A lighter week of sorts ...
Monday - 7 miles with GW
Tuesday - off. Got a knee shot.
Wednesday - 7 miles with GW
Thursday - 7.1 miles
Friday - 7.5 miles with GW
Saturday - 7 miles, including 8 by Stonehenge Hills.
Sunday - decided I might as well do Green given the low mileage week. As I started I noticed JV and BW in the meadow and so I was given the gift of the round trip with them. 5.5 miles.
I took the dog for a walk up the hill from the house around sunset the other night and looked over the Front Range. I know the profile pretty well from looking at it for years, and in many cases, having tagged many of the high points (or having JV point out to me the ones I had not done).
I looked at Green and wondered when, if ever, I'd get back to it. And then I realized I couldn't remember when I last did it.
I texted GW and told him I was going to do it Saturday morning and he immediately responded with agreement that he was also in. I wasn't expecting much other than to get my ass kicked. I mean it always kicked my ass but this would be an ass kicking that would just take longer than it used to. I was curious as to how my ankle would hold up, and recognized I might need to pull the rip cord early if I was jacking it up.
As a bonus, JZ came home for the weekend last night and so he joined us. We took the ASG up and Gregory down. It was mostly a slog hike up, but with some slow running where we could manage. JZ took off on the down - but I took it careful. 6.1 miles.
It had been 51 weeks since I had last hit this hill. Definitely kicked my ass, but that is because I have not done this in a long time. I am happy with how the ankle held up. It was sore, but no more so than it has been the last week or so.
Also was good to get this done early - it was turning into a bit of Disney Land as we finished up.
Monday AM - 4 miles around practice. Getting hot early these days.
Afternoon - 2.75 on the ditch with JZ and then I did 8 x 300 on the MS track. It was hot and I had a lot of excuses but I figured that I need to do these because I don't want to do these since they suck but when I don't do them it just makes the suck suck some more.
Tuesday AM - Sore. I guess the combination of squats yesterday - which I REALLY SUCK at and the workout put me here. So that is good. Embrace the suck. But I did know I needed to go easy. It was better at the end than the beginning. 6.1 miles around practice.
Super busy weekend. but one with the cup was full.
First on Friday we celebrated TZ’s father’s birthday. He turned 80. We were supposed to do this in a local park, but the weather turned – so it was “hey, let’s have 50 or so folks at our house for BBQ.” It was pretty awesome.
There were a lot of family out for JZ’s graduation, so the whole affair was a family reunion of sorts. It was pretty wonderful.
Of course there was JZ’s HS graduation on Saturday. That was a nice little milestone
Particularly impressive at the graduation was the kid in the band who built a house of cards to stay entertained.
Saturday was a zero – my first day off in about 10 weeks. There was just too many other obligations with graduation activities and related celebrations.
Sunday – I made it over to Green, and on the way, I gave JV a call. He was kind enough to allow me to keep the pace slow. It was fun to catch up with him. It was one of those interesting days on the hill where it was different temps on different side of the mountain – with it probably being 10 degrees cooler on the backside compared to the front.
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A high fifty week with 2 days of significant “get up” work. Not bad but not great. Will keep plugging in SD this week.
I got a lap in on Green this AM with Jeff and Homie. It was my second summit on Green this year. It was Jeff’s 37th on the year and Homie’s 400th. Or something like that. So yes, these guys can climb ridiculously well. I pretty much went about as quick as I was going to go and they took a walk up the hill behind me to be nice. And then they were kind not to blow by me on the way down either as I old man picked my way through the rocks.
It was a foggy morning and so a pretty wet climb, but the time flew as we made chatter on the trails. These guys were the first two with me in my first ever “ultra” … a run from the Rim to Rim to Rim in the Grand Canyon. Both hard and easy to believe that was 8 years ago now. Running with these guys is easy: laughs, history, common topics to touch on, and just good “dooods.”
I headed over to practice afterwards to get another half dozen miles in … super easy. It had to be.
On a related side note, I got a lap on Bear on Sunday … it was the first time I had been up on that peak (based on my notes) since 2015! I recalled why as I was going on Fern. That trail is so stupid steep it is something I can’t really run. I guess there are some who can run it but nearly most folks can’t. So there is a benefit to it, but at some point it is just a different thing. But on this Sunday, a very rainy Sunday, it was a nice escape to visit this peak I had not been at in almost a thousand days.
As best as I can tell from this blog, today’s round trip on Green was the first one I have done since the 27th of January.
Of 2017. So, yeah, it has been a little while.
Knowing I don’t have the climbing chops given the lack of practice, I looked to manage the effort. It was fine. I was a sweaty mess of course, which seems to scare the day hikers, but I managed to not slime anyone, or even take any digger wipe outs. I was especially careful on the way down, and wondered how I ever bombed some of these descents. Of course, I remember and they did come with a fair number of spills, scraped knees and ripped up hands.
It was a fun and different outing.
Green, and Bear, and South Boulder made sense when I was regularly training for Pikes. These days I seem more stretched for time, and the additional half hour (at least) to get there and back bugs me. But on a cloudy Sunday afternoon, it was good. 
In the AM I met up with JV for a round of Green. The route from Chatuaqua via the Baseline – ASG to the summit and then back down Ranger – Gregory seems to be measuring in around 6.1 miles and 2680 feet of vertical these days. There was some ice, but nothing bad. I went with the Ice Bugs this go around, having learned the error of my ways on Tuesday from going in the ice storm with Dave on HOKAS!
I ran in the afternoon (4.4 miles) but skipped doing the workout with the team as it was busy enough that it made more sense for me to help with timing than to run with them.
AM – I got a round of Green with Dave M and Bryan D.
It was Dave’s first Green since his accident last year. 
The weather did us no favors. As we hit the summit, the fog started to freeze. It laid a greasy coat of ice on everything, making it one of the slickest days on Green I have ever seen. Not the best for a guy testing out his new foot. On the way home I saw further evidence of how nasty it was as there was a dozen something car pile up at the 36 South Boulder Road exit. Traffic was backed up for a bit … until it wasn’t as they closed the highway at some point.
In the afternoon I got an other half dozen, doing 8 x 30” hard uphill. I was feeling a bit tanked on these after twenty something seconds … so I guess I was getting after it pretty hard on the front of it.
150 squats today. 70 lightly weighted, the other 80 just body weight.
