A different kind of double

I've run a lot of doubles.  In fact, I typically run at least two, sometimes three, doubles per week when I'm in the thick of training for a race.  These typically consists of an easy 6-8 miles on roads in the morning before work and then 4-5 miles on hilly trails, usually Lookout Mtn, at lunchtime.  Nothing spectacular, just an easy way to get in double-digit miles for the day while sneaking in some trail runs.

This past Saturday, I ran a very different double.  With the Red Hot 55K only four weeks away, I wanted to for sure get in a long run.  Shannon and the kids were planning on running the Snowman Shuffle 5K/1K in Spearfish on Saturday morning, followed by a basketball game for Caiden (whose team I coach) in the afternoon.  I knew that if I was going to get a long run in on Saturday, it would be best to get it over with before all of that stuff started, so I woke up well before the crack of dawn on Saturday and set out for my run.  The plan was to run from Belle Fourche to Spearfish along the backroads, which would end up being about 18 miles and allow me to meet the family at the city park for their race.

Initially, my run didn't feel all that great.  My legs felt fine, but I was moving much slower than it felt like I should be moving.  For a long run, that's not really that big of a deal and it's a typical occurrence when I run really early in the morning, but it was still annoying me.  Besides that, it felt much colder than the temperature WeatherBug had led me to believe it would be...cold enough that the tube on my hydration pack kept freezing up, which was further annoying me. Finally, though, I moved into a pocket of warmer air (another typical occurrence on early morning winter runs) and fell into a solid groove (yet another typical long run occurrence) and started feeling pretty good as the sun came up.  I cruised into the park 18 miles later with about 15 minutes left before the race was to start.  My legs still felt pretty fresh so I decided that since I was there and there was a race, I might as well run the damn thing.

After watching the kids 1K, where Caiden and Chloe placed 1st and 3rd, respectively, we lined up for the 5K.  Full-on honesty, there were only 25 or so people there, so this wasn't a stacked field by any means.  But there was one guy I knew, Carlos, who I struggle to keep up with on fresh legs, much less on 18 mile legs.  The gun sounded and Carlos was nice enough to let me hang with him and chat a bit until we hit the water station at about halfway and then he was gone.  I kept cruising and my legs actually felt pretty good, I just didn't have a ton of speed.  Ended up with a 20:50 (my Garmin measured the course a bit short) and 2nd place.  And the best part?  Since the race was a fundraiser for the local Girl Scout troop, they had free samples of Girl Scout cookies at the finish.  Not a bad end to a 21 mile day!

Leadville

I am in.

I hate committing to a race so far in advance (Leadville is Aug. 17th), but registration opened on New Year's Day and I suspected it would fill up fairly fast, so I took the plunge and registered before I could talk myself out of it.

Should be a hoot.  Or something.

Looking ahead to 2013

Culminating with the (unofficial and unsanctioned) South Dakota Trail Championships a couple of weeks ago, the local trail/ultra running season is (un)officially over.  Overall, not much to complain about.  I missed a couple more of the Black Hills trail series races than I would've liked, but I also got to run one that I really wanted to run (the Sundance 50K) but didn't think I'd be able to, so I guess it all balances out.  Looks like I finished 4th in the men's open division of the trail series, just 2.5 points out of 3rd.  This is the first year in the series' four year existence that I haven't finished in the top 3, but that's what happens when you miss races.  Not a big deal, regardless.

As is typical of this time of year, the motivation to put in big miles is somewhat lacking.  Forty to fifty miles a week, with a couple of flirtations with 60, have been pretty typical the last couple of months.  Haven't run more than 15 miles in a single run since the Sundance 50K at the end of September.  I've never since I started running ten years or so ago taken a planned break with absolutely no running that has lasted more than three or four days.  I tried to take a week off, for no good reason, at about this time last year and I think my hiatus from running lasted all of three days before I caved and hit the trail again.  Well, no such plans this year.  In fact, quite the opposite since my first ultra of 2013 is actually looming fairly close.  I'm signed up for the Moab Red Hot 55K on February 16th. Team South Dakota consisting of myself and friends Ryan, Nathan and Paul (who is actually from Wyoming, but just barely) will be making the long drive over to experience some slickrock racing.  Hopefully the weather doesn't suck, because driving across Wyoming sucks ass under normal conditions, much less in the middle of a winter storm.  But I digress....the point is that the relatively low miles I've been putting in recently will have to be ramped up soon if I'm going to be in decent shape for a 50K+ in a few months.  One of my goals for 2013 will be to not just finish ultras....I've established that I can finish 50Ks, 50s and 100s in relatively decent, front of the middle of the pack times.  Now to answer the question of how fast can I do this thing if I really nail the training (and the race itself too, of course)?

Beyond Moab, the schedule is still a bit up in the air.  Ryan and I have discussed returning to the Quad Rock 50 in Fort Collins in May and maybe an excursion down to the Grand Canyon to run R2R2R.  I suspect strongly that I will run another 100 at some point next year but am having a hard time choosing which one.  All other factors equal, my choice would likely be Cascade Crest in Washington, but that's a fairly good haul from here (although having relatives in the Seattle area would at least make the trip more worthwhile).  Leadville is another likely choice.  I've heard a lot of opinions (many not too flattering) of how Lifetime has handled the event, but it still has that legendary mystique about it that intrigues me.  Plus, I've had several people tell me that the Black Hills 100 is harder than Leadville....wouldn't mind being able to judge that better myself (conceding that I've never actually run the entire BH100 course in one go).  The Bear is up there too, but  Ryan has expressed interest in running that one and I told him I'd pace him if he did.  So many choices...

Alright, enough of this.  Time for a run.

Tinton Trail Picture Tour

I have two "go-to" local trails for running on: Lookout Mtn and the Tinton Trail.  Lookout's main advantage is that it's convenient...I can see it from my office window and it's about a mile's worth of warmup running on city streets from my office to the trailhead.  Tinton is a out of town a bit, but features gentler, longer, more runnable and generally more scenic trails (while still offering some elevation gain).  Both are user-created trails, the primary "user" in both cases being local mountain bikers, but Tinton tends to be much better maintained (some of the Lookout trails get kind of overgrown in summer due to lack of maintenance/use).  This is primarily due to the fact that Tinton gets much more use and is partly the venue for the Dakote Five-O mountain bike race on Labor Day weekend.

This time of year is the best time to be on Tinton, with the cool weather and fall colors in full display (well, almost full display).  With a day off on Friday, I decided to head out for a medium distance run (ended up being 13 miles total) and took my iphone along with me.  As you will see, I just updated to the new iOS and discovered that my camera now has a panoramic option.  So, I've been taking panoramics of pretty much everything.  I was hoping to get some good shots of the aspens in full blazing yellow, but was unfortunately a good week or two too late for that as they had mostly dropped their leaves already.  

Lower on the trail you go through some open, recently harvested pine stands (I actually had to go cross country about a mile in to skirt around some loggers cutting right alongside the trail).  A little further up, the trail transitions into a mix of pine and burr oak, as seen in the first picture (and you can see that the oak has gone brown....again, a week or two too late). This first pic is also very near the site where I saw a coyote chasing a deer fawn early in the morning a couple of months ago.  Straight outta National Geographic.

The next pic is 4 miles up the trail, in a dense, dark stand of pine. This is where the name "Black" Hills comes from.  As you can see, I was starting to get into some snow at this point as I gained elevation.

My favorite part of the trail doesn't come until you're about 5 or 6 miles up.  After running up a drainage, where the trail meanders back and forth across an intermittent stream, you come out into an open area with large stands of old growth aspen mixed in with pine and meadows.

This last pic is just up the trail from the previous one, after the trail cuts directly into the aspen stand.  It would've been a much better pic if the aspen were still in full bloom, but alas...

Win some, lose some

Two weeks, two races.  Last weekend was the Sundance 50K across the border in Wyoming.  I was horribly under-prepared for running a good 50K and it showed.  I was cruising along fairly well at sub-6 pace (my goal) for the first 25 miles or so, but ran spectacularly head-first into The Wall on a steep section of uphill after the last aid station.  As I hiked along at an almost impossibly slow pace I watched the average pace on my Garmin climb higher and higher until it was obvious that sub-6 was a pipe dream.  I did make a bit of a recovery on the last couple of miles of downhill, but it was too little too late at that point.  Ended up with a 6:24 finish in 6th place (only 20 or so finishers).  Beautiful course, especially with the fall colors in full effect, and a bit tougher than I had expected.  Would definitely like to give it another go with a more solid training cycle under me.  And, for the life of me, I don't know why this race gets so little attention....there should be more than 20-some entrants for this one if the word gets out.  Paul does a great job with it and sounds like he'll be adding a 30K option next year (in addition to the existing 10K, which gets a much better turnout than the 50K).

A week later, this past Saturday, I ran a very different race.  My wife signed me up for the inaugural Firefly 5K in Belle Fourche, a fundraiser for a scholarship fund that was scheduled for a nighttime start (started at 8:00).  I'm not big into road 5Ks, but I thought the night running idea was a cool one, especially under the full moon, so I didn't complain too much about being thrust into the field.  As it turns out, good thing she did sign me up as I ended winning the damn thing.  Of course, it's more impressive if I just leave it at that and not mention my time or how many other runners there were.  Actually, I'm not even sure how many runners there were...I think the total field was over 60 people, but many were walkers.  My time was 20:40, not blazing fast, but actually faster than I really expected given the fact that I haven't done any fast running since.....uh...probably the Hayfever race in Belle back in June (where I finished 2nd to a high school cross country runner....damn punk kids). In any case, it was fast enough and earned me a cool $10 to spend at Subway.  Not a bad way to spend a Saturday night.

Dancing with the sun (finally)

The Sundance Trail Run is held each year near the end of September just across the border from me in the Bearlodge Mtns in eastern Wyoming.  The first couple of years, it was just a 10K and I ran it both years.  In fact, those were two of my first trail races.  RD Paul, an ultra runner himself and finisher of the Black Hills 100K this year, added a 50K a couple of years ago.  By that time, I was fully gravitating toward trail running and was starting to get into ultras and was immediately excited by the opportunity to run one close to home, in the fall foliage of the Bearlodge.  Despite my enthusiasm for the race, I have yet to run the Sundance 50K.  You see, my son started playing youth football that first year that Paul included the 50K distance and for each of the last two years he has had a game on the day of the race and I've been involved as either a spectator or, starting last year, as a coach.  So, I assumed that I wouldn't have the opportunity to run Sundance this year.

That all changed a few days ago.  After several delays, we finally received the full season football schedule for this year (a week after we actually started playing games) and I immediately noticed that our bye week is September 22nd, the day of the Sundance run.  Upon seeing this, I almost immediately logged into Ultrasignup and registered for the 50K.

The bad news is that, assuming that we would have a game that day and I wouldn't be able to run, I really haven't been training all that hard.  The last several weeks I've been in the 30-40 mile range with, really, no long runs whatsoever since the El Vaquero Loco 50K on Aug. 11th (my longest run since then was 12.7 miles up and down Harney Peak, the high point of South Dakota, a few weeks ago).  I guess you could say I'm well tapered??  Or just undertrained, if you're being realistic about it.  Whatever.  I may not get another chance to run Sundance in the near future, so I had to grab the opportunity when it arose.  My race may not be pretty, but I know the course will be, so that's good enough for me....I guess maybe my (probable) slow pace will give me more time to enjoy the fall scenery.

The Crazy Cowboy

To put it simply, my running since Bighorn has been pretty.....meh.  I really didn't feel all that bad after Bighorn and took things easy, in no hurry to rush myself back into high mileage/high intensity weeks.  Just as it felt like my legs were regaining some of their normalcy, I ran the Missoula Marathon, which just seemed to set me back a couple of weeks.  After running long runs on trails for the majority of the winter/spring, my legs weren't ready for a long (moderately) hard effort on pavement just three weeks after Bighorn and I was left feeling much more sore after the marathon than I was after Bighorn.  Not really a big deal, except for this other race on the horizon: the El Vaquero Loco 50K (aka "the crazy cowboy").

I first learned about El Vaquero Loco last summer when my friends Ryan and Nathan ran it.  Located outside of Afton, WY, just south of the Tetons and Yellowstone, the course is brutally tough, featuring about 9,000 feet of elevation gain over the out and back route.  Now, I certainly haven't run every 50K in the country, but this one has got to rank right up there with the toughest.  Speedgoat in Utah is probably tougher, but not many others can make that claim.  To put the elevation gain in perspective, the Bighorn 100, widely regarded as a fairly tough 100 miler, has between 16,000 and 17,000 feet of gain.  El Vaquero Loco has over half of that across less then a third of the distance.  In any case, at last year's race Ryan met the race director, Ty Draney, who is himself a very talented ultra runner, and offered him a free entry into the Black Hills 100.  Ty accepted and, in exchange, offered Ryan and I free entries to this year's El Vaquero Loco (this race directing thing has some perks!....hey, if any Leadville race directors are reading this, drop me a line...).  So here we are.

Eventually, my legs did start to recover a bit from Missoula.  I found that the more I stuck to trails, the better they felt in general.  But, still, I wasn't able to manage much in the way of weekly mileage.  Between starting a new position at work and an admitted lack of real motivation, it's been a struggle to break 50 mpw.  One thing I have tried to focus on is elevation gain, so with that in mind I ran two different "long" (in terms of time more so than distance) runs up Crow Peak hoping to whip my climbing legs into shape.  The first was a double summit of Crow, approximately 3100 feet of elevation gain in just under 13 miles.  The second, a week later, was a triple summit, 4600 feet of gain in just over 19 miles.  Still less gain than I'd face at El Vaquero Loco, but the best I can do with what I have available in the Black Hills.

After that Crow triple, I was actually feeling fairly optimistic about things. The third ascent was a slog, but I was able to recover and still run the descent fairly strongly.  Things were looking up.  And then I got sick.  Nothing starts off a two week taper quite like feeling like a miserable pile of shit for three days.  After sitting around feeling like I'd been hit by a truck, with some nausea thrown in, for three days, I got back to running on Thursday (9 days before El Vaquero Loco) and it was one of the more horrendous 4 mile runs of my life.  Five miles the next day didn't feel any better.  It was like I had taken 3 years off of running instead of 3 days: burning lungs, dead tired legs, pathetically slow pace....it was a mess.  Ten miles on Saturday went okay, but not great and then 7 on Sunday was less than remarkable as well.  So, a week to go before I'm planning on running a 50K in the mountains and it takes all I've got to run 10 flat miles at a slow pace.  Super.  Thankfully, things started too look up a bit in the final week before the race as 6 and 7 mile runs on Lookout Mtn. and the Tinton trail felt much better than the road efforts over the weekend.  With nothing else to do about it, I was left hoping that normalcy would return by Saturday.

Ryan and I set off for western Wyoming on Thursday afternoon and were immediately faced with the conundrum of how exactly to get across Wyoming.  If you've never tried it before, finding a direct east/west route across northern and/or central Wyoming is basically impossible.  The highways tend to avoid going over mountain ranges as much as possible, resulting in a bunch of back and forth travel as you skirt around the mountains instead, which consequently adds significant mileage to what is already a fairly long trip.  Ultimately, we chose to head over to Buffalo, across the southern end of the Bighorns and then on to Worland, Thermopolis and Riverton before heading up the Wind River and setting up camp for the night about 20 miles west of Dubois.  By "setting up camp", I mean that we crashed in a camper that a friend of Ryan's has parked in a storage shed for use during backcountry ski season.  We were up fairly early Friday and finished out the 11 hour or so journey by skirting past the Tetons through Jackson and finally down the Star Valley to Afton and onward to our campsite at Cottonwood Lake (the start/finish area for the race) about 15 miles outside of Afton.  We were somewhat surprised to be among the first runners there, but that was fine since it meant we had plenty of campsites to choose from (by late afternoon, the campground was packed).

Turns out, we chose a campsite fairly close to some folks from Salt Lake City, Jeremy and Ashley, who had volunteered at the Nemo aid station during this year's Black Hills 100, so we got a chance to catch up with them around the campfire that night.  That is, until Mother Nature put the kaibash on the campfire with some fairly significant rainfall.  As we retreated to the tent for the night, Ryan asked if I'd ever camped in this particular tent in the rain before.  Nope, sure haven't, but surely the Walmart special tent will be water-tight, right?  Turns out it was, other than a very small leak around the door zipper that didn't cause us any real problems.  And the rain was fairly short-lived anyhow. After a fairly fitful sleep that alternated between me being too hot in my sleeping bag and too cold outside of it, my alarm fired off at 4:00 AM and we were up making coffee and a quick breakfast ahead of the 6:00 AM start. A bit of standing around in the dark ensued before moseying down to the start/finish line and taking off with just enough light to see comfortably without a headlamp.

The course itself is an out and back, starting at Cottonwood Lake and climbing up to and past three high mountain lakes before descending into the Swift Creek drainage and the turnaround at the Swift Cr. trailhead (which is also where the 25K race starts before covering the return leg of the 50K course).  From Swift Cr., it's back up and and over and down to Cottonwood.  All told, about 9000 feet of gain for the 50K, with a big chunk of that coming in two climbs: the initial 4 mile climb from Cottonwood up to the first, and smallest, of the lakes and then from Swift Cr TH up for a solid 8 miles to the northernmost of the lakes. For me, the plan was simple: take it fairly easy on the uphills (i.e., hike everything) and then try to make up some time on the downhills.  Hopefully, this would result in still having the legs to run the final 4.5 miles of downhill at the end.  Ultrasignup had projected my time as 7:02 and I myself thought maybe sub-7 was possible if I had a good day, but I really didn't know what to expect on a course like this coming off of a slightly lackluster training cycle and a few days of being sick.  So, I just what I got and dealt with it.

What I got was some absolutely stunning scenery.  I didn't carry my camera with me, so I don't have pictures to back this up and words will hardly do it justice, but this has to be one of the most scenic race courses in the country.  Once the course topped out near the high mountain lakes, it was like you were running through something you usually only see in magazines or on postcards.  Definitely made all of that climbing worthwhile.  

For the most part, my pacing strategy worked.  I ran when it felt comfortable and hiked when it didn't (which was often).  Ended up hitting the turnaround in 3:25 and knew it was highly unlikely that I was going to pull off a nearly even split and get a sub-7.  This suspicion was verified on the long slog back uphill on the second leg.  Near the top of said slog at about mile 20, I felt my stomach turn suddenly and before I knew it, I was Tebowing in the wildflowers along the trail with the dry heaves.  After three bouts of this (on the third, a very small amount of liquid came up, but nothing significant), my stomach felt much better and would end up feeling rock solid for the rest of the race.  I finally topped out not much later and, as hoped, found I was still able to run the downhills fairly comfortably.  After one last grinder of a climb coming out of the last aid station, I hit that final 4.5 miles of downhill and was able to run it all.  I wasn't laying down 6:00 miles, by any means, but it's all relative at that point. I was moving forward in a running motion, and that was good enough for me.  I managed to pass three other 50Kers in the last few miles, and didn't get passed by any, and ultimately returned to Cottonwood Lake in 7:34:53, 21st place overall.  Ryan had laid down a smoking good time, running a 6:02 and finishing 4th overall.

Funny thing is, the day before the race I had been joking with Ryan that every time I ran a 50K, it took me an hour longer than the one before it.  My first was Lean Horse, which I ran in 4:46.  Then came Bighorn in 5:46.  Then Elkhorn in 6:40.  Well, looks like the trend continues.  Of course, those hour differences are directly proportional to the difficulty of the course.  Guess I have two choices:  find an easier 50K to run or just go whole hog and run Speedgoat next year (not likely).

In any case, all in all a great day in the mountains.  I'd highly recommend this race to anyone who's into ultras; you'd be hard pressed to find a more stunning course.  The race itself is kind of obscure and not well known outside of the Utah/Idaho/Wyoming area, but it's well worth looking in to.