Week 16: Patience, my friend

Mon 9/10 Decided to choose my day off. It’s been Mondays for years. Turned out to be a trend.

Tue 9/11 After successfully fending off Christy’s cold, I finally caught it. Thought a run might compromise some immune system function.

Wed 9/12 Plain old sick. 

Thu 9/13 Much better, but after a long day, my legs were feeling achy.

Fri 9/14  4 miles on Cottonwood. Felt pretty okay. 

Sat 9/15 9 miles at Croft. Had ambitions of a longer run. Just felt crappy. 

Sun 9/16 Yard work. 

Total: 13 miles in 2 runs

As I usually do, I got caught up in the Run Rabbit Run 100, an ultra offering a pile of prize money and therefore attracting a bunch of good runners. Add into that a 1 pm start that assured an overnight run for everyone and irunfar.com’s twitter feed commentary, and I’m one happy runner geek.

Trail ultramarathon updates are already sparse because runners often disappear onto back-country trails where all kinds of race strategy stuff can happen. But Bryon Powell and his folks at irunfar.com make it exciting and accessible and fun. 

So off goes the crowd with all the right people thrown in the front. Timothy Olson, Mike Wolfe, Jason Schlarb, Dave James, and Karl Meltzer were all in the top ten or so. Then off went the speedsters. and Meltzer hung tight. He’d talked about how he figured to win the master’s division but not the race. At 44 maybe he’s too old to keep up with the youngsters. 

But of course not. The guy runs without a pacer in every race, and no pacers were allowed in this race. He loves the through-the-night-with-tons-of-climbing stuff. There were drops ahead of him, but he negative-split a hundred-mile race, running the second half faster than the first. What patience that shows, a willingness to let the race run in front of him, and not just take advantage of the carnage, as he would say, but to jump all over it. I’ll say it again, he negative split a hundred-mile race.

In both my Terrapin Mountain runs I moved ahead in place at every aid station but one. The race begins with a four mile climb; I took my time getting up, knowing there was a long day ahead. But I moved through the crowd both years, passing other runners in the last miles. The second I ran five minutes faster than the first, and the last ten miles faster than the first year. David Horton told me that was a sign of good training.

I want to feel fit and strong in Wisconsin in May, and feel certain I will. I know there’s no rush, and my Karl Meltzer example applies to this training season, too. I need to be patient, and build my training through low times and high.

When I went running on Saturday, I set myself up for a bad run, I think. I ate 5 gels in an hour-and-a-half, I started later in the morning, I spent too much time thinking of a way out (I did find a good nine-mile loop though). But I’ve said several times already that I’m most worried about crashing in March and not being ready to run in May. Thirteen miles in a week is no way to train for a race in November, but maybe it’s the way to train for a race in May.