Feb 3-16

Returning to less consequential matters...

Feb 3
Am: 3 miles easy on CR 250 w/ Tanner
Pm: 2 x 5 x 200 @ goal mile pace in a snowstorm. Average right at 36. Brrr…

Feb 4
3.9 miles easy on CR 220 in the snow and bitter cold.

Feb 5
3.5-mile fartlek on CR 210, 26 minutes, avg HR 153. Just trying to get something workout-like in on a stressful day.

Feb 6
3-mile dog jog w/ Tanner on CR 250

Feb 7
3-mile dog jog w/ Tanner or CR 210

Feb 8
Big rush to get to the hospital today. 1.75 miles easy dog jog with Tanner in the dark before saying goodbye to Salida, the dogs, and home for the next couple of months.

Feb 9
3.66 miles in 26:20 in 3-4 inches of new snow around City Park in Denver. Sloppy and messy, but still pushed the pace a bit to relieve some stress.

Feb 10
3.8 miles in 30 minutes along Cherry Creek Bike Path and towards Wash Park.

.5 miles extra running from parking a car.

Feb 11
6 miles in 43:40 on Cherry Creek bike path, HR < 150. Icy and sloppy much of the way.

Feb 12
6 miles in 43:30 along the Cherry Creek bike path, HR <150. Conditions were cleaner, but I sure do miss me some Chaffee County dirt roads. These concrete paths are brutal on my bad ankle.

My days now are basically hospital, run, meditate, shower, repeat.

Feb 13
6.17 progressive run through the Country Club neighborhood and around Wash Park; 45:52. Conditions were bad enough that it was hard to get speed going mechanically, simply because every step was on ice, slush, and inconsistent packed snow. Good effort, but I never got any turnover going.

Feb 14
3.8 miles easy w/ 6 strides and 2 10-second max sprints on the Cherry Creek path. Warmer day today with clearer paths. Too many slow days in a row, so just trying to prioritize turnover today.

Feb 15
10 x 90 seconds @ 5k pace plus 2 x 20-seconds @ mile pace. Averaged low 5:30s for the 5k reps and a shade under 5-minute pace for the reps at the end. Running sub-5 pace in Hoka Cliftons feels like sprinting with balloons on your feet. But since the only clear space to run here is a concrete path, that’s what I got.

Decent run considering I got about 3 hours of sleep last night. 6.9 total

Feb 16
7.8 miles on Cherry Creek path in 57:40, HR sub 150. Felt solid.

Been doing long, slow barefoot walking meditations instead of seated meditation the last few days. I find that’s helpful to loosen up scar tissue in the ankle when it’s flaring up. Been feeling less acute ankle pain on the concrete paths since I started doing that.

Life > Running

I don’t usually post much about my personal life on this blog. That’s not because running is some all-consuming thing that dominates my entire life. It’s because it’s a running blog. Also, I’m not the kind of person who cares to share every detail of my life with the internet. I just like to think about running and share my running adventures with the 12 people who read this blog. 

But sometimes it’s hard to explain what’s going on with your running life without explaining what’s going on with your actual life. So perhaps I should explain a few things. 

Here’s what’s happening with my life right now:

-My wife is pregnant. She’s 33 weeks, 3 days as of today.

-On February 4^th, she was in a car accident. She was T-boned on Poncha Boulevard by a dude who was driving way too fast in snowy conditions.
-That day, she was taken to the hospital. She was released five hours later.

-February 6^th, she went to Denver for a baby shower.

-That evening, she had to go to UC Health with pregnancy complications. She had to stay there all weekend through Monday. The baby shower happened in the hospital.

-After speaking with the doctors that weekend after all that had happened, it was clear that it wasn’t safe for us to return to Salida. We needed to be close to a hospital with a NICU, because she’s at very high risk for pre-term delivery.
-We’ve temporarily relocated to Denver. We’re currently staying in the Cherry Creek area, and we will remain in Denver until the baby is born.
-Right now, the long-term prognosis for momma and baby (a boy!) appears to be good. But we’ve spent 10 of the last 13 days in the hospital, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds.

-This has been tough for me, but really, really, really hard on my wife.
-We’re hanging in there. My wife is plenty tough. Last year Mike H. described her as a “bad-ass wood-chopping wife” after watching her manage our mountain household on her own when I was useless with my broken life. She is a bad ass. But these last few weeks have tested all of her resolve.
-I’m optimistic, after all is said and done, that momma, baby, and I are gonna come out of this stronger than ever. But it’s going to take some work to get there.

And that’s all I have to say about all of that.

Jan 20-Feb 2: Hard Days Very Hard, Easy Days Very Easy

Jan 20
Got a root canal to address the prior tooth & gum infection. Doctor said no running today. Wouldn’t have gone quite so easy yesterday had I known.

Went to the track and cheered on the kids to a great workout. .8 miles jogging back and forth along the track yelling out splits.

Jan 21
Am: 3 miles in 25:40 on CR 210 w/ Tanner.
Pm: 3.89 miles in 28:54 on CR 220. 7:26 pace.

Jan 22
Am: 3 miles in 24:40 on CR 140 & 250 w/ Tanner
Pm: 7.2 miles, including 5 x 5-minute tempo w/ 1-minute rest, with HS kids along the river trail. 7-minute pace uphill into a stiff, 20-mph wind; close to 6-minute pace on the ones heading back.

Jan 23
3.4 miles w/ Tanner on CR 210. Tanner distance PR!

Jan 24
Am: 5 x 300 w/ the track kids. Sprint drills and warmup. Idea was to run the reps at goal mile pace with full rest. Ran 52-high and 53 low on the first four, and then 48 high on the last one for me. Lead kids did 50 high and closed in 45. Good workout.
4.7 with warmup and cooldown
Pm: 3.2 mile dog jog with Tanner on CR 140 & 250

Jan 25
9.2 miles with the kids, starting at the caboose, heading over to cattle yards, up Race Track to Little Rainbow, down 108 and back to the caboose. Methodist Mountain trails were still an icy and treacherous mess.

Jan 26
3.4 miles easy on CR 210 w/ Tanner

Jan 27
Am: 3 miles dog jog with Tanner on CR 140 & 250
Pm: Feed the cats, followed by (4 minutes @ tempo, 2 minutes rest, 4 x 300 @ 2 mile pace w/ 1 minute rest, 2 minutes rest) x 2
4.2 miles on the track, in a light snowstorm; tempos were at 6:10 pace; 300s were slightly above 5-minute pace for me.

Jan 28
3 miles easy on CR 210 w/ Tanner

Jan 29
Am: 3-mile dog jog with Tanner on CR 140 & 250
Pm: 8.73 in 70:40 on Ute Trail Road with the kids. Nearly 2k of gain and loss on this route, and we started off slow. Last four miles, we were moving.

Jan 30
3 miles easy on CR 210 w/ Tanner

Jan 31
Am: 4 x 8 second max hills on Spiral Drive; 5 x 30 second hard hills on same. Full rest on all. This was a hard workout, and I was getting dropped by the end. My speed is actually sufficient to keep up with most of the kids. My speed endurance on the hardest workouts is not, however.
Pm: 3 miles easy w/ Tanner

Feb 1
Long day. 2 miles easy w/ Tanner on CR 250.

Feb 2
Am: 6.54 aerobic (HR < 150) at Mears Junction, 50:20. Haven’t been doing much running without either the kids or the dog, lately, so it was nice to just have a solid aerobic jog. Roads were icy but never felt dangerous.
Pm: 3 miles easy on CR 210 w/ Tanner. 24:20. Dog was moving. I was definitely the weak link on this one.

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Kind of a weird training cycle right now. I’m training with kids who are aspiring to run sub-4:30 miles and sub-10 3200s, so the running is more intense than I’m accustomed. And we’ve got a dog that desperately needs exercise, so he consumes a lot of my other runs.

Most of my runs thus have two levels of intensity now: very intense and slow recovery. I’m not doing a lot of steady aerobic jogging, because I need to keep the easy days super easy to recover from the 800/mile/tempo workouts we’ve been doing. Early indications are that I’m not losing much on the aerobic front, but I’ve only been doing this for a few week. It’ll be an interesting experiment.

I’m aspiring to run a sub-4:50 1600 this year. That’s an ambitious goal, especially since I haven’t done a sub-5 since 1997, but I’m hitting the early-cycle workouts at that pace. We’ll see if I can keep that momentum going as the workouts progress.