Per Aspera Ad Astra

At Snowbird, up Gad to Hidden Peak, down Peruvian and then back over.  Calling the up "tempo" effort because I was completely exhausted by the top.  Had 2 ibuprofen in me and hip felt great, even with the long downhill that got quite steep in a couple spots.

Sick chest workout.  My recent max on decline press was 1x205 and I felt like I was getting stuck ever since I hit 200 again.  In this lift, after an extra 2 rest days, I hit 3 x 210 with relative ease, so I will almost definitely hit 215 or even 220 next time.  No running, just ran the last 4 days and it's not smart for me to jump back into daily running so quickly.

Best run in months.  9 miles in 55:xx on a treadmill so I could stop whenever necessary if my hip bugged me (I was running without anti-inflammatories for more than 6 miles for the first time in months).  It never did.  First 3 at 6:18 pace (roughly MP if in shape), then the 4th mile at 6:00 pace (tempo-ish pace), then miles 5 and 6 at 6:18 again, then 7 and 8 at 6:00 pace.  Finally, 8 to 8.7 at 6:18 and then 8.7 to 9 at 5:00 pace.  Felt really good to rip out a fast run.  This is a long cry from the workouts I was doing before I ran 1:15, but it felt easier than I expected and I could have carried on with the 6:18s for awhile longer.  That said, the goal isn't to really kill any workouts right now, but to just continue to get healthy and strong, so I stopped at my pre-determined maximum allowed distance.  I've been more consistent with my PT exercises recently and it's really noticeable, which is great.

With Holly in Mill Creek.  Canyon road, Terraces Road, Terraces Trail to Elbow Fork, across the street, Pipeline to Burch Hollow trailhead, back up the canyon road.  Roughly marathon effort, which is 2+ min/mile slower up there with all of the climb (low point almost exactly 6000', high point of 7300', with some roll along the way) and the difficulty of the Terraces Trail (narrow, fallen logs to hurdle, steep rocky spots, tons of sharp turns).  Pretty fun run.

From field house to president's circle and then 9.6 with James (campus to 27th south, up to 2000, back along 21st and then foothill, through upper campus, and back down).  9.8 total in 63:39 with a lot of climb for a road run, so a pretty hard effort considering my poor current fitness.  Also, mapmyrun lists it as 10.04, so we must have done a REALLY good job of cutting corners.  I took ibuprofen, but I'm starting to think that I don't need it much anymore.  In any case, my hip didn't hurt and only felt marginally off balance at one point in the first half of the run (good for the 2nd half).

Low point of 4428', high point of 4849' with some roll, and yet MapMyRun manages to claim 387' of gain?  Even the high point minus the low point is more than that, discountint all roll.  Try more like 500'+.

Anyway, this was a good run, roughly similar effort to my pretty hard run on Monday.  I'll take tomorrow off and then I think I'm going to race a trail 15k on Saturday.  I have 2 hours to decide and sign up, so I better get on that...

Sapper Joe 15k in 1:21:45 (annoyingly, officially 1:22:45 on their website... wish my garmin would connect to the PC so I could get that corrected), going on 2 hours and 40 minutes of sleep (was out late, went to bed at 2, got up at 4:40 to make it to the 6AM start at Camp Williams in Riverton).  Old course record was 1:28:xx and I had the rather confident idea that I could run 1:20 and easily win after looking at the course profile:

 2284' of climb in 10.93 miles isn't that bad, right?  I guess I didn't really look carefully enough to see that the portions of climb between 3.2 and 4.0 were a 25% grade...

Anyway, the race took off and some hairy ultra-running looking dude without a shirt blasted off the front.  I decided that he looked serious, so I went with it and pushed hard from the gun.  I hit the first mile (with 200' net uphill) in 6 high, about 10 seconds back and he just kept pushing.  By mile 2, I was about 20 seconds back thanks to another 400' of climb and by mile 3, I was 30 seconds back (both very uphill and slow, 8+ pace).  This wasn't good, but he seemed to have a slightly awkward cadence on the climbs, so I figured I could catch him on the absurdly steep climb that I saw looming ahead.  He set a punishing pace on the downhill rollers leading up to the big impending climb, so I gained no time leading up to it.  Going up the climb, I maxed myself out but couldn't gain any ground.  Mile 4 took 14:59 (not a typo) and involved mostly hands on knees powerhiking.  Fun.  I don't know what to say about this except that it massively sucked.  After this death climb, we had some nice net downhill (with steep grunts mixed in) rollers up until 5.5 miles.  I had been laser focused on trying to keep up with this guy without completely burning myself out for the first 5.5 miles, but when I hit 5.5 and realized that virtually all of the uphill was gone, I decided to just focus even harder, go for broke, and try to catch this guy.  My watch said 8:00 flat pace average for the mile split so far at 5.5 and by 6, my mile split read 6:35.  That means 5.5 to 6 was 5:10 pace, but I wasn't gaining.  I figured if I kept hammering, I'd catch him, so I ran mile 7 in 5:11, but managed to lose ground on him.  At that point, I started to get a side stitch (really uncommon for me), so I only hit mile 8 in 5:36.  Mile 9, I drifted off pace a bit to 5:44.  Mile 10, I picked the focus back up and closed from about 45 seconds back to 30 seconds back, hitting a 5:42 with one very irritating extended uphill mixed in.  However, I was never going to be able to pick up 30 seconds in the last mile or so and had already pushed myself to the max, so I stayed about 30 seconds back until I mistakenly missed the last turn, tacked on another 40 or so seconds, and roughly doubled his winning margin (final pace of 5:37/mile for the last .96 with more fun uphill).  In all fairness, the turn wasn't marked, but it was just the opposite of the starting section, so I probably should have recognized it.

In any case, I finished in 1:21:4x and realized my heel was in agony due to a massive blood blister (funny how you don't notice these things when pushing super hard).  I'm guessing my overused shoes probably aren't helping:

 Without the missed turn, I would have been about 1:21 flat, having thought that 1:20 was the best case scenario on what I thought was an easier course.  In other words, I met or probably even slightly exceeded my expectations for what I could run here today and really couldn't have done much better.  The winner was simply better.

I chatted with the winner and found out he was Nephi Tyler, who ran a 4:01 mile and 3:43 1500 in 2005 while at the U in their last year of men's track, having since dipped under 15 in the 5k a handful of times.  While chatting with him, Amiee came in to win the women's race (and maybe even break the course record???).

Anyway, Nephi is a sick runner, so while my limited abilities probably translate better to trails than his (and more than anything, I will push and punish my body more than virtually anyone in these shorter trail races), sticking 30 seconds back of him for most of the race is a huge win for me.  I was super focused and basically in a state of complete agony for virtually the entire race after about a mile in, so I know it was a solid effort. :)  I think that I'll be able to knock some serious time off when in shape, so when I run this again next year (which I'm definitely going to do), I think 1:15 or 1:16 would be a good 'A' goal to shoot for.

Ok, time to nap for a couple hours.