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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Am I really running 26.2 in a couple of months?

Sunday was the 2nd time in 4 or so years that I opted to run instead of ski. I wanted to go out for a late afternoon ski at Pineland because I had snowshoe run in the morning with TMR at The Brad. But I was busy working on a research paper and it got late and it was easier to just lace up the running shoes than drive to Pineland.

Summary: 10.7 mile fairly hilly road run. The goal was a progression but it was more like a slow tempo run with 7K of something slower than marathon pace and then a slow cooldown. Something that would have been really easy in the fall turned out to be astonishingly hard Sunday. What's the deal?

1) I snowshoe ran 4.4 miles at Bradbury 5 hours earlier
2) I did a reasonably exhausting 25K classic ski at Pineland the day before
3) I hadn't run at all in exactly 2 weeks
4) I have averaged only 13.1 mpw of running over the last 15 weeks!
5) the longest stretch I have run on the road since the marathon (October 3) is about 1.5 miles
6) I've had the last remnants of the flu and have felt a little rundown and the coughing has kept me up at night.

Anyway, in the fall, I thought running Boston at 8 min/mi pace would be a walk in the park. Now I recognize the folly in that thought. If I'm going to run 26 miles at what should be a very easy pace, I'll need to figure out how to do this with very little running training because I'm really not going to give up much skiing for running as long as the trails are skiable.

Distance: 10.7 miles
Pace: 7:30/mile
Course: Woodville Road loop + there and back

Saturday, January 1, 2011

New Year's Day Triple Play


1. 5K Snowshoe run with the dogs

2. 19K easy skate ski with JB. Hot, hot, hot. Oak Hill was great. Campus loop not so much.

3. 4K backcountry ski on snomo trails with Hugh. Snow a little thin in spots for the big rocks on the downhill trail.