On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

I had my misgivings about the Ohlone 50k on Sunday, for which I'd registered. I wasn't sure how I was going to get there. I'd tried going down the entry list for other runners who live in San Francisco, checking for them on Strava to see if they lived close, and none did. So I tried to send messages to those I could find on facebook to see if we could coordinate somehow a ride out. But I got only one response, in the negative. He was staying in Pleasanton the night before, relatively close to the "finish" in Del Valle where we were to meet for a shuttle ride to the start of the point-to-point run. Maybe I should try to get a hotel as well, I thought. Then I could ride to the finish on my bike. Or, more fun, I could try camping out in Del Valle. But that involved carrying a tent and sleeping bag and making reservations which probably weren't available still. It all became irrelvant when I checked the event website to see that the run had in fact been ...

Last year I did the Inside Trail Racing Woodside Ramble 50 km and it was for me a very successful race. That race was broken down into 6 segments: up Huddart Park, along Skyline Ridge, down into Wunderlich, back out of Wunderlich, back along Skyline Ridge, and down Huddart Park (with its infamous mini-climb just when you think you're close to the finish). That's two primarily-climbs, two primarily-descents, and two rolling sections. I'd trained hard for the ride, ramping up my distance as I should have done for my previous long races, both marathons, none of which went as well as I'd wanted. The key for me is to get solid blocks of consecutive long days, for example 10 miles or more four days in a row, to really build endurance for the longer distances. And for trail races it's important to train hilly trails, not just flat runs. This year my running suffered from the distraction of the San Francisco Randonneurs brevet series, first the 200 km at the end of J...

After months of carefully tracking my training metrics to ramp my volume up to where I thought it needed to be for the Woodside Ramble 50 km race, my first race over marathon distance, my training had been diverted off-course by 12 days of fatigue after a relatively innocuous tooth extraction. This had left me just a week and a half until the race. So after an test run on a Wednesday, I did a solid 3 days on Thu-Fri-Sat, the last of these a 31.5 km run through the Marin Headlands. This was a very important test for me, as it included 1300 meters of descending (and, less importantly, climbing), and my legs survived running all of it. This was 90% of the descending I'd need to do in the 50k, where I'd have the additional advantage of fresher legs. But that was it: my last chance for training. Instead of a controlled taper in the last two weeks, I had one week to get my legs into something resembling race shape. I did a series of short runs until Friday, when feeling fat an...

Training for the Woodside Ramble 50 km race, while not without hiccups, was going nicely to plan. I'd plotted a gradual increase in my simplified running form of CTS, ramping 0.43 km/day per week, and I was sticking to that schedule, initially by increasing the length of my runs, but later transitioning to an increase in frequency. I was tired, of course, but a good tired. I was pushing my limits, as one must to get them to shift, but it seemed to be working. The problem with simplified training stress metrics is they exclude stress from other sources, and in this case the big ugly stress source was oral surgery. A tooth broke and the dentist gave me the sobering news the next day: it should be removed and replaced with an implant. So the tooth came out, a process involving the expenditure of extremely few kilojoules on my part, but which nevertheless left me very, very tired. Initially I persisted in my plan to run every day. Length didn't matter, speed didn't mat...

Another day past, and another day less until the Woodside Ramble 50 km race. I've been focusing on plots showing weighted average distances (which I refer to as ATS, CTS, after the cycling power metrics of the same names), and to number of runs per week. These plots have been guiding my training. An example is the following: But long run distance is important as well, and that's been increasing. This hasn't been as much planned as it's been based on what I can do: I like to run long, and if I feel good, I try to extend my previous distance a bit. Here I plot the distance of my runs versus the date relative to 18 Mar, where I label training runs as crosses, and races as stars: The long run distance has been steadily tending up, but not fast enough to approach 50 km by 13 April. I've run 3 races so far this year. The first was just 4 km (listed as 4.5 km here because of warm-up). For that race, distance wasn't a factor; I'd already done runs twice the ...

Lake Chabot is a particularly easy-to-reach trail run from San Francisco: I rode my bike about a mile to the BART station, took BART to Castro Valley, then rode from there 5 km to the Lake Chabot marina , merrily spinning by the line of cars and personal trucks lined up waiting to get into the limited-capacity parking lot. This was my 2nd trail run this year after a long break from trail running. I knew my fitness was coming around: good day-to-day recovery and my speed was improving. Rationally I knew I should be ready. I just had to pace myself right. The race started near the Marina. Since the distance was a stretch, my longest run in over a year, I decided go light on the warm-up. But then I'd ridden my bike 5 km up a gradual hill to get there. Off we went down the paved path which constituted the beginning of the course. The pace felt glacially slow, trodding through sludge, but then that's always the case in race. The Strava data show we were around a 4:50/km ...

The next trail race on my list is the Lake Chabot Trail Run by Inside Trail Racing. This seems to be my year for Inside Trail racing. That just worked out based on the race calendar. In a moment of weakness I chose to accept the technical T-shirt. I'm down one technical T after leaving one somewhere; I don't recall at the moment where. At my last race, the Inside Trail Racing's Pacific Foothills race at Montara Mountain, I ended up wearing my wool undershirt after I accidentally started pinning my number to it and then just decided to go with it. It's January and way too warm for two layers. Not normal. The biggest concern about using the wool shirt is pinning numbers leaves damage, and I really like the shirt. Better to shred my race technical T's. As an aside, both of my technical race T's fit me like a tent. I think the point of these shirts is to wear them in a race, and in a race, wind resistance slows you down. That means shirts should be form-...

I was shocked when I looked back through this blog and observed that it had been two and a half years since my last trail race, the Golden Gate 30 km by Coastal Trail Runs. I remember that run well: the pain of the wrong turn, breaking down toward the finish. Two and a half years? Where had the time gone? Obviously, I've not been idle, but between cycling events, road running events, and a few unfortunate injuries focus drifts and suddenly you open your eyes and the year has jumped 3 digits. Clearly I had to fix this. And so after an extended period of bikeless December travel where running became my only outlet for self-exertion, I decided to continue the momentum through early 2014. Goals: it's important to have goals. With each year it's important to try for something new and challenging, something outside the comfort radius, something which will be hard. And an anomalous addiction to Ultra Running Magazine has me telling myself that a marathon distance is just...