A Busy Weekend and Confidence-Builder

The weekend started out with me getting off from work at 6 pm Friday, then hitting the gym for a 1-1/2 hour weight workout with my personal trainer (Igor). Then, instead of having an recovery meal immediately after my workout, I waited for the rest of my family's meal at about 9 p.m. that night! I must not have been thinking too clearly, because this intense workout followed by no food, would have an affect on my running performance, less than 12 hours later. I also didn't sleep well that night; I ended up with about 4 hours sleep.

At 6 a.m. Saturday morning, a few of us Trail Nerds met to run a long run on the rocky trails at SM Park. It started out hot and humid enough, but was supposed to get to 96 degrees (F) and 60% humidity by 11 a.m. or so. Just great; 3 of us were slated for a 6-hour training run.

I felt pretty good for the first 2 hour loop, and we came back to the cars to refill our water bottles and hydration packs. I didn't feel like eating, but probably should have been eating something at this point. We took off and ran for another hour and circled-back to the cars to drop off another runner. Curt K. was waiting there to start running with us, so we picked-up another runner. By the time 4 hours had elapsed, I was feeling severely depleted. I started to eat some Clif Shot Blocks, and they seemed to help somewhat. By the time we made our way back to the cars again, our total running time was 5:23:00. I decided to call it quits at that point and keep from running myself into the ground. After all, I had a big party to prepare for (that I was hosting at my house), that night. Caleb and Kyle ended up doing more than 6 hours of running.

The party went well, and I seemed to have a lot of energy that night. I went to bed at 1:30 a.m. and woke up at 5:30 a.m. to get ready to run. Great...another measly 4-hours of sleep!

We started our trail run from Kill Creek Park, which has some fairly-technical rocky MTB trails. Five of us Trail Nerds were running, 3 guys and 2 gals. Caleb had had even less sleep than me, (but he is 23 years younger, after all, so what the heck). I started us down the trail in the lead. My legs were a little tight, but I found that I could still run at a decent pace. We hit both of the fun loops there, with 2 times on the first loop. We ran a total of 1-hour, 30 minutes, and covered about 9.4 miles. I felt good about that.

The rest of the day, I felt both hungry and lazy, but could only muster getting a 1-hour nap. I felt good about the whole weekend's training, though. I started out on a low-energy note, got only 4 hours of sleep per night, but still ran strong on the 2nd day. My hamstring and calf issues never surfaced...they felt strong. My next 50-miler is just 4 weeks out. I'm finally starting to feel confident about finishing it in decent form!

Happy trails!
Bad Ben