Well friends, I know I’ve been a little quiet lately. That is usually a good sign or bad sign. I’m happy to report that in my case, it is indeed a good sign. I took a relatively short period of downtime following the IAU Trail Champs in Wales and felt ready to get back at it. The last 4 weeks have been great - both high volume and high quality training. If you haven’t heard, the IAU Road 100k Champs scheduled for South Africa in October has been cancelled. Even so, because I was so mentally prepared to shift into road 100k training this month, I have basically maintained course while I’ve tried to decide what my revised fall racing plans will look like. I’ve almost got the plan figured out now, but I’m not quite ready to put the schedule in writing yet. I’ll let you know when it’s official.
So yeah, the last 4 weeks of training have been great. I’ve worked my mileage up over 100mpw in singles with back-to-back long runs on the weekends, and I’ve also mixed in some good speed workouts. I’ve stuck to the roads mostly because the limited trail choices in Cincinnati aren’t that great in the summer, and if you’re training for a road ultra, you kinda need to train on the roads. So I may not be worried about a flat, road ultra anymore, but I still find it to be a nice change of pace (literally and figuratively) from the trail running. The weather has been unseasonably cool and dry in Cincinnati the last month, so that has really helped me feel unusually good for August. Let’s hope I can keep this training momentum going through September.
I don’t normally like to chase miles simply for the sake of hitting some arbitrary number, but I’ll admit to doing that this month. I’ve got a big goal, and it will get me to a major milestone in my running career. This is really helping to keep the motivation high while my race goals are a bit ambiguous. I’ll be sure to share how it all turns out at the end of August.
But first...I’m running the Hood to Coast Relay this weekend! I tried my best to get out of running this event this year, but I just couldn’t do it. This will be my fourth time running the 197 miles from Mt Hood to Seaside, OR with 11 other teammates...each of us running 3 legs roughly 10km a piece. I’ll be running on a mixed corporate team from GE again this year. I didn’t think I wanted to bother with the travel and interruptions in training to run HTC this year, but perfect timing has work sending me to the Pacific Northwest anyway, so I decided I was destined to run. I’ve always been intrigued by the first leg of the relay which drops 2000ft in less than 6 miles. It’s not classified as the hardest relay leg, so I normally get assigned to run another leg where I might be more useful to the team. Now, I don’t have tons of leg speed anymore, but I figured my experiences over the last couple years make me uniquely qualified to run well downhill, so I might as well jump on the opportunity to run this part of the course. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do.
So that’s what I’ve been up to for the last month, and what I’ll be doing for a few more weeks. Don’t look for me to race anything serious until October, but I’ll let you know when my racing plans are finalized. In the meantime, follow me on twitter (@rundavid1) if you want to live vicariously through my experiences at Hood to Coast and elsewhere. Happy trails...whether they be dirt or paved!
