LooseCrew-JeffO: 62.3 Miles

LooseCrew-JeffO

Ramblings of an adventurous guy living in Denver and playing in the mountains.
For my trail adventures, visit my Trail Bum blog

Monday, April 02, 2007

62.3 Miles

Here's the way I deck-out my feet for a run. Injinji's underneath and some cheap, Target polypro sox over that. Yep, all my sox are stained with various trail colors.
I'm pretty sore all over, today. I ran over 62 miles last week. That might, maybe, be the most mileage I've ever run in a 7-day period of time in my life.
I ran over 177 miles in March.
The course of yesterday's race started out climbing up a sandy ravine. Then it crossed to the same jagged, washed-out road the Marathon had finished on. After seven miles, I finally was on new territory heading towards a feature called "The Crater".
I don't think it was an actual crater. If it was, it certainly wasn't a magma-spewing one. The crater was actually a flat spot surrounded 3/4 around by ridges. It makes me wonder if it was some sort of non-violent mud-flow cone (I majored in Geology at KansasU), but I've never heard of a mud-flow cone, so I'm grasping at straws here.
Then the race took off down a wild ravine following a wildlife trail. I loved that. We were bushwacking part of the way. I often had to run with both forarms held vertically in front of me to keep the branches out of my face.

I missed the rock arch that was along the ravine. My various injuries had my attention riveted to where each step was about to land. Maybe next year I'll see it.
I took one wrong turn that ended up not taking me off course. But I assumed that I was off course so I went up the side of a hill in pursuit of a wrong-guess as to where I ought to have been. I lost a few minutes while I figured out that I had been on-course before afterall.
It may not have been the funnest course, but it was close.
Since the last 10 miles were new trails for me, I had to run with the map in my hand. There were very few markers. It was almost an orientering adventure, since I was nearly always alone the last 10 miles.
We headed to Tom S's house for a potluck afterwards. It was a nice way to end the event, since I didn't know anyone particularly well.
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I found out about Coconut water from Scott Dunlap's blog. If you Google "coconut water", you'll get all kinds of info. I'll have to check it out. Whole Foods should carry it.
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For my training plans, I pretty much make it all up as I go along. Here's my latest...
Every-other-week will be a high-mileage week. Then I'll have a week of low-intensity workouts. "Intensity" refers more to pounding, jolting, and speed-strains. During these moderate weeks, I'll concentrate on biking and hiking. I'll probably still pound the sidewalks/trails, but only very low mileage (like 10 miles).
My high-mileage week totals need to climb up over 100 miles.
Even though Leadville doesn't require anything over 15:00 pace, speed and hills are still an important part of training. Even at Leadville, there will be occasional need for bursts of energy. I just needed to back off on the quantity of speed. All those marathons and 50K's last year had me into a speed-demon mentality that led to injuries.
I hope this varied-intensity plan allows rapid increases without disintegrating.

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