Per Aspera Ad Astra

Ski day #24 for the season in the AM, this time at Alta.  REALLY fun day out there.

Very late (12:30 AM): 10.5 miles, 6:48 average.  Intended to go easy, but around 5 miles, I got rolling.  Did a 6:06 for mile 6 (slightly net downhill), 6:26 for mile 7 (70' net uphill!), and then 5:39 and 5:34 for miles 8 and 9 (quite downhill, really got rolling down the 4% average grade down University Avenue).  Definitely a bit harder than MP effort overall, but still easier than tempo, so I guess I'll log those miles as MP. Finished up with a nice easy last mile.  Garmin had 10.1, but it got started a couple minutes late.  I thought it was connected when I started, but it wasn't, and after a couple minutes, I noticed that it only had me logged as .08 miles, so I just reset it and started back from 0 after a couple minutes.

AM: Weight is coming down, thanks to a better diet, with help from Allie.  155.6 is the lightest I've been in quite a long time.  Skied for day #25 of the year, this time at Park City MountIn Resort.  I love that my Snowbird pass gets me 3 free days at each of Alta, Deer Valley, and Park City.

PM: 10.4 miles with Holly.  Aves - fed heights- upper campus loop - fed heights - 11th ave - canyon road - loop around capitol building - around the bottom of memory grove and back home.

Didn't get out until 11:30 PM.  Need to fix my running schedule again. Hah.  Up 4th to Virginia, on University to Foothill, up a bit, across to Sunnyside, upper research park, down wakara to foothill, onto capechi, through upper campus, back through federal heights, up to 11th, to B, down A, back home.  Lots of hills, 7:20 average pace, had to fight the urge to start pushing hard a couple of times. :)

Big workout tonight.  1 mile warmup at 6:20 pace, then 4, 3, 2, 1 on treadmill with 4,3,2 minutes rest, starting at about half marathon effort and getting slightly faster each rep, then 1 mile cooldown without a watch on the indoor track..  I did a similar workout on a track last April a few weeks before rather easily running 1:15:33 at Provo City Half (with a lot left at the end) and wanted to run a better workout on a treadmill.  Last year, on the track, the total time was 59:14, so to run an equivalent workout on a treadmill indicating the same fitness, I'd need to hit sub-56:50  I decided to plan for low-mid 56s to make it a slightly "better" workout without crushing myself (I've been trying to not full-on race my workouts as much this cycle, so as to not leave my legs in training).  In hindsight, I mis-timed my rest a little bit and gave myself a bit too much, as I had thought I had done 4,3,2 last time, but had actually done 3,2,1.

Without further ado, times were:

4 miles: 22:58 (5:44.5 pace).  Felt very smooth.

4 minutes rest: ended up taking only 3:45.  4 minutes just felt too long.  I was itching to get going again after less than 2 minutes.

3 miles: 17:00 (5:40 pace). Last half mile was getting harder, but still felt smooth.

3 minutes rest.  Felt a little long, but took the whole thing.

2 miles: 11:05 (5:32.5 pace).  First mile was fluid, and second mile was the hardest mile of the workout, as I split this as 5:36/5:29.

2 minutes rest.  Was happy to have the full 2.

1 mile: 5:16.  Felt pretty fluid.  It's not hard to stay engaged for a little over 5 minutes.

Total time for the 10 miles: 56:19.  I hit exactly the kind of time I wanted, but should have taken 1 minute less rest per cycle.  Overall, it was hard but not super hard, so I'm quite certain that I could've held the same pace with less rest.  In all honesty, I'm not even convinced that it would've been much harder; with nearly 4 minutes of rest between reps 1 and 2, my heart rate had dropped a fair amount by the time I started the 2nd rep, and it took a little bit to find my rhythm.  With less rest, the 2nd rest would've been easier, while the 3rd might not have changed much, and the 4th probably would've been harder.  Maxed out and fully racing, I would estimate my maximum capacity for this kind of workout to be in the ballpark of just under 55 minutes.

Take-aways: I've been getting really confident for March.  I've had some really good workouts lately that have strongly indicated to me that I'm going to be able to run fast, but I haven't been beating myself up in the process, which I think is going to be key on race day.  I've felt fresh and I've been extremely consistent throughout the entire cycle so far, and I think these factors are going to give me massive benefits.

I'm going to race Winter Series 5k on Saturday, and frankly, I have no idea what to expect.  I haven't been training for short stuff, and I generally find it hard to mentally engage for something as short as a 5k, so I find it unlikely that I'll be much faster than, say 17:20.  In any case, the entire focus is on the marathon, and I'm only running this series because it's fun/miserable and everyone else is doing it, so I've already promised myself not to put any stock into it one way or the other.  If I run well, it's not relevant to a marathon.  If I run poorly, that's typical for me in a 5k over the last year, so it doesn't matter.

AM: 6 miles at 9:00 pace in City Creek Canyon. Nice slow recovery run with Sara Davidson, who's in town for OR.

Pm: 7 miles on treadmill @ 7:20 pace without ipod or tv. Certainly less than thrilling...

8.8 miles very easy (9:10 pace) on BOSHO trail in bad conditions (very icy, to the point that I fell, in places, even muddier in other places) with James, Josh, and Nate.  Note to self: Garmin has 8.55, but I started .25 late because it wasn't connected when I left my building.

My first race in a couple months went well.  I did a couple miles of warmup, the Winter Series 5k in 17:02, a couple miles of cooldown.  I went out in 5:32 and felt really comfortable, not to mention that the weather was uncharacteristically good, so I figured I had a shot at sub-17.  Not wanting to blow up (I'm bad at gauging 5ks, and just yesterday thought that anything under 17:20 probably wouldn't happen), I decided to conservatively increase the pace and just sneak under the mark.  I did the 2nd mile in 5:27, and then the 3rd mile in 5:23.  Unfortunately I wasn't planning on 3.13 (I guess I ran the tangents pretty poorly), so my last .13 at 4:59 pace couldn't quite get me there and I ended up at 17:01.6.  Oh well.  This is still my fastest non-aided 5k in Utah (previous was 17:04 in 2009, on a point-to-point course that was net uphill by a measly 5 feet) and my overall 3rd fastest 5k ever (16:34 PR is from my win in the 5k at the National Beer Pong Championships in 2009, down at sea level, and my 16:44 at Running of the Leopards last year was obviously aided).

Race wise, I went out in what must have been about 30th place.  I stuck about there until shortly before a mile, when I started passing people.  I couldn't get a sense of pace for about the first .5 miles, but right around when Steve Ashbaker pulled up to me at a half mile, I started being able to roll, so I took off from him.  I passed another 5 or so guys before the turnaround, and after the turnaround, I saw Sasha pretty far off in the distance.  It took me until 2.3 to catch him, but I did, and then started to focus on Walter.  I caught him around 2.7 or 2.8, and then keyed off closing the gap on Benjamin Pachev from there until the finish (closed on him, but he was too far and still got me by 10 seconds), while fighting off Dennis Simonaitis - who had been running with Walter and then went with me -over the last couple hundred meters.  I don't normally feel like having others in the race affects how I perform all that much, unless I'm just sandbagging for an easy win, but negative splitting was a lot easier today when I had other runners in front of me that I knew I could reel in.

Congrats to Josh E for running nearly 2 minutes faster than last year (and massively leapfrogging me), Scott Keate for an absolutely dominating masters performance (yeah, yeah, he's 39, but he turns 40 this year and counts as masters in the circuit), and Riley for beating a solid course record.  Getting 17th with a 17:02 this year, compared to 12th with a 17:33 last year, indicates that there are a lot of people who are rounding into monster shape for their upcoming early-mid Spring races, so I'm excited to see everyone's results this year.

Noon: Clean air rally.  Some of the speakers were good, but overall it was less effective than it could have been.

PM: Ski day #26 of the season.