Road Runner Sports 2nd Thursday Adventure Run 3/14

The family went last night to do this Adventure Run together at Road Runners Sports in Westminster.  It was the first one of 2013 and was a blast as always.  You check in between 5-6 at Road Runners Sports where if you pre-signed up you get tickets for free beer afterwards from a local microbrew (Fort Collins Brewery).  Then you cruise the vendor booths until 6 pm earning tickets.  If you chat with the vendors you get raffle tickets for later, you will see the point of the raffle tickets in a bit.

At 6 pm a huge map is shown with 12 check points that have businesses in the area on it.  You have until 7pm to visit as many as possible and get back to Road Runners Sports.  We (wife, 12 year old, and myself) were able to hit up 3 check points covering about 4 miles.  You lose lots of time at the beginning writing down the 12 locations and at the check points getting your paper signed.  At each check point you collect more raffle tickets.  The further way the check point the more tickets you get.

Here is a picture of the map.

 

 

Or if you are special VIP like me you get a map like this that is GPS enabled sent to your phone at 6 so you don't have to waste time writing down all the locations.

As you work your way to the check points you have to do extra things like pushups or eat cake to earn extra raffle tickets. 

Here I am planning the next location to run too while Braden is eating this.

Needless to say he had a stomach ache the rest of the time since this was our first stop of the run.

When you return to Road Runners Sports before 7pm, you throw all your raffle tickets (we had about 25 between the 3 of us) into a pot for a raffle of about $3000 worth of prizes which we did not say for.  We walked across the street to the sushi place for dinner instead.

We had a blast, this was a great family event for us or for anyone.  We really have a lot of fun doing this event.  We plan on doing as many as we can this year when Ashley is not at work the Thursday that it is held on.  So if you are not doing anything on the second Thursday of April come on out and join us, we will be there.  Oh yeah did I mention that it is FREE!!! 

Spring Cleaning

Thought it was time to clean up the blog a little so there was not so much crap on the side bar.  It was getting hard to find anything or to even look at.

 I moved all that onto their own pages which are linked across the top.  I also added a Search box to search through the blog, I found it really nice when looking for that one time I did that one thing but can't remember the date because I am getting old moments. 

Hopefully this makes it a little bit more user friendly.  Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

RMRR 3 miler

In the last post I laid out 4 goals for the month of March.

They were:

Goals for March:

1.  Get back to normal training with a goal of ~250 miles and ~40K of vertical this month.

2.  Hit the weight room at least 2 times a week.

3. Do one 14er.

4.  Do at least one shorter race (5K or so) to get a measurement of fitness.

A few weeks ago I completed a 3 mile race to get a gage of my fitness.  I ran one of the monthly races that Rocky Mountain Road Runners puts on.  You can find their website here.  It is a great deal: free for members (membership is $35 a year) or $10 per race if your not a member.  You are not going to find a race cheaper.

My goal was just run around 170 beats per minute for the first 2 miles and push on the third to get a baseline on my pace on a flat course.  Here are my splits, overall average was 6:10 per mile at 170 beat per minute.  This gave me a finish time of 18:45 for the 6th fastest on the day.  That is the baseline for next month, faster than 6:10 per mile.

I would highly recommend these low stress races.  They are a lot of fun.  Only 3 more goals to hit for the month and I am on target as of today. 

GPS data here. 

Weak!

What a crappy month, I am glad to put that one behind me.  You can get the details of why it was a BAD month here.

Here is the breakdown for February (Click on photo to enlarge it).

I think that was the worse month mileage wise I have had in the last 4 years.  Oh well on to bigger and better things.

Goals for March:

1.  Get back to normal training with a goal of ~250 miles and ~40K of vertical this month.

2.  Hit the weight room at least 2 times a week.

3. Do one 14er.

4.  Do at least one shorter race (5K or so) to get a measurement of fitness.

Time to get back to work.