Monday, April 27, 2009

Mark's book is coming out this week!

Mark's book is finally coming out next week!! Just as a short history of why I am excited about this book is that Kirk (ex-drag racer who is doing headstands/ see below) and I are both in the book. We took Mark on his 1st winter 14er climb a few years ago and Kirk took him on a few other climbs. Hope you also pick up the book which will be for sale on Amazon also at this link:

Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Halfway-Heaven-White-knuckled-Knuckleheaded-Quest-Mountain/dp/1416566996/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236360985&sr=1-3

Enjoy and I will post some comments on my thoughts after reading it later in the week, I should have my copy in the next couple of days. Also if you are interested the dates and locations of the book tour is at the end of this post.






Announcing the Release of

Halfway to Heaven
My White-knuckled – and Knuckleheaded – Quest for the Rocky Mountain High
By Mark Obmascik


Fat, forty-four, father of three sons, and facing a vasectomy, Mark Obmascik would never have guessed that his next move would be up a 14,000-foot mountain. But when his twelve-year-old son gets bitten by the climbing bug at summer camp, Obmascik can’t resist the opportunity for some high-altitude father-son bonding by hiking a peak together. After their first joint climb, addled by thin air, Obmascik decides to keep his head in the cloud and try scaling all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains, known as the Fourteeners – and to finish them in less than one year.

The result is Halfway to Heaven, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Obmascik’s rollicking, witty, sometimes harrowing, often poignant chronicle of an outrageous midlife adventure that is no walk in the park, although sometimes it’s A Walk in the Woods – but with more sweat and less oxygen. Half a million people try climbing a Colorado Fourteener every year, but only 1,200 have reported summiting them all. Can an overweight, stay-at-home dad become No. 1,201?

With his ebullient personality and sparkling prose, Obmascik brings us inside the quirky, colorful subculture of mountaineering obsessives who summit these mountains year after year. Honoring his concerned wife’s orders not to climb alone, Obmascik drags old friends up the slopes, some of them lifelong flatlanders tasting thin air for the first time, and lures seasoned Rockies junkies into taking on a huffing, puffing newbie by bribing them with free beer, lunches, and car washes. Among the new friends he makes are an ex-drag racer trying to perform a headstand on every summit, the lead oboe player in a Hebrew salsa band, and a climber with the counterproductive pre-climb ritual of gulping down four beers and a burrito.

Though danger is always present – the Colorado Fourteeners have killed as many climbers as Mount Everest – Mark knows his aging scalp can’t afford the hair-raising adventures of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, and his quest becomes a story of family, friendship, and fraternity. In Obmascik’s summer of climbing, he loses fifteen pounds, finds a few dozen man-dates, and gains respect for the history of these storied mountains (home to cannibalism, gold rushes, shoot-outs, and one of the nation’s most famed religious shrines.) As much about midlife and male bonding as it is about mountains, Halfway to Heaven tells how weekend warriors can survive them all as they reach for those most distant things – the summit of mountains and a teenage son. And as one man exceeds the physical achievements of his youth, he discovers that age – like summit height – is just a number.


Advance praise for
THE Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled – and Knuckleheaded – Quest for the Rocky Mountain High


By Mark Obmascik
Published by Free Press of Simon
and Schuster · Release date: May 12, 2009


“The author maintains a breezy narrative style, a keen eye for nature’s beauty and a self-deprecating tone that makes his marathon journey fly by. His story and those of many of the free spirits he meets along the way vividly demonstrate the thrill of taking the road less traveled. Highly readable, entertaining and educational.’’
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Hilarious midlife picaresque… the result feels like a raucous bowling night, with moderate oxygen deprivation, on the brink of an abyss.”
Publishers Weekly

Editor’s Choice
Parade Magazine May 10 issue

“With every lumbering step and gasping breath, Mark Obmascik proves that you don’t have to scale Everest to conquer nature – or write a great book about the great outdoors. Halfway to Heaven is an oxygen-deprived romp, a coming-of-middle-age adventure story that is by turns hilarious, gripping, poignant, and uplifting.”
Stefan Fatsis, author of A Few Seconds of Panic and Word Freak

“The mountains of Colorado reach great heights, and so does this book. It’s funny, smart, fascinating, poignant – and well worth scaling!”
Jeffrey Zaslow, coauthor of The Last Lecture

“I thank Mark Obmascik for writing an enlightening and funny book. And I thank him for climbing a bunch of tall mountains so I don’t have to. I was with him for every oxygen-deprived step of the way (as I lounged on my sectional sofa).”
AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically and The Know-It-All

“As Obmascik chases the meaning of life across the haute peaks of the Rockies, he touches something in your heart even while he knocks on your funny bone. Halfway to Heaven is deft and delightful. Always minding his wife’s admonition never to hike alone, Obmascik proves once again that it’s the journey – and the characters met – not the summits, that really matter the most.”
Dean King, author of Skeletons on the Zahara

“Obmascik tells the often funny, sometimes moving, always fascinating story of taking up the challenge of a midlife-time to climb all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains. He takes us into the strange world of obsessed mountaineers – past and present – and vividly describes the ardors, dangers, and joys of chasing that Rocky Mountain high. Whether you ever plan to climb a mountain – or just want to summit one from your armchair – Obmascik’s engaging style makes him the perfect companion for the trip.”
Susan Freinkel, 2008 National Outdoor Book Award winner for American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree

“Halfway to Heaven, Mark Obmascik's account of his quest to climb all of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks, should prove an inspiration to middle-aged mountaineers everywhere. For all of his comically recounted misadventures, Obmascik has the true mountaineer's love of high places, and a professional writer's gift of conveying that love to the reader.”
Maurice Isserman, coauthor of the 2008 National Outdoor Book Award winner, Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes

“Halfway to Heaven goes all the way in explaining what it feels like to climb all of Colorado’s fabled Fourteeners. Obmascik’s excellent writing follows more than the twists of the trails; mark generously laces his quest for the heights with insights, history, humor, politics, personalities, record runs, friends, family, flora, and fauna. Halfway to Heaven is a fortune cache for everyone.”
Maurice Gerry Roach, author of Colorado’s Fourteeners: From Hikes to Climbs

Author Biography




Mark Obmascik is the author of The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession, a national bestseller that received five Best of 2004 citations by major media. He was lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the 2003 National Press Club award for environmental journalism. He lives in Denver with his wife, Merrill Schwerin, and their three sons, Cass, Max, and Wesley.


Book Tour

Tuesday, May 12
7:30pm, Boulder Book Store
Boulder, CO

Thursday, May 14
7:30pm, Tattered Cover/LoDo
Denver, CO

Monday, May 18
University Book Store
Seattle, WA

Wednesday, May 20
7:30pm, Powell’s City of Books
Portland, OR

Thursday, May 21
7:30pm, Capitola Book Café
Capitola, CA

Friday, May 22
7:30pm, Book Passage
Corte Madera, CA

Friday, April 24, 2009

Do you have ORD?

My buddy Neal is trying to create a category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Psychological Disorders for ORD. Also known as Obsessive Running Disorder. Code: 26.2

The Patient must meet eight of the eleven criteria listed below:

1) Ignores familial obligations to run.

2) Obsessively thinks about running interrupting workplace obligations.

3) Runs to the point of exhaustion and/or injury and maintains a strong desire to continue to run.

4) Talks about running 5-10 times a day exhausting friends, family, and co-workers.

5) Has purchased 5 or more running shoes in the past year and measures the wear on a daily basis to determine if they need new shoes.

6) Owns and does not throw out every copy of Runner’s World for the past 10 years. (Ultrarunning or Triathlete magizine also counts)

7) Signs up for Ultra Marathons multiple years in a row.

8) Shares their training experiences on a social network site on a daily basis

9) Spends more money on food for themselves than on a car payment

10) You go to take your clothes out of the washer and they are already dry

11) When friend or colleague says “what a nice day,” you talk about how it is hard to break a 7:00 min mile pace when it is too sunny and over 55 degrees.

I’ve already met nine of the eleven, you?

Any other criteria that we are missing?

Thursday, April 23, 2009

How much do you spend on running shoes every year?

Came across this article, not sure what to think of it but thought I would share. The article can be found here.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The painful truth about trainers: Are running shoes a waste of money?
Thrust enhancers, roll bars, microchips...the $20 billion running - shoe industry wants us to believe that the latest technologies will cushion every stride. Yet in this extract from his controversial new book, Christopher McDougall claims that injury rates for runners are actually on the rise, that everything we've been told about running shoes is wrong - and that it might even be better to go barefoot...
By CHRISTOPHER McDOUGALL

Last updated at 8:01 PM on 19th April 2009
Comments (106) Add to My Stories

Every year, anywhere from 65 to 80 per cent of all runners suffer an injury. No matter who you are, no matter how much you run, your odds of getting hurt are the same.

At Stanford University, California, two sales representatives from Nike were watching the athletics team practise. Part of their job was to gather feedback from the company's sponsored runners about which shoes they preferred.
Unfortunately, it was proving difficult that day as the runners all seemed to prefer... nothing.

'Didn't we send you enough shoes?' they asked head coach Vin Lananna. They had, he was just refusing to use them.

'I can't prove this,' the well-respected coach told them.

'But I believe that when my runners train barefoot they run faster and suffer fewer injuries.'

Nike sponsored the Stanford team as they were the best of the very best. Needless to say, the reps were a little disturbed to hear that Lananna felt the best shoes they had to offer them were not as good as no shoes at all.

When I was told this anecdote it came as no surprise. I'd spent years struggling with a variety of running-related injuries, each time trading up to more expensive shoes, which seemed to make no difference. I'd lost count of the amount of money I'd handed over at shops and sports-injury clinics - eventually ending with advice from my doctor to give it up and 'buy a bike'.

And I wasn't on my own. Every year, anywhere from 65 to 80 per cent of all runners suffer an injury. No matter who you are, no matter how much you run, your odds of getting hurt are the same. It doesn't matter if you're male or female, fast or slow, pudgy or taut as a racehorse, your feet are still in the danger zone.

But why? How come Roger Bannister could charge out of his Oxford lab every day, pound around a hard cinder track in thin leather slippers, not only getting faster but never getting hurt, and set a record before lunch?

Tarahumara runner Arnulfo Quimare runs alongside ultra-runner Scott Jurek in Mexico's Copper Canyons.

Then there's the secretive Tarahumara tribe, the best long-distance runners in the world. These are a people who live in basic conditions in Mexico, often in caves without running water, and run with only strips of old tyre or leather thongs strapped to the bottom of their feet. They are virtually barefoot.

Come race day, the Tarahumara don't train. They don't stretch or warm up. They just stroll to the starting line, laughing and bantering, and then go for it, ultra-running for two full days, sometimes covering over 300 miles, non-stop. For the fun of it. One of them recently came first in a prestigious 100-mile race wearing nothing but a toga and sandals. He was 57 years old.

When it comes to preparation, the Tarahumara prefer more of a Mardi Gras approach. In terms of diet, lifestyle and training technique, they're a track coach's nightmare. They drink like New Year's Eve is a weekly event, tossing back enough corn-based beer and homemade tequila brewed from rattlesnake corpses to floor an army.

Unlike their Western counterparts, the Tarahumara don't replenish their bodies with electrolyte-rich sports drinks. They don't rebuild between workouts with protein bars; in fact, they barely eat any protein at all, living on little more than ground corn spiced up by their favourite delicacy, barbecued mouse.

How come they're not crippled?

I've watched them climb sheer cliffs with no visible support on nothing more than an hour's sleep and a stomach full of pinto beans. It's as if a clerical error entered the stats in the wrong columns. Shouldn't we, the ones with state-of-the-art running shoes and custom-made orthotics, have the zero casualty rate, and the Tarahumara, who run far more, on far rockier terrain, in shoes that barely qualify as shoes, be constantly hospitalised?

The answer, I discovered, will make for unpalatable reading for the $20 billion trainer-manufacturing industry. It could also change runners' lives forever.

Dr Daniel Lieberman, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, has been studying the growing injury crisis in the developed world for some time and has come to a startling conclusion: 'A lot of foot and knee injuries currently plaguing us are caused by people running with shoes that actually make our feet weak, cause us to over-pronate (ankle rotation) and give us knee problems.

'Until 1972, when the modern athletic shoe was invented, people ran in very thin-soled shoes, had strong feet and had a much lower incidence of knee injuries.'

Lieberman also believes that if modern trainers never existed more people would be running. And if more people ran, fewer would be suffering from heart disease, hypertension, blocked arteries, diabetes, and most other deadly ailments of the Western world.

'Humans need aerobic exercise in order to stay healthy,' says Lieberman. 'If there's any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it's to run.'

The modern running shoe was essentially invented by Nike. The company was founded in the Seventies by Phil Knight, a University of Oregon runner, and Bill Bowerman, the University of Oregon coach.

Before these two men got together, the modern running shoe as we know it didn't exist. Runners from Jesse Owens through to Roger Bannister all ran with backs straight, knees bent, feet scratching back under their hips. They had no choice: their only shock absorption came from the compression of their legs and their thick pad of midfoot fat. Thumping down on their heels was not an option.

Despite all their marketing suggestions to the contrary, no manufacturer has ever invented a shoe that is any help at all in injury prevention. Bowerman didn't actually do much running. He only started to jog a little at the age of 50, after spending time in New Zealand with Arthur Lydiard, the father of fitness running and the most influential distance-running coach of all time. Bowerman came home a convert, and in 1966 wrote a best-selling book whose title introduced a new word and obsession to the fitness-aware public: Jogging.

In between writing and coaching, Bowerman came up with the idea of sticking a hunk of rubber under the heel of his pumps. It was, he said, to stop the feet tiring and give them an edge. With the heel raised, he reasoned, gravity would push them forward ahead of the next man. Bowerman called Nike's first shoe the Cortez - after the conquistador who plundered the New World for gold and unleashed a horrific smallpox epidemic.

It is an irony not wasted on his detractors. In essence, he had created a market for a product and then created the product itself.

'It's genius, the kind of stuff they study in business schools,' one commentator said.

Bowerman's partner, Knight, set up a manufacturing deal in Japan and was soon selling shoes faster than they could come off the assembly line.

'With the Cortez's cushioning, we were in a monopoly position probably into the Olympic year, 1972,' Knight said.

The rest is history.

The company's annual turnover is now in excess of $17 billion and it has a major market share in over 160 countries.

Since then, running-shoe companies have had more than 30 years to perfect their designs so, logically, the injury rate must be in freefall by now.
After all, Adidas has come up with a $250 shoe with a microprocessor in the sole that instantly adjusts cushioning for every stride. Asics spent $3 million and eight years (three more years than it took to create the first atomic bomb) to invent the Kinsei, a shoe that boasts 'multi-angled forefoot gel pods', and a 'midfoot thrust enhancer'. Each season brings an expensive new purchase for the average runner.

But at least you know you'll never limp again. Or so the leading companies would have you believe. Despite all their marketing suggestions to the contrary, no manufacturer has ever invented a shoe that is any help at all in injury prevention.

If anything, the injury rates have actually ebbed up since the Seventies - Achilles tendon blowouts have seen a ten per cent increase. (It's not only shoes that can create the problem: research in Hawaii found runners who stretched before exercise were 33 per cent more likely to get hurt.)

In a paper for the British Journal Of Sports Medicine last year, Dr Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed there are no evidence-based studies that demonstrate running shoes make you less prone to injury. Not one.

It was an astonishing revelation that had been hidden for over 35 years. Dr Richards was so stunned that a $20 billion industry seemed to be based on nothing but empty promises and wishful thinking that he issued the following challenge: 'Is any running-shoe company prepared to claim that wearing their distance running shoes will decrease your risk of suffering musculoskeletal running injuries? Is any shoe manufacturer prepared to claim that wearing their running shoes will improve your distance running performance? If you are prepared to make these claims, where is your peer-reviewed data to back it up?'

Dr Richards waited and even tried contacting the major shoe companies for their data. In response, he got silence.

So, if running shoes don't make you go faster and don't stop you from getting hurt, then what, exactly, are you paying for? What are the benefits of all those microchips, thrust enhancers, air cushions, torsion devices and roll bars?

The answer is still a mystery. And for Bowerman's old mentor, Arthur Lydiard, it all makes sense.

'We used to run in canvas shoes,' he said.

'We didn't get plantar fasciitis (pain under the heel); we didn't pronate or supinate (land on the edge of the foot); we might have lost a bit of skin from the rough canvas when we were running marathons, but generally we didn't have foot problems.

'Paying several hundred dollars for the latest in hi-tech running shoes is no guarantee you'll avoid any of these injuries and can even guarantee that you will suffer from them in one form or another. Shoes that let your foot function like you're barefoot - they're the shoes for me.'

Soon after those two Nike sales reps reported back from Stanford, the marketing team set to work to see if it could make money from the lessons it had learned. Jeff Pisciotta, the senior researcher at Nike Sports Research Lab, assembled 20 runners on a grassy field and filmed them running barefoot.

When he zoomed in, he was startled by what he found. Instead of each foot clomping down as it would in a shoe, it behaved like an animal with a mind of its own - stretching, grasping, seeking the ground with splayed toes, gliding in for a landing like a lake-bound swan.

'It's beautiful to watch,' Pisciotta later told me. 'That made us start thinking that when you put a shoe on, it starts to take over some of the control.'

Pisciotta immediately deployed his team to gather film of every existing barefoot culture they could find.

'We found pockets of people all over the globe who are still running barefoot, and what you find is that, during propulsion and landing, they have far more range of motion in the foot and engage more of the toe. Their feet flex, spread, splay and grip the surface, meaning you have less pronation and more distribution of pressure.'

Nike's response was to find a way to make money off a naked foot. It took two years of work before Pisciotta was ready to unveil his masterpiece. It was presented in TV ads that showed Kenyan runners padding along a dirt trail, swimmers curling their toes around a starting block, gymnasts, Brazilian capoeira dancers, rock climbers, wrestlers, karate masters and beach soccer players.

And then comes the grand finale: we cut back to the Kenyans, whose bare feet are now sporting some kind of thin shoe. It's the new Nike Free, a shoe thinner than the old Cortez dreamt up by Bowerman in the Seventies. And its slogan?

'Run Barefoot.'

The price of this return to nature?

A conservative £65. But, unlike the real thing, experts may still advise you to change them every three months.

Edited extract from 'Born To Run' by Christopher McDougall, £16.99, on sale from April 23


PAINFUL TRUTH No 1 THE BEST SHOES AND THE WORST

Runners wearing top-of-the-line trainers are 123 per cent more likely to get injured than runners in cheap ones. This was discovered as far back as 1989, according to a study led by Dr Bernard Marti, the leading preventative-medicine specialist at Switzerland's University of Bern.

Dr Marti's research team analysed 4,358 runners in the Bern Grand Prix, a 9.6-mile road race. All the runners filled out an extensive questionnaire that detailed their training habits and footwear for the previous year; as it turned out, 45 per cent had been hurt during that time. But what surprised Dr Marti was the fact that the most common variable among the casualties wasn't training surface, running speed, weekly mileage or 'competitive training motivation'.

It wasn't even body weight or a history of previous injury. It was the price of the shoe. Runners in shoes that cost more than $95 were more than twice as likely to get hurt as runners in shoes that cost less than $40.

Follow-up studies found similar results, like the 1991 report in Medicine & Science In Sports & Exercise that found that 'wearers of expensive running shoes that are promoted as having additional features that protect (eg, more cushioning, 'pronation correction') are injured significantly more frequently than runners wearing inexpensive shoes.'

What a cruel joke: for double the price, you get double the pain. Stanford coach Vin Lananna had already spotted the same phenomenon.'I once ordered highend shoes for the team and within two weeks we had more plantar fasciitis and Achilles problems than I'd ever seen.

So I sent them back. Ever since then, I've always ordered low-end shoes. It's not because I'm cheap. It's because I'm in the business of making athletes run fast and stay healthy.'


PAINFUL TRUTH No 2 FEET LIKE A GOOD BEATING

Despite pillowy-sounding names such as 'MegaBounce', all that cushioning does nothing to reduce impact. Logically, that should be obvious - the impact on your legs from running can be up to 12 times your weight, so it's preposterous to believe a half-inch of rubber is going to make a difference.

When it comes to sensing the softest caress or tiniest grain of sand, your toes are as finely wired as your lips and fingertips. It's these nerve endings that tell your foot how to react to the changing ground beneath, not a strip of rubber.

To help prove this point, Dr Steven Robbins and Dr Edward Waked of McGill University, Montreal, performed a series of lengthy tests on gymnasts. They found that the thicker the landing mat, the harder the gymnasts landed. Instinctively, the gymnasts were searching for stability. When they sensed a soft surface underfoot, they slapped down hard to ensure balance. Runners do the same thing. When you run in cushioned shoes, your feet are pushing through the soles in search of a hard, stable platform.

'Currently available sports shoes are too soft and thick, and should be redesigned if they are to protect humans performing sports,' the researchers concluded.

To add weight to their argument, the acute-injury rehabilitation specialist David Smyntek carried out an experiment of his own. He had grown wary that the people telling him to trade in his favourite shoes every 300-500 miles were the same people who sold them to him.

But how was it, he wondered, that Arthur Newton, for instance, one of the greatest ultrarunners of all time, who broke the record for the 100-mile Bath-London run at the age of 51, never replaced his thin-soled canvaspumps until he'd put at least 4,000 miles on them?

So Smyntek changed tack. Whenever his shoes got thin, he kept on running. When the outside edge started to go, he swapped the right for the left and kept running. Five miles a day, every day.

Once he realised he could run comfortably in broken-down, even wrong-footed shoes, he had his answer. If he wasn't using them the way they were designed, maybe that design wasn't such a big deal after all.

He now only buys cheap trainers.



PAINFUL TRUTH No 3 HUMAN BEINGS ARE DESIGNED TO RUN WITHOUT SHOES

'Barefoot running has been one of my training philosophies for years,' says Gerard Hartmann, the Irish physical therapist who treats all the world's finest distance runners, including Paula Radcliffe.

For decades, Dr Hartmann has been watching the explosion of ever more structured running shoes with dismay. 'Pronation has become this very bad word, but it's just the natural movement of the foot,' he says. 'The foot is supposed to pronate.'
To see pronation in action, kick off your shoes and run down the driveway. On a hard surface, your feet will automatically shift to selfdefence mode: you'll find yourself landing on the outside edge of your foot, then gently rolling from little toe over to big until your foot is flat. That's pronation - a mild, shockabsorbing twist that allows your arch to compress.

Your foot's centrepiece is the arch, the greatest weight-bearing design ever created. The beauty of any arch is the way it gets stronger under stress; the harder you push down, the tighter its parts mesh. Push up from underneath and you weaken the whole structure.

'Putting your feet in shoes is similar to putting them in a plaster cast,' says Dr Hartmann. 'If I put your leg in plaster, we'll find 40 to 60 per cent atrophy of the musculature within six weeks. Something similar happens to your feet when they're encased in shoes.'

When shoes are doing the work, tendons stiffen and muscles shrivel. Work them out and they'll arc up. 'I've worked with the best Kenyan runners,' says Hartmann, 'and they all have marvellous elasticity in their feet. That comes from never running in shoes until you're 17.'

SO SHOULD WE ALL BE RUNNING BAREFOOT?
BY JUSTIN COULTER, SPORTS PODIATRIST

Running barefoot may have some benefit in muscle strengthening as the muscles have to 'tune in' to the vibrations caused by impact loading.

If, like Zola Budd, you grew up running barefoot on a South African farm, your tissue tolerance would adapt over time. But for someone who has grown up wearing shoes and is a natural heel striker (see right), the impact loading will be beyond tissue tolerance level, and injury will occur.

We are all individuals, therefore it is prudent to have your own running technique assessed and work around that.

As for getting out your old worn out trainers and running in them - don't! Based on the individual's size and running surfaces/conditions shoes should be changed between 500-1,000 miles. It's best to seek the advice of a specialist running store.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Follow the Boston Marathon live.

If you are stuck at work like me you can follow the Boston Marathon live on-line.

Here is the link for that if you are interested. They just knocked out a 4:28 first mile, incredible!

http://bostonmarathon.runnersworld.com/

Friday, April 17, 2009

Crappy drive home!

Think we are getting some weather. This is 470 and Morrison Road.
Spring in the Rockies.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Grizzly Peak D from Loveland Pass

Yesterday Kirk and I decided to head up into the high country for some fun off of Loveland Pass. I had a vacation day to burn and he had the day off work. With all the running and training that I have been doing lately I have not been climbing as much as I would like and with days like yesterday it really makes me miss it. Here are some pictures of the awesome day that we were blessed with. It is great to go during the week with no one else up there. We ended up with about 8 miles and about 4000 feet of vertical all taking place at over 12,000 feet above sea level. Sounds like good altitude training to me.

T- 2 weeks for the 1st 50 miler of the year, CRAP!

Enjoy and have a great week.


Wednesday, April 1, 2009

March's Numbers

Not to bad of a month overall, lots of good quality runs. I was shooting for a little bit more mileage but I did miss one 2.5 hour run when I was moving that would have put me lots closer to the 300 mile mark, maybe this month I will hit 300. Here is how it all breaks down so far.

March 1st - March 31th

Miles covered on foot: 260.1

Vertical gain: 32,401 feet

Total hours (includes weights,swimming,biking,ect.): 42:37:00


Now here is the breakdown year to date.

Jan 1st - March 31st

Miles covered on foot: 676.05

Vertical gain: 88,459 feet

Total hours (includes weights,swimming,biking,ect.): 123:59:32

At this time last year I had ran 489 miles by the end of March. That is quite a difference in mileage in my mind. This next month should be about the same I think as March. The first 2 weeks of the month will be higher mileage weeks for me then it is taper time for the 50 miler in Buena Vista on May 2nd. You can also check out my on-line log by clicking on the link on the right hand side of the webpage.

Have a great week.

Shad