My Birthday Run

Yes, I turned 51 today. Instead of saying I'm 50, I now have to say I'm "in my fifties". That sounds a little worse for some reason. Anyways, to celebrate, I decided I would do a 5.1 hour trail run up, down, and around Kennesaw Mountain. There are some easy peasy trails, but also some hard core, up and down, technical trails. I was able to do sub-15 minute miles on the easy stuff, but the serious up and down rocky stuff was at 20+ minute miles. Overall I did 17.83 miles in 5:06 for an average pace of 17:10. A little better than my outing at Pine Mountain, but I still need to improve. Right now I'm eating pizza, drinking wine, and catching up on my DVR watching (Glee anyone?)

Here are a couple of pictures of my outing.

Easy Peasy Trail


Roots and Rocks



That's a Trail?



A Little Civil War History Along the Way



The Rewarding View At the Top

Trail Running

I really need some trail running. The Burning River 100 has about 25 miles on the road and 75 miles on trails. That's more trail running than I have in total. In an attempt to remedy that situation, I drove down to FD Roosevelt State Park to get in a little time on the trails. The trails there are well maintained and have some respectable but not too challenging ups and downs, along with good rocky technical sections. I only went for two hours and logged 6.72 miles according to Mr Garmin. That's 18 minute miles. I will need to pick that up quite a bit in the next couple of months. I'm thinking I'll need to be able to do 15 minute trail miles while I'm feeling fresh for my 100 miler. My biggest problem is that I am very tentative on technical sections. The good news is that I got my very first blood drawing trail crash out of the way. There was a very steep downhill section with large rocks leading down to a road crossing. I missed a step and went crashing down. Somehow, I ended up flat on my back, facing the way I had come down. A car went by just as I was crashing. Did he stop to see if I was all right? Of course not! Good thing I was all right, just shaken up, a couple of bruises, and a little blood. Overall a great outing.

Sean's Run Like Hellathon 2 Report

Ok, this is a week late, but I have the IRS and work to blame. I joined a cult called GUTS (Georgia Ultrarunning and Trailrunning Society) and one of the members put on a run for the second year. Instead of doing a long boring training run on his own, he mapped out a 1.13 mile loop around his neighborhood, rented a Porta-Potti, offered his parent's front porch as an aid station, and invited everyone to come over and run as much or as little as they wanted in 12 hours. The course opened up at 7 AM. I slept in and showed up around 11 AM. My plan was to run a minimum of 4 hours if I was feeling bad and a maximum of 6 hours if I was feeling great. (Remember I had run 50 miles just two weeks before.) We were all asked to bring shareable food and drinks, so I dropped off my can of Pringles, bag of animal crackers, and bottle of Gatorade. Three runners came by about this time and I asked if they were slow enough that I could follow them for a lap so I would know where the course turns were. They assured me they would be slow since they had already been running for several hours. Kena was one of the runners, she had just run the tough SweetH2O 50k the weekend before and was taking it easy so I could keep up with her. She prefers the 24 hour and 100 mile runs. After the first lap, I was mostly on my own, but I did get to run with Matt Jenkins for a bit. He was running with a 30 pound pack and was barefoot, training for a 760 mile run across North Carolina to raise money for the Western Youth Network. Another Bad-A$$ dude was Jason. He showed up planning to run 6 laps for a 10k since he had also run the SweetH2O the weekend before. However, when new people showed up, he went out and did another couple of laps. Before he knew it, he was 4 laps short of a marathon, so he succumbed to peer pressure and did that. Then, of course a 50k was within reach, and once again the peer pressure kicked in and he ended up doing 28 laps for a total of 31.64 miles. Way to go Jason!

I stuck with my plan and at 5:59:29 I had completed 26 laps for a total of 29.38 miles. Although I only had 2 more laps to do a 50k, I did not succumb to peer pressure and had a beer instead.

In other training, I ran a total of 61.4 miles last week and 52.9 miles this week since I did a "short" long run of only 15 miles today.

What Happened To Spring?

We had a week or so of perfect spring running weather, then this week summer and its higher temperatures arrived. Well, I knew I needed to start heat acclimation training, but I was hoping to start it in May.

My recovery week went very well. I took Sunday and Wednesday off, and here's what I did the rest of the week.

Monday - 3 mile shuffle on the treadmill in 35:47 for an average pace of 11:56.

Tuesday - 5.2 miles in one hour for an average pace of 11:33.

Thursday - 3.71 miles in 40 minutes for an average pace of 10:48. Temperature was in the 80s but for some reason, my legs wanted to move fast so this turned into an accidental tempo run.

Friday - 7.19 miles in 1:30 for an average pace of 12:32. I paid for my exuberance the day before during this run. Had to do a lot of walking the final 30 minutes.

Saturday - 4.43 miles in 50 minutes for an average pace of 11:18.

Sunday - 14.3 miles in 3 hours for an average pace of 12:36. Purposely ran with the temperature in the 80s. Heart rate started creeping up the last hour so I added more walking breaks.

Total mileage this week was 37.8 miles. I plan to continue running during the afternoon with the warmer temperatures to continue the heat acclimation. I'm also going to try to run on trails or run up and down Stone Mountain once a week. On Tuesday my running cult is doing a trail run with pizza after. Since I'm not working that day I'm going to try to make it. I've been assured there will be some people there as slow as me, we shall see.