Wheeler Farm Loops

AM - 16 miles. Andrea and I met Fritz, ACorn, and AdamRW at SHP and the 5 of us did a loop (~13 miles) around Holladay. I ran home from there. Nice run - good company and conversations. Got what I wanted today... a medium-long run at an easy pace. I'll probably wait until Tuesday before doing anything faster to make sure I'm 100% recovered from yesterday's race.

PM - 5 miles very easy. Its soooo nice outside! 

If you haven't seen Adam's message forum post about the NIH budget, check it out and consider signing the petition. 

AM - 10.3 miles up to work, really easy.

PM - 8 miles. Ran down to the track and cruised into 12 x 200m in just under 35 seconds average, just boppin' along. Someday that is going to be 5K pace - hopefully this year! Andrea was there running around so I drove home with her instead of running home.  

We watched a fantastic documentary yesterday called Man On A Mission. Its about Brother Colm O'Connell and St. Patrick's High School in Kenya. Eamonn Coghlan travels there to learn about the program. As you may or may not know, the school is a factory for producing world champion athletes. I found it very interesting - the culture is so much different than ours. At one point Eamonn asks a young runner how often he trains - the runner is almost embarrassed to admit that at that point, he is only training twice a day. And watch how slow they do their easy runs, too :-) The whole thing is 55 minutes, and totally worth watching from start to finish.

AM - 9 miles. 5 mile tempo in 26:19 (5:16 / mile). Splits - 5:14, 5:25, 5:18, 5:11, 5:11. The plan today is to do the AM/PM double workout, but now that its sleeting and gross outside, I'm sort of wishing I just got up earlier and did one longer workout this morning. I'll just see what the weather ends up being this afternoon and make the call later. The little bit of extra sleep was probably what I needed more than anything.

PM - 9 miles. 8 x 800m in 2:26 w/ 200m float recovery. All of the reps were within a half-second of each other, very consistent... just some cruise intervals at threshold pace. Didn't feel hard at all. The weather was great... it always seems worse up at my building, but then again - I work 600 feet above the rest of the city. The Highland track just had one 20m patch of slush that was slowly turning to ice towards the end of the workout. Warmed up 2 miles w/ Andrea, Tina, her husband Nate, and their dog. Cooled down about 2 miles by jogging Kenyan style on the grass. 

AM - 11.5 miles. JAJAF run and then up to work from there. Legs felt decent after yesterday's double dipper (no soreness), but they didn't feel springy. The group opened up a 15 yard gap on me in the first 30 seconds of the run that took me about 3/4 of a mile to close. I don't think anyone noticed I was dragging off the back at the beginning. Whew - that would have been embarrassing!

PM - 7.3 miles home. The first mile was windy, I could smell the salt in the air. Then it started dumping snow. I did not not enjoy this run! My head got very cold. 

February totals - 563 miles, 3100 perfect pushups, 670 perfect pullups. Solid month... lots of good workouts. I actually ran slightly more miles per day than January, but the percentage of quality/fast miles went up a lot. Averaged just under 8.5 hours of sleep. Drove my car to work a lot more this month (12 times).

A handful of us are going to do an Emigration Canyon long run on Saturday. We'll meet here (Eastside Elementary School - 3300S and I-215) at 8am sharp, then shuttle up to Mountain Dell Golf Course. The shortest distance back is 16.7 miles (route map). There are a few places we can add on some extra miles for those looking to get 20 miles or so.

Happy Leap Year! 

AM - 11.5 miles. My streak of not exercising indoors for the past decade had ended... winter decided to finally make an appearance on a day that I had mile repeats on the calendar. Normally I would be flexible w/ the workout schedule, but I needed to get this one in at least 9-10 days before the 15K. So I drove out to the Olympic Oval this morning. It was my first time there - quite a facility! I justified running in the perfect indoor conditions as good training for racing in perfect conditions in Arizona next weekend.

Workout was 6 x 1600m in 4:56. Reps - 4:56.5, 4:56.4, 4:55.7, 4:56.2, 4:55.9, 4:56.2. Nice and consistent. Kept the recovery to ~1:50 of walking/light jogging. Felt like I could have done 8 reps, but pulled the plug at 6 because I don't think I am completely recovered from Tuesday yet and wanted to play it a little conservative.

The cooldown was the best part of the morning. An older guy decked out in Hansons-Brooks Distance Project gear started talking to me - turns out he is 63 years old and trying to break 3 hours for the marathon in Madrid this spring. First off - who wears Hanson's gear like regular people wear NFL/NBA team gear? Answer = people I get along with very well! :-) We ran about 3 miles together chatting about all things running.

Then it took me over an hour to drive up to work from the oval. Fun. 

PM - 7.5 miles really easy.  

Groupon deal today for hot springs up near Logan - we can all head here after the TOU 1/2 marathon this summer!

AM - 10 miles up to work. Slippery, snowy, and slowly (like 8:30 pace). Went to see Radical Reels last night - watch the first couple minutes of this trailer if you want to get fired up for the weekend. It was really cool - as always, the rock climbers have the best stories... those guys are such characters. And I was blown away by the mountain bikers. The only downside of the evening was that I didn't get to bed until 11pm - 2.5 hours past my bedtime! And I got rear-ended by some idiot on the drive home in the snow, but luckily my thule bike rack totally protected my jeep.

PM - 8.6 miles home.  

Update on the LR plan for tomorrow - I'm thinking rather than the shuttle run, lets just meet at SHP / Highland High School and do it as an out & back. Its about 10 miles up to the hairpin turn in the canyon from there. That way if road conditions are bad, we can easily change course, and if they are great, then we've completely earned all that sweet downhill coming back down. 8AM - there will probably be folks running different paces. 

AM - 21.5 miles. Emigration Canyon long run. A group of us met at SHP and ran up to the canyon via 17th/19th and Sunnyside. I ran with MarkP and Chad on the way up. Both of the ran very strong - Mark turned at the firehouse, and Chad get pushing all the way up to the hairpin turn. He kept the pace really honest and I was impressed by how he ran this morning. 

When we hit the hairpin it was time for some downhill tempo. The whole point of this was to do some climbing and then beat up the quads a bit on the way back down. Tempo was 15K in 48:18 (5:11 / mile average). Its seems fast but it really isn't - its a lot of downhill. I'll call these MP miles but aerobically they aren't really even that challenging. Thank goodness for Garmin speed checks or else I would have probably run that too fast. I hit the 15K mark back near SHP and then ran back home from there at a relaxed pace. 

I'm icing down my legs as I type out this entry, and in a little while Andrea and I are headed up to Zermatt in Midway for the rest of the weekend. I plan to soak in hot tubs as much as possible over the next 36 hours!

Forgot to mention this earlier, but there was a dead bobcat on the side of the road about a mile up the canyon. Kinda cool to actually see a bobcat, but really sad that it got hit by a car.

PM - 3.5 miles easy along the golf course at Wasatch Mountain State Park during a break from hot tubbing and eating.