the teens, the snow was blowing and I am sure folks thought we were nuts.  Admittedly, I get some stupid ego stroked joy by being “that guy.”  You know, people drive by at 6:30 AM and wonder who “that guy” is that is out running in the snow and cold. “That guy” is nuts.   Or the folks at work who say “yeah, he is one of those runners.”    Yup.   Left right go.   It is a gift.  Use it.

The latest from Sisu (aka Strava art).

Evening – post work dinner … probably the nicest weather we have had since I got here but as it was dark and I did not want to navigate roads with no sidewalks, I did laps around the hotel and on a spur road that had a little hill to it.  5.2 miles.  We are supposed to get 5-10 inches here on the overnight, and you’d think it was some sort of cyclone blowing in. 

The “Mode” button is going on my Garmin XT which means I might have trouble transferring my workouts up to Strava-MapMyRun-GarminConnect-Vitality … which is to say they won’t really count.  ;)

It is getting a little harder each year to get to state in CO 5A.

Tuesday 022415

AM – whew – tough to wake up given the time shift, and I have become less inclined to get up and get after it.  The unexpected snow here and thus colder temps in the Carolinas did little to motivate me to get out.  But I got out for a bit.  5.3 miles.

Evening – dark, cold, slushy, wet and narrow roads.  Meh.  I really enjoyed the location of the old office that we had down here rather than this one – simply because of its access to the ATT (American Tobacco Trail).  5.1 miles.

Just a couple of inches snow here but there was a fair amount of panic as folks are not used to it.  Or they say they ain’t.

Monday 022315

AM – 10.1 miles before heading out to the airport.  Chilly, and bright.  Started super easy and it took me almost an hour to get “awake” to get moving a little bit.  

I think I have actually have been running with 24601 as of late.

Sunday 022215

Got together in the closing hours of the snow storm with Bob, and we slogged out 14.4.

I had been out shoveling the driveway, in one of those efforts where you complete it and then come back to the start and wonder if you should just keep going … and muttering about my run I had to do …  and I came in to find the phone with a text on it that stated Bob was heading over to run.  There was no question if I wanted to run, or if it was okay to run.  He was coming over to run.   If that ain’t gonna force you to get out and get it done, I don’t know what will.  I mean, what are friends for.  Love it.

I finished the week out meeting the arbitrary goal of a 100 miles.  It was meant to stretch me a bit and it did that.  I felt good about stringing together a sold Wednesday – Friday of the moderate hill repeats, the longer tempo and then the long run to cap it off.  The whole week did not crush me, but was a nice stretch for me.  This reinforces for me that this is less about holding together this level of miles, but the challenge is actually getting the time to get these done.  The week in review vid and some other blathering …

I felt better today than yesterday – being another day out of the mix of the heart of the week.

Ritz looks like he is holding form together well for his bid to Boston.

It is really mind boggling that 36 guys broke 4 in the mile last week.  On a single day.  Last night when I was shoveling, in an attempt to keep ahead of the snow, I listened to the Track After Dark podcast from Flotrack.  They interviewed Christian Soratos who had the fastest time of the collegians posted.  It is pretty cool to hear the passion that a kid at that age brings to the game, including how they are still dreaming big for the season, the seasons down the road.  Good stuff.

But 36 … I think it only furthers the case I have made that the whole distance running pool has gotten a lot lot deeper.  Sub 3:50 at the pointy end is still insanely good, but the number of guys just knocking outside the door at the HS, Collegiate and Pro level is absolutely incredible.

Interesting to see how fast old guys went at the 8K at sea level a couple of weeks post cross (comparing similar runners).

Saturday 022115

AM – the snow rolled in but not too bad yet. 7.2 miles.

Afternoon – the snow rolled out in reprieve, and I got another 7.2 in with the dogs.  The snow really started to fly after that though.  Definitely a slow jog with the dogs.  I was feeling a bit of the last two days.

More USATF crap.

Apparently carbs now cause concussions.

Good read on the current state of Trason.  Buried in there is a stat:  70000 something runners did an ultra in 2013.  Hmm.  So essentially in a year, some number less than the number of people who attend say a few baseball games.  Or less than the attendance at the Daytona 500.  The sport is still niche folks, even if it has grown in 20 years.

All I can think of is “why the f*ck do I do this to myself?”

My lab results from Thursday came in today.










Admittedly I have not done any analysis on this other than to notice that they recorded my BP as 118 over 72 versus what they told me when I got it done which was 112/82.  Frankly, with that sort of weirdness, it does make me begin to question the very integrity of the other numbers.  I get it – people write stuff down and errors are made. 

I have to assume that my triglyceride numbers from one of my tests is wrong.  My doc visit on Tuesday had it at 36.  Historically my numbers with this program have been in the 50s and 60s, and my numbers with Kaiser have been WAY higher than that. 

Friday 022015

Seriously love the Nate Jenkins blog.  It gets referenced in the latest ATC.  Here is the Canova post from Lucho’s blog a few years back.

No word of a lie, my kid heard me listening to the podcast on my phone (over the speaker) as I was coming in, and he asked “is that the guy who wears the cowboy hat and flips parts of a tree until he pukes?”

There is no way to mimic the pain and suffering that is likely to ensue in a race that length in any other way than to simply do it. However, hard training, through prolonged tempo runs, intervals on the track, and intense hill repeats (both up and down), train the mind and the heart to withstand the mental anguish that inevitably ensues around mile 78 of a 100 miler. Tasting blood in the mouth, feeling your arms go numb, and accepting the virtual piano on your back during lap three of a mile repeat simply hardens your head.

Afternoon – 20.3 with Bob.  I was fine for the first 10, but then I was fairly tired, mostly in the hammies from the very light weight work I had done.  Still, glad to get it done and I would not have it not running with Bob.

This might have to become one of my most favorite quotes in running:  I always tell them that for me, racing is like sex: Try to start really hard and always finish before the women...

And then there is this:  There was this one day, not too long ago, that I ate a cold McDonalds burger for breakfast, a Klondike bar, two old hotdogs, a frozen burrito for lunch and a Little Caesars pizza for dinner. On top of that I somehow ate half a 5 lb bag of Swedish Fish. I’m not proud of it.

Kid concert at the HS tonight.  The director was just in front of me to the left so I did not swing the camera to get the whole crew.  And the scratch on the camera from where the burro bit it back in Leadville is becoming more and more obvious to me.

Thursday 021915

Doping is estimated to be occurring at anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in 3 elite athletes.

Scored a 112/82 BP today in my work place “biometric screening.”  This will mark me as pre-hypertensive in the “Vitality’ program (side note, that is a program that has roots out of South Africa and has ties to J. Dugas).  I should get additional lab results in a few days.

I love the sport but the analysis this guy does on masters competition is a whole another level above what I got.

It is Girl Scout cookie selling season again.  Apparently some of my co-workers found my post on this topic from a couple of years ago.  They have been appropriately kind to reforward me any of the emails that get spammed to our company bulletin board about whatever parent is selling these cookies out of their cube.  Apparently that post is quite humorous to them and is something they call a rant.  I thought it was rather tame and hardly a rant at all (although there have been rants on this blog).  And in an appropriate stroke of karma, these cookies are actually being sold directly in front of my work spot. 

Distance runner beats world’s best athlete in an arm wrestling contest.  Well sort of.

So I guess I have jogged with someone who has officially received a doping ban.

So was the XC course slower this year compared to last year?  Short answer: the data sez probably not.  I compared the results of the 72 common runners that ran in 14 versus 15.  Straight up, the finish time average was about 29 seconds slower in 15 compared to 14.  But, I then modified the average calculation to only consider those that ran within a minute of their time last year.  There is a lot of things that can get a guy’s results to  vary year over year outside of the course.  They could be more fit or less fit, have a great or bad race in one year or the other.  And they all get older.  One guy in the 80 year old division ran six minutes faster.  With that, the course comes up 3 seconds slower.  With that, I’d have to say the course considerations were a non factor.

Afternoon – again, press for time so I pressed the button to get what I could in the time I had.  13.2, tempo-ing it with a bio break between the Ketner Loop and Johnson Loop.  Probably one of the better tempos I have actually had in a couple of years …

Wednesday 021815

Trautmann had a helluva comeback. “When I was younger, I could eat anything. But now I can’t do that anymore, or I’ll wind up gaining 10 pounds in no time. At my age, no matter how much running you do, you still need to watch what you eat. Because, to get down to the racing weight that I want to be at, I really need to watch everything I eat.”   It is possible.

“We don’t necessarily train harder, we just replicate what we are doing, and focus on getting better.”  I think Troop has planted a seed for something that could very well take off well.  There was a gap for a while there between the Boulder Road Runners (now sometimes called the “Older” Road Runners) and, well no other groups.  I’d love to see BTC be a common flag that multiple groups could fly under … and potentially get some traction away from the store sponsorships that separate a lot of team talent.

Afternoon – 10.1.  Easy to start then to steady then to a low grade tempo, but with the end being a bit more of stride on, off.  Sort of a progression.  Sort of not.  I didn’t have a boat of time to get a bit more today.

JZ and the brass/percussion group at the HS tonight … they have come a ways over the last couple of years.  Probably helps that this is a combined group of elementary school, middle school and high school kids.

Tuesday 021715

Minimalist, maximalist, whatever.  Find a shoe that works for you.

14.3 miles.  Did a few (5) runs up Simms Hill to get back into a bit of vert (4:01, 3:44r, 3:54, 3:43r, 3:54, 3:43r, 3:51, 3:45r,.3:42, 3:18r)  I did these steady, not looking to outright tag them yet, but building into them a bit.  I’ll be back.  I added on another 10k afterwards with Adam B.

This helicopter was around during the run.  Just cool to see one of those dual prop ones.  It looked a lot closer, but I couldn’t get the craptastic iphone camera out quick enough to get it while running.

Conversations with my doctor

I have two physicals this week.  Today I had one where I needed to get a physician to sign a form that cleared me to do the Scout trip to the Bahamas later this year.  So this was a general routine stuff sort of physical. 

I am part of a big HMO type plan so I really don’t know my doctor.  In fact when I booked my appointment, they wanted to cancel it because the system assigned doc was not available.  I asked if any GP was available and when they confirmed there was, I stuck with the original appointment.

So this included the typical stuff … height, weight, pulse, BP, looking in the ears, etc.  When they ask the typical questions though, it is as if there is another party in the room other than the doc and me.  And that other party is the voice in my head.  Some excerpts from this AM are below.

Doc:  Do you ever encounter shortness of breath, chest pain, or dizziness?
Voice in my head:  I actually try to make that happen on Tuesdays and Fridays with either repeats or a long tempo effort.
Actual voice:  No.

Doc:  How much on average alcohol do you drink in a week?
Voice in my head:  Let’s see … I will go weeks without drinking a drop, but then decide that it is a wonderful idea to drink a 12 pack with friends.  No, that is a 12 pack for me.  And yeah, they have their own 12 pack each.  And then we might go for a run. 
Actual voice:  Maybe 2 drinks a week.

Doc:  Do you ever engage in activities that might cause injuries, like parasailing or rock climbing?
Voice in my head:  Does running with a burro up to a 13000 foot pass count?  And W.T.F?  Am I only supposed to do those sort of activities on my XBOX?
Actual voice:  No.

Doc:  Any knee, hip pain or soreness?
Voice in my head:  Probably all the time compared to the average person.  Really bad if I take a spill when running down Green.  Really really bad after some races. 
Actual voice:  No.

Doc:  Any questions?
Actual voice:  Yeah, I saw that the BP you guys measured for me was 106 over 82.  My workplace wellness program will classify me as prehypertensive if the top number is greater than 120, or if the bottom number is higher than 80.  What is your take on that?
Doc:  That is ridiculous.  Your BP is fine and we don’t get concerned until the lower number gets above 90.
Voice in my head:  I agree.

Doc:  Do you do self testicular exams?
Voice in my head:  What?  Do you really need to ask any man that?  Well, yeah, I guess you do.  Don’t ask how often. 
Actual voice:  Yes.

Doc:  Okay, I need to check your prostate.  Please roll over to your left hip.
Voice in my head:  Ah, really?  Is this the time where I officially go down that old man route?  Thank Buddha you are a small handed older woman.  And that I showered this AM. 
Actual voice:  (nothing said).
Voice in my head:  I am really really glad now that I did not say all these things to you out loud.

So, another annual checkup done with some new fun.  Admittedly, the voice in my head were much worse than what you read above.  The general take of the appointment ended with the typical feeling I get from these:  “good job, we are not really familiar with how to deal with folks that are healthy like this … we are much more familiar with dealing with the ill.” 

And I am fine with that for as long as it lasts.

PS – lab results came in

Other lab results are here.

Monday 021615

Snow was flying pretty good today.  I got out in the afternoon for an easy jog.  14.4 miles.

That is all. 

Sunday 021515

Busy week .. some highlights.  This was the run Tuesday AM
This was doing damage to make up for 25 years of not seeing these guys on Tuesday night.
 
I sort of looked like this when I saw them (I am actually 19 in this shot)
 
This was the run on Friday afternoon.

This was the sleeping Saturday night.

This was the boy on the way home on Sunday.
All for this patch …

6 miles in the evening in the snow after we got home.  I was tempted to go long today but the day got away from me getting back from Ookpik, and then the weather blew in.  And my hammies were touch trashed from all the heavy shoveling yesterday.  Why long?  Well, see the thought was in my head that if I got 25 today, I would have 70 on the week.  But instead I got just over 50 on the week.  More on that below. 

Today’s reading recommended by Wes.

Solid weekend for the Buffs.

Recent JZ artwork.  He is enjoying playing with clay.

Saturday-Sunday 0214-1515 Oopik

Another trip up to the camp outside Ward for camping.  The kids get a variety of classroom instruction Friday night.
Then it is up early on Saturday to pull the pulk out to the field where we will build the quinzee (snow cave) to camp in.
Breakfast with the croo before heading out.
The snow was really thin in spots this year.  This meadow is usually covered pretty deep with snow and it was bare in many spots.  We found snow up in the trees to build the caves.  To preserve some snow, and some efforts, I (and several of the other adults) “squatted” in caves that had been built the week prior.  Worked well for me!  Also allowed me to keep and eye on our guys as they built theirs.
This is the same meadow from the other direction last year:
John H checking out a quinzee from early in the season.
Time to get to work.
Lunch time.
Then you move in … I had my own …

After an incredibly comfortable sleep (as in super dark, super quiet, perfectly warm with cool air), we woke to a morning for some breakfast in the field.

Another great weekend at Tahosa with JZ and his buds. 

No running.  But I shoveled a lot.