Per Aspera Ad Astra

Traditional Sunday spiritual experience in the mountains (well, the foothills today), with Holly.  8.5 easy miles from my place up C and B to City Creek, up the trail, up the turn on the left ~ a mile up, up to the trail that ends right before the first towers, and back.  Garmin uncharacterstically lost signal for awhile on the way out.  Way back was 4.25, way out was a quarter shorter, despite same route and I actually noticed when it lost the signal, so I'm just doubling the way back for 8.5 instead of the Garmin's 8.21.  9:00 pace because of all of the uphill and because Holly wasn't enjoying the mid-60s temps and intense sun with her fur getting pretty long lately.

The mountain bikers were really obnoxious, as is typical for Shoreline.  Holly and I were running down from the towers against some some fat woman biking up to them.  She couldn't handle the not-very-step uphill and, right after I went by, she swerved hard on the trail to keep her momentum going while going up the uphill.  She came within about an inch of running over Holly, who was running 2 feet directly behind me on a leash and had to dive off the edge of the trail, forcing me to grind to a halt and nearly pulling me off the trail with her.  Good thing Holly has common sense for a dog, but seriously, bikers, if you can't handle sharing the trail, get off your bike when a pedestrian (who ALWAYS has the right away over bikes) is coming, or better yet, stay at home and eat a bucket of ice cream rather than riding out of control and endangering others.  I can't wait until winter, when only the serious and respectful bikers touch the trails.

My new-ish car (bought at the beginning of summer) started to have issues, so I had to bring it into the shop.  Jogged a half mile from there to get to trax, rode the trax up, jogged a half mile across campus.  The mechanics only asked for the key, but set off the alarm somehow and needed the fob to turn it off, so I had to get back to the mechanics shop mid-day to give that to them and mixed in more jogging to and from trax (including one 4 block full-out sprint to successfully make it to the tracks station before the trax got there on the way back).  At the end of the day, my car wasn't done, so I just ran home another 2.5 miles.  So, not really a structured run in there, but still got in 5 miles in jeans and dress boots. Hah.

Didn't have my car back from the shop yet, so I ran to work, 2.5 miles.  It's always fun to show up to work sweaty.  Hah.  The shop called me mid-day and said they didn't have time to figure it out, so I went and picked it up, jogging a half mile from trax along the way.  Took Holly out for another 6, up and down Memory Grove / City Creek.  We picked up the down miles, hitting 6:09, 5:54, 5:44 (pace for .62), and the downhill made the pace feel nice and relaxed.

14 miles, about 12 with James.  Met up with him after .3 miles at 5th East / South Temple, ran to his house for him to drop off his backpack, and then ran to the end of 5th East at 4500 South, right around 7 miles when we got there.  Splits on the way out were pretty easy, ranging from 6:52 to 7:04.  On the way back, we did 6:26 (slightly downhill, about marathon effort), 6:21 (slightly downhill, marathon effort), 6:18 (uphill, only a little faster, but that uphill was noticeable, felt like it was getting to be about tempo), 6:01 (first half down, 2nd half up, full on tempo), 5:55 (uphill, hard), then another .2 at 5:5x pace before jogging the last block to James's house, and then I jogged home very easy (8:20 pace, quite uphill, 5 or 6% over th last mile).  Good run overall, I felt strong on the marathon pace, although that 5:55 mile was not feeling great.  Hip was totally fine.

Didn't get in a run.  Oh well.  Wasn't looking for huge mileage quite yet this week, so it's OK.

3 miles with Holly, over to E, up to 11th, down to City Creek, down Memory Grove.  8:00-ish pace on the steep uphill, then settled into a 5:36 mile (pretty downhill) going down from 11th and down Memory Grove, finally doing half a mile at 4:56 pace (equally downhill, just going a little harder).  Just trying to get my legs feeling speedy for an XC race the next day.  Jogged home and then shook out for another half mile to make sure I was loose.

2+ mile warmup, Dracula's Dash for Hope 5k, short (not even a mile) cooldown.

Dracula's Dash is almost certainly the slowest 5k course I've ever run.  The course is XC, with pretty long grass, and features 3 loops of a little over a mile, each of which has 6 extremely tight turns of 90 degrees or more, 4 extremely steep rhythm-sucking hills (2 up, 2 down, with a few more pretty steep hills, mostly around 20-30'), and a quarter mile of running on a muddy path across a slope, making it hard to get traction.  This morning, the grass was frosted over, so everything was pretty wet, and the dirt portions were muddy.  I ran this race on a whim last year and won with a 19:19.  The next few close-to-accurately measured 5ks that I ran were within a couple seconds of 17:30 (with a 15:25 on a super flat and fast 2.85 mile course in there as well), so I feel that it's 90-120 seconds slow, at least for me, being the type of runner that likes to get a rhythm going.

Anyway, I warmed up with a loop and a half of the course and some more light jogging, and then the race started.  I led from wire to wire and the whole thing was pretty uneventful except that a kid wearing a banana suit stuck pretty close for the first mile or so.  I remember thinking, about a half mile in, that I would quit running forever if I lost to a 20 year old in a banana suit.  Fortunately, he fell off, so I get to keep running in the future.

Anyway, I averaged 6:00 pace exactly for this super slow course and finished the slightly long 5k in 18:51.  The time is irrelevant compared to other 5ks.  What matters is that it was 28 seconds faster than last year while equally early in a training cycle, so I figure that I should be able to run some reasonable courses faster this fall than I did last year.

I wouldn't normally pay $35 for a little 5k like this, but it's put on by a great organization that helps abandoned children, so my money seems well spent.

Went out for another 4 and change loop around the Avenues with Holly later in the day.  Legs felt fine, but I kept it really easy (8:00 average).