I finally got back on the horse this past weekend and ran my first ultra since last year's Leadville 100 by running the 50K version of the Bear Chase. I just have not had the interest this past year with everything going on in our family's life to do the long races. Anyways a super quick report and some pictures.
I signed up for this race without really putting in any long runs. I was running about 50-60 miles a week for a while just as a stress relieve but my longest run was only 14 miles every weekend doing the Dirty Bizmark loop. About 3 weeks out from the race a I did a 24.5 mile run in the Marshall Mesa/Dowdy Draw area in 3 hours and 45 mins at an easy pace. After that weekend I took the next 2 weekends off due to family coming to visit, needless to say I was a little under trained.
I had 2 goals in mind for this race- A) break my PR at 50K distance which is 4 hours and 31 mins or B) Finish before noon which is 5 hours and 10 mins.
To keep this short I went out at a moderately hard pace but never close to the red line with the exceptions of the small hills on this course. I was able to finish the first 19 miles in about 2 and half hours or so. The third and final lap (12.4 miles) I was doing fine the first 5 miles of the loop then gradually got slower and slower until by mile 29 I was on my hands and knees with the puke fountain turned on in full force. My stomach just shut down again and my body quick absorbing what I was drinking and eating. I was able to walk it in losing about 4-5 places in the standings to finish in 4:50:22 for 14th male and 16th overall. At least I hit my B goal, got an ok time, and got back into ultras again.
What is next? I am pondering doing either the 6 hours or 12 hours of Boulder on Oct 15th. I am leaning towards the 6 hours so that I can go see Braden's hockey game that morning but I am unsure right now. I kind of want to go out for 50 miles which should be very doable on this course in 12 hours. We will see, here are some pictures from the race.
Showing posts with label ultra. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ultra. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
Salomon Team Hardrock Video
I know I have been real quite on here lately. Life has been getting in the way lately and I hope to make a better effort of updating this more often the rest of the year. Anyway I came across this today and had to share it. This is the #1 race on my life list of 100 milers. I have paced it twice and have seen 60 miles of the course. Maybe someday I will get picked in the lottery. Enjoy!
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Monday, February 28, 2011
Paleo Fitness
This is an awesome read and kind of goes along with how I am trying to eat lately but failing at big time due to Girl Scout cookies. I copy and pasted the entire article here for my future reference but you can go to OutsideOnline.com article by clicking on the title of this post.
My wife as started getting into Crossfit and I have been reading articles about the Paleo diet and some about Crossfit here and there over the past month. She really enjoys it and gets me wondering how it would affect my ultra running and training for 100s. Would the benefit of spending the time doing Crossfit like workouts for example be greater than the benefit of using that time actually putting in more miles? I don't know.
Enjoy.
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The Workout that Time Forgot
Will caveman calisthenics be the next big thing for adventure athletes?
By Nick Heil
Erwan Le Corre seems to defy gravity—and not just because he's French.
I'm standing close by as the 39-year-old movement coach—shirtless, barefoot, and built like Mikhail Baryshnikov—hops up and grasps a wooden bar lashed eight feet off the ground between two stout maple trees. Le Corre dangles calmly from both arms for a moment before swinging one leg up to the side, hooking it over the beam, and—swoooop—crouching on top of it and looking down at us. The move is so swift and catlike that I'm not quite sure how he did it. A few minutes later, I attempt the same thing, legs scissoring awkwardly until my arms give out and I hit the dirt with a thud, kicking up a cloud of dust.
This is day one—hour one, in fact—of caveman camp: July's weeklong MovNat Reawakening Workshop, at Summersville Lake Retreat, an RV resort in West Virginia. MovNat, an abbreviation of "Move Naturally," is the outdoor fitness-and-conditioning business that Le Corre founded in 2008. Our camp—modern dome tents, a fire ring, and a kitchen area covered by a canopy—is set up in a grassy clearing a couple of miles from the lake. Gyms are out; wilderness is in. Instead of weights, we lift rocks, logs, and one another. Hand-to-hand combat is as much a part of the regimen as lying in the grass and watching billowy clouds blow by.
"MovNat is a comprehensive lifestyle," Le Corre tells us. "It's about diet and nutrition. It's about exposure to sunlight and nature. It's about getting rest. It's about feeding the mind with healthy insights and positive thoughts." Le Corre, who relocated to the United States full-time in 2009, founded MovNat on the premise that humans once dashed around untamed landscapes with power and grace, gathering berries, toppling mastodons, and so forth—and that proficiency at such things will help reconnect us to the world in which we evolved. Not only were we born to run, he says, but also to jump, climb trees, swim deep underwater, slog through swamps, stalk prey, and fight off attackers.
"We live like zoo animals!" he continues that morning, pronouncing it "ah-nee-mahls." It's an idea Le Corre borrowed from the British zoologist Desmond Morris, author of the 1967 classic The Naked Ape, and it's central to his worldview: that we are essentially wild creatures ill-suited to desk jobs and processed foods. "We have become divorced from nature, trapped in colorless boxes," Le Corre says. "We have lost our adaptability, and it's threatening our health and longevity."
Clearly, the approach holds some appeal: all five of Le Corre's $1,700 summer workshops have sold out. I'd worried slightly about the freak factor before arriving, anticipating a clan of wayward hippies and hairy Luddites. But the group is surprisingly normal—and cosmopolitan. Among others, there's a corporate-recruitment manager from Osaka, Japan; a musician and his wife from London; a journalist from Zürich, Switzerland; two brothers from northern New Jersey; a Web designer from Brooklyn; and a computer programmer from Tallahassee, Florida. Everyone looks reasonably fit and is either barefoot or, like myself, shod in Vibram FiveFingers, the simian-looking foot-gloves.
"When I saw his promotional video, The Workout the World Forgot, I thought, This makes sense," Richard Carlow, the manager from Japan, tells me when I ask what inspired him to make such a long trip. "I wanted to learn it from the Source."
The Source is being assisted by Vic Verdier, a 42-year-old former French commando who currently lives in Thailand, where he teaches Krav Maga, the official self-defense system of the Israeli Defense Forces, and other martial arts. The only other staff is Allie Brodeur, 22, an accomplished acro-yogi and poi spinner—and our camp cook.
They make a colorful trio, but it's Brodeur's cooking that's the focus of most of our first day's conversation. That's because we're all being put on a strict version of the paleo diet, as in "Paleolithic," a pointedly unhedonistic approach to nutrition modeled after the eating habits of our hunter-gatherer forebears. Meat, fruits, veggies, nuts, and certain oils are OK, but grains, dairy, salt, sugar, caffeine, and alcohol are all verboten. Starbucks, I'm reminded on the first morning in camp, didn't materialize until the Late Neolithic.
By the time I turn in that night, after more exercises and a dinner of gravyless pork ribs and boiled carrots, I'm drained and swan-diving into full detox: woozy, wobbly-kneed, and worried that it's going to be a very, very long week. I do, at least, find a queen-size air mattress and cotton sheets in my tent. "This isn't survival school," Le Corre reassures me. "We want you to be comfortable here." One great thing about hunter-gatherers, apparently, is how much they love Bed Bath & Beyond.
MOVNAT DRAWS FROM some familiar sources—CrossFit, low-carb diets, barefoot running, martial arts, mud wrestling, Quest for Fire, etc.—but Le Corre's program occupies a space all its own. If anything, MovNat falls within the concept of "evolutionary fitness," an increasingly popular trend embraced by a loosely organized but fast-growing global community of health enthusiasts, medical professionals, and athletes. The movement is often lumped under the "paleo" rubric, but it's more than just a prehistoric way to eat and exercise.
The most fervent paleos prefer raw meat (thankfully, our workshop meals were always cooked), eschew footwear, fast periodically, and entertain themselves by dissing vegetarians—especially vegans, who they believe are misguided about human nutrition. But most paleos are more moderate, embracing the 80/20 rule: don't despair over the occasional bagel or sundae, as long as you adhere to the diet roughly 80 percent of the time.
The basic tenets of the paleo diet have been kicked around for years, but its watershed moment came in 1985, when an anthropology professor at Emory University named S. Boyd Eaton published "Paleolithic Nutrition: A Consideration of Its Nature and Current Implications" in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggesting that the paleo diet could be a public-health panacea. While the paper made a sizable splash, it wasn't until Loren Cordain, a professor of exercise science at Colorado State University, came across the piece a couple of years later that the idea began to reach a larger audience. Cordain eventually became the reigning authority on paleo nutrition and, in 2001, published The Paleo Diet.
Interest in the paleo lifestyle sputtered along for a few years, with help from flag bearers like Ray Audette, the author of NeanderThin, and Frank Forencich, author of Exuberant Animal, as well as a few primal-exercise proselytizers, like Art De Vany, a buff eptuagenarian and former economics professor from Los Angeles whom many credit with launching the evolutionary-fitness idea and whose latest book, The New Evolution Diet, is due out this month. But toward the end of the aughts, something curious happened: Cordain's royalty checks began to fatten up, and The Paleo Diet crept into Amazon.com's top 100. Cordain attributes much of the book's sleeper success to Robb Wolf, a former champion power lifter and biochemist who apprenticed with him in 2006.
In the late nineties, Wolf had suffered a series of health problems, including ulcerative colitis, high blood pressure, and depression. "I was augering into the mountainside," Wolf told me. Two years later, ailments cured by the paleo diet, Wolf discovered CrossFit, the popular strength-and-conditioning system that combines weight lifting, sprinting, and gymnastics. Eventually, Wolf took the paleo message to the greater CrossFit community, speaking often at gyms and events. Word spread with viral intensity, and as CrossFit mushroomed—the brand grew from 13 affiliated gyms in 2005 to 2,200 by 2010—so, too, did paleo's popularity.
These days, low-carb, high-protein diets are embraced by everyone from professional athletes to suburban moms. While the paleo approach is considerably more holistic than, say, the now disparaged Atkins diet, not everyone is buying it. The influential nutritionist Marion Nestle, for example, has questioned the wisdom of completely eliminating grains and dairy from our table. "It's never a good idea to restrict food groups unless you have to," Nestle says. "These foods have been eaten by humans for a long time with much pleasure as well as nutritional value." Others, like Katharine Milton, a respected anthropologist at UC–Berkeley, argue that paleos' fundamental presumption—that we have been unable to adapt to relatively new types of foods since the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry—is flawed. Humans, Milton argues, have always, even in Paleolithic times, adjusted to their changing environment, nutritional and otherwise, quite well.
Despite the lack of consensus, by the time I get to caveman camp, premodern diets and exercise are a small but growing phenomenon. NFL veteran John Welbourn preaches the paleo diet to his former teammates on the New England Patriots. Endurance gurus like Joe Friel, who, along with Cordain, co-authored The Paleo Diet for Athletes, urge triathletes to try it. Similarly, books like Christopher McDougal's Born to Run, about Mexico's Tarahumara tribe, are inspiring people to run barefoot or nearly barefoot, helping jack sales of Vibram FiveFingers by a factor of five in just the past year. Countless Web sites, books, and blogs have sprung up too, along with a handful of local paleo clubs across the country whose members gather to do things like learn archery and make grass-fed-beef jerky.
AT CAMP, WE FALL INTO a familiar pattern: up by seven, hearty breakfast, some warm-up drills, a skill-building session on barefoot running or proper log-lifting technique, lunch, siesta (or "MovNap"), a combo circuit, a swim in the lake, meaty dinner, and a lecture on topics such as lipid metabolism or the value of vitamin D.
So far, considering there was no fitness test required, attrition has been pretty minimal. A few of us have missed meals because we weren't feeling well, though some have been hit worse than others. There's a strict no-snacking policy, and Dave Csonka, the computer programmer from Florida, who's a buff six-five, has been begging for bananas because his blood sugar keeps crashing. Worse, his arms are covered in poison ivy. On one of our daily 40-minute barefoot hikes to the lake, Oswald Fombrun, one of the brothers from New Jersey, gets nailed just beneath the eye as we dash past a hornet's nest hidden in some rocks. The hikes have been a favorite part of my day, in which I imagine myself a wily hunter tracking down lunch, until I get stung twice on the arm.
Most of our training takes place in a shady grove near camp, where Verdier and Le Corre have built a temporary outdoor gym, with timbers lashed at different heights between trees, a complement of rocks and logs, several four-by-four balance beams, and a couple of picnic benches for high jumps. Verdier mostly hovers quietly in the background, while Brodeur keeps the food processor and blender humming back at camp.
On occasion, Le Corre will interrupt what we're doing to demonstrate proper technique or impress us with feats of skill and strength. After a few of us fail to move a massive log, he comes over, levers the tree trunk (which must weigh more than 300 pounds) onto his shoulder, and carries it the 100 yards to camp, where he plunks it by the campfire, dusting the bark off his arm with a theatrical flourish.
Le Corre is tall and tawny—the kind of physique you might expect to find if you waxed the hair off a Neanderthal. Still, for all the hard-bodied exterior and motivational speeches, he's no drill sergeant. His coaching is seasoned with quasi-mystical declarations, like "Oxygen is an accident, breath is intentional," and tips, like how listening to more reggae encourages rhythm and flow. At one point, I find him standing in the grass, performing some sort of sun prayer, head bowed, one arm raised to the sky. "I was just having a moment of gratitude," he says. He owns an iPhone, drives a Land Rover, and, perhaps due to his Frenchness, is comfortable wearing tight black briefs at the lake.
By the third morning, I'm filthy and sunburned and have acquired hundreds of tiny cuts and scratches that sizzle in a glaze of sweat. Even so, my body has (mostly) adjusted to the diet, and I'm feeling surprisingly good as we squirm around on crackling brown grass under a blistering sun, practicing an evasive move that might help us escape an attacker. Le Corre barks that we have become domesticated, that our sterilized and hermetically sealed lives have left us intolerant of nature. "But you can train dirt!" he exclaims, making an oblique reference to the fact that being exposed to grit and germs helps bolster our immune systems.
Not only does exercising outdoors make us more resilient, says Le Corre; it's also a better conduit for fitness than the typical cardio penance or preacher curls popular at big-box gyms, where waist trimming and biceps bulking are the main motivators. MovNat advances a concept that certain athletics coaches have pushed since the seventies, one that treats the body as a tool for dynamic movement, not a topiary sculpture.
Later that afternoon, after practicing more barefoot running ("Fall forward, catch yourself on the front of your feet"), Le Corre adds a twist to our trip to the lake. Along the way, we have to stop and carry a partner on our backs. I team up with Christoph Zürcher, 44, the journalist from Switzerland, who's six-two and has about 20 pounds on me. We're sweaty and shirtless, and I awkwardly hop on his back while he hooks his arms under my legs and starts lumbering forward. "Uuuuugghhhhh," he groans. "How far are we supposed to go?"
"Switch!" Le Corre shouts after about five minutes, and I stagger down the trail, bent under my crushing Swiss payload. At last we scramble over large rocks and emerge at the lake.
"The more we move, the smarter we become," Le Corre says as we sprawl on the rocks after our swim. "We're less stressed when we see green, like leaves and grass." A motorboat whizzes by, towing a water-skier. "I love technology," he continues. "I love all the modern conveniences that we have now, but we have to ask: When do we use it, and at what cost?"
LE CORRE GREW UP RUNNING around the fields and forests on the outskirts of Paris. He dabbled with ball sports—soccer, tennis—but hated the rules and boundary lines. At 15, he moved on to karate, quickly surpassing older, more experienced opponents. But he also found karate's formal protocols and tense competitions too staid and confining.
Then, at age 18, he happened to watch a television show about a 45-year-old Parisian stuntman named Jean Haberey. At one point, Haberey jumped out of a helicopter into an iceberg-strewn ocean wearing only swim trunks. It was the most outrageous thing Le Corre had ever seen—and he wanted to do it, too. A year later, he tracked Haberey down, and for the next seven years he followed him and his other disciples around the French metropolis, playing high-risk games: a "fight club of natural movement," as Le Corre puts it.
"He was the first guy to take people up onto the roofs of Paris," Le Corre said. "He also took us down into the underground, always barefoot, with no gear at all, to train people how to move silently like cats through urban obstacles … especially at night, when everyone was asleep."
Once, Haberey and Le Corre held a sit-up competition while dangling by their legs from a bridge over an eight-lane superhighway. Another time, Le Corre climbed along the transom of a tower crane, legs dangling in the void nearly a hundred feet above the ground. "It was crazy," Le Corre recalls, "but you just felt so alive."
Haberey's urban antics helped kick off the parkour craze, but Le Corre, like most of his followers, eventually grew disillusioned. "I supported him for a while," Le Corre says, "but it turned into a cult of his personality. It became too dark and underground, all about helping him, not others."
For a few years, Le Corre delved into endurance sports, competing in Ironman-distance triathlons while supporting himself with odd jobs, including making soap and men's jewelry. But turning himself into a perpetual-motion machine wasn't his raison d'être, either. Finally, in 2004, he stumbled upon an online comment about Methode Naturelle, an obscure training manual published in 1912 by Georges Hébert, a French naval officer. The book featured black-and-white photos of robust young men in briefs performing all kinds of primal-movement exercises: jumping, running, swimming, climbing, etc.
"I was like What?! This is exactly what I was doing before, but this guy had given it a name," says Le Corre. "He had systematized it, and I thought, That's the way to go."
Hébert's motto was "Being strong to be useful," a concept largely inspired by the defining event of his life. On May 8, 1902, Hébert was stationed on the Sughet, a naval ship just offshore of Saint-Pierre, on the island of Martinique, during the infamous eruption of Mount Pelée. In minutes, the blast flash-fried most of the town's 30,000 citizens, searing them with pyroclastic ash before burying them in tsunamis of mud. Amid the carnage, Hébert and his shipmates were credited with saving some 700 lives, pulling from the sea scalded men, women, and children, some of whom had been blown hundreds of feet through the air by the blast.
Preparing your body and mind for real-world, life-or-death applications is at the root of MovNat. Our workshop activities (throw a rock, climb a tree) may seem random, but they're intended to cultivate what Le Corre refers to as "selective tension," a kinetic reaction in which muscles relax and contract in patterns that help you move efficiently, especially in unpredictable situations. To underscore their practical value, Le Corre would often cite imagined modern-day scenarios during our training. "What if you had to pull someone from a burning building?" he asks one morning. "Or a flood," Verdier adds. "Sometimes survival comes down to who can run up a flight of stairs and who can't."
One afternoon, Le Corre shows me a video on his laptop, basically the director's cut of The Workout the World Forgot. I recognize a few scenes: Le Corre scrambling through brambles and running on the beach in Corsica. But there's other, more dramatic stuff in this version. "I can't put this online for liability reasons," he says as he appears onscreen jumping, from boulder to boulder, across a raging, flood-swollen river.
In the next scene, as a large wave subsides, Le Corre leaps from a cliff into a frothing sea; it looks as if he's about to be pulverized into human bouillabaisse. As the next wave arrives, he angles his body and kicks—a subtle, fishy move that lines him up in front of an impossibly narrow opening in the rocks. The wave breaks, but Le Corre rides it like driftwood into the small alcove. He vanishes briefly as the chaotic surf washes over the shore. The water retreats, and there he is, crouched on the rocks, unscathed.
"I'm not trying to show off," he says, perhaps sensing my disbelief. "I'm just showing you what's possible."
TOWARD THE END OF the week, Verdier finally takes center stage. It's combat time. "The best option is always to get away," Verdier says. He speaks with a measured calm that reminds me of David Carradine in Kung Fu, a TV series I loved as a kid. "But if we have to fight, we should be ready to fight to the end." Street battles are "total chaos," he says. "You're flooded with adrenaline, and most fights don't last more than a minute."
Verdier passes out muay Thai strike pads, and we take turns punching the pad as hard and fast as we can. I team with Fred Fombrun, 26, one of the brothers from New Jersey. Both Fombruns are serious amateur boxers, and Fred's first punch is so powerful I stagger backwards and almost fall over. It takes all my energy to keep my feet during his flurry. My own assault is considerably less impressive; at one point, I notice Fred checking messages on his iPhone while I hammer away at the pad.
After fight class, we adjourn to camp, where Brodeur has lunch waiting. Spaghetti! Oh. No. It's zucchini, shredded to look like spaghetti: zughetti! Still, the veggies are dressed with raw campari tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh basil, garlic, oregano, olive oil, and cracked black pepper—and it's delicious. I'm famished, and I gulp it down like a starved coyote, shamelessly licking the sauce from the bottom of my plate.
Despite my frequent anti-paleo cravings (the movie version of which I'm calling Quest for Fritos), I feel great. My skin feels thicker, my sunburn has faded into a honey-wheat sheen that it hasn't sported in years, and the soreness in my back and arms has dissipated completely. Only Dave Csonka, the big dude from Florida, seems to still be in decline. In addition to the poison ivy and low-blood-sugar spells, he's also tweaked his neck. "I'll be fine," he says, gamely playing along even though he has to rotate his whole torso to address us individually.
One question we all seem to be pondering is finally asked out loud by Fred Fombrun: "What exactly am I supposed to do when I get back home?" he says. "There aren't a lotta parks where I live in northern New Jersey."
Le Corre is working on an answer. In 2009, he met Robb Wolf, the influential CrossFit instructor and The Paleo Solution author, through a mutual friend. Inspired by Wolf's story and the viral success of CrossFit, Le Corre began hammering out a business plan modeled on it: he hopes to train and certify instructors, who will license the brand for their own gyms or create grown-up outdoor playgrounds like ours. Or both.
I could see the appeal as a general fitness program, especially because Le Corre believes that, if the regimen is intelligently designed, you have to do only a few circuits a week—no more dailies or oppressive dates with the treadmill. "A specialized athlete can improve their game, because training like this helps prevent injury and improve balance," he says. I figure it will also translate to the things I like to do, like skiing and cycling, because it's helping my body move the way it was designed to. Best of all, it's way more fun than doing intervals with a heart-rate monitor.
In the meantime, Le Corre is writing a book about MovNat. He also continues to crisscross the country, hosting one-day clinics, seminars, and other events. In October, he was a VIP guest at New York City's first annual barefoot run. A few weeks later, he and Wolf traveled to the Johnson Space Center's Wyle Laboratories to introduce and discuss the benefits of paleo diets and MovNat with NASA.
WORKING OUT On an empty belly, in a "fasted state," paleos argue, increases production of human growth hormone. So on the last morning, Le Corre has us begin our final, skill-culminating circuit sans breakfast. We begin by walking around the grassy hill near camp, twisting and bending, followed by body-weight squats. Then we drop down and prowl around the hill on all fours. "Scan the horizon," Le Corre instructs. "Stay low! You don't want to be seen. Remember: in nature we are ever mindful. Always alert."
He ratchets up the intensity with push-ups and wheelbarrows, a partner holding your feet, and then tells us to drop to the ground and roll down the hill, like logs. I'm so dizzy by the bottom, I can't stand up. Nearby, our other Dave, Dave Beretta, a young kid from East Greenwich, Rhode Island, is doubled over, dry-heaving.
Le Corre keeps throttling. We stagger into the wooded training zone for log lifts and stone carrying. Next, it's balance-beam walking and high jumps. Le Corre throws in some mind games, telling us we're doing an exercise on a ten count but stopping at eight and then counting backwards or repeating a number over and over: "Seven, seven, seven, seven …"
"Do we function in sets of ten in the wilderness?" he asks. "How do we know how long we will have to do something?"
After more than an hour grinding through the drills, we step up to the high bar that we attempted on the first day. I jump up, hook my leg, and … burst out laughing when I monkey myself on top of the bar. One by one, nearly everyone else, so embarrassingly defeated at the beginning of the week, pulls off the same feat. "See?" Le Corre says, a look of satisfaction on his face. "Progress."
I leave West Virginia inspired. Back home, I invent circuits in a neighborhood park—sprint barefoot across a field, jump over a bench, crawl on all fours down some stairs—even though I notice dog walkers and parents with small children altering course to avoid me. In the evenings, I cook my girlfriend dinners of grass-fed beef and roasted vegetables, with sliced watermelon for dessert. But it requires a level of dedication, planning, and self-control that I can't sustain, and soon I'm caught in the undertow of enchiladas and triple cappuccinos and driving a few blocks to the grocery store. My training fades to once a week, then once a month, and finally to watching 10,000 BC on Netflix.
I might have anticipated this while sitting at my gate in the Charleston airport, glumly half-watching a chattering news anchor talk about the Gulf oil spill while pudgy kids trundled by, clutching waffle cones the size of their heads. It dawned on me how each day boils down to a series of decisions centered on convenience and comfort. As I slumped in my chair, sipping water, our final morning in camp already felt distant and dim.
After the last day's circuit ended, we followed Le Corre down a game trail, deep into the woods. We weren't allowed to talk and had to move as quickly and quietly as possible. It started to rain, and soon we were not only sweaty but soaked and spackled with forest grit. At one point, Le Corre dropped down on all fours, and we did the same. Crawling down the trail, I crunched over some thorns but didn't feel a thing.
Eventually, we came to a small, fecund amphitheater, at the center of which was a dark bog, maybe 20 feet in diameter. The air was ripe with the smell of moss and ammonia, and the foliage flicked and glistened neon green. For the first time in 20 minutes, Le Corre finally spoke. Wearing only shorts and a dark-green bandanna, and streaked with mud as if someone had outlined his muscles with a black magic marker, he looked downright feral. "Adaptability is the holy grail of MovNat," he told us. "This is what we have done throughout human history. But we have lost touch with the world that created us."
With that, he charged across the swampy black hole, sinking instantly up to his waist but diving his arms and chest into the muck and thrashing his way to the other side in one sustained, growling effort.
The rest of us stood there dumbstruck, a couple of people shaking their heads while Le Corre beckoned from the other side. Finally, one by one, we splashed across to join him. And then, as if to underscore the fact that, yes, we had at last reawakened and it wasn't so bad, we slogged across the bog again—not once, but twice.
My wife as started getting into Crossfit and I have been reading articles about the Paleo diet and some about Crossfit here and there over the past month. She really enjoys it and gets me wondering how it would affect my ultra running and training for 100s. Would the benefit of spending the time doing Crossfit like workouts for example be greater than the benefit of using that time actually putting in more miles? I don't know.
Enjoy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Workout that Time Forgot
Will caveman calisthenics be the next big thing for adventure athletes?
By Nick Heil
Erwan Le Corre seems to defy gravity—and not just because he's French.
I'm standing close by as the 39-year-old movement coach—shirtless, barefoot, and built like Mikhail Baryshnikov—hops up and grasps a wooden bar lashed eight feet off the ground between two stout maple trees. Le Corre dangles calmly from both arms for a moment before swinging one leg up to the side, hooking it over the beam, and—swoooop—crouching on top of it and looking down at us. The move is so swift and catlike that I'm not quite sure how he did it. A few minutes later, I attempt the same thing, legs scissoring awkwardly until my arms give out and I hit the dirt with a thud, kicking up a cloud of dust.
This is day one—hour one, in fact—of caveman camp: July's weeklong MovNat Reawakening Workshop, at Summersville Lake Retreat, an RV resort in West Virginia. MovNat, an abbreviation of "Move Naturally," is the outdoor fitness-and-conditioning business that Le Corre founded in 2008. Our camp—modern dome tents, a fire ring, and a kitchen area covered by a canopy—is set up in a grassy clearing a couple of miles from the lake. Gyms are out; wilderness is in. Instead of weights, we lift rocks, logs, and one another. Hand-to-hand combat is as much a part of the regimen as lying in the grass and watching billowy clouds blow by.
"MovNat is a comprehensive lifestyle," Le Corre tells us. "It's about diet and nutrition. It's about exposure to sunlight and nature. It's about getting rest. It's about feeding the mind with healthy insights and positive thoughts." Le Corre, who relocated to the United States full-time in 2009, founded MovNat on the premise that humans once dashed around untamed landscapes with power and grace, gathering berries, toppling mastodons, and so forth—and that proficiency at such things will help reconnect us to the world in which we evolved. Not only were we born to run, he says, but also to jump, climb trees, swim deep underwater, slog through swamps, stalk prey, and fight off attackers.
"We live like zoo animals!" he continues that morning, pronouncing it "ah-nee-mahls." It's an idea Le Corre borrowed from the British zoologist Desmond Morris, author of the 1967 classic The Naked Ape, and it's central to his worldview: that we are essentially wild creatures ill-suited to desk jobs and processed foods. "We have become divorced from nature, trapped in colorless boxes," Le Corre says. "We have lost our adaptability, and it's threatening our health and longevity."
Clearly, the approach holds some appeal: all five of Le Corre's $1,700 summer workshops have sold out. I'd worried slightly about the freak factor before arriving, anticipating a clan of wayward hippies and hairy Luddites. But the group is surprisingly normal—and cosmopolitan. Among others, there's a corporate-recruitment manager from Osaka, Japan; a musician and his wife from London; a journalist from Zürich, Switzerland; two brothers from northern New Jersey; a Web designer from Brooklyn; and a computer programmer from Tallahassee, Florida. Everyone looks reasonably fit and is either barefoot or, like myself, shod in Vibram FiveFingers, the simian-looking foot-gloves.
"When I saw his promotional video, The Workout the World Forgot, I thought, This makes sense," Richard Carlow, the manager from Japan, tells me when I ask what inspired him to make such a long trip. "I wanted to learn it from the Source."
The Source is being assisted by Vic Verdier, a 42-year-old former French commando who currently lives in Thailand, where he teaches Krav Maga, the official self-defense system of the Israeli Defense Forces, and other martial arts. The only other staff is Allie Brodeur, 22, an accomplished acro-yogi and poi spinner—and our camp cook.
They make a colorful trio, but it's Brodeur's cooking that's the focus of most of our first day's conversation. That's because we're all being put on a strict version of the paleo diet, as in "Paleolithic," a pointedly unhedonistic approach to nutrition modeled after the eating habits of our hunter-gatherer forebears. Meat, fruits, veggies, nuts, and certain oils are OK, but grains, dairy, salt, sugar, caffeine, and alcohol are all verboten. Starbucks, I'm reminded on the first morning in camp, didn't materialize until the Late Neolithic.
By the time I turn in that night, after more exercises and a dinner of gravyless pork ribs and boiled carrots, I'm drained and swan-diving into full detox: woozy, wobbly-kneed, and worried that it's going to be a very, very long week. I do, at least, find a queen-size air mattress and cotton sheets in my tent. "This isn't survival school," Le Corre reassures me. "We want you to be comfortable here." One great thing about hunter-gatherers, apparently, is how much they love Bed Bath & Beyond.
MOVNAT DRAWS FROM some familiar sources—CrossFit, low-carb diets, barefoot running, martial arts, mud wrestling, Quest for Fire, etc.—but Le Corre's program occupies a space all its own. If anything, MovNat falls within the concept of "evolutionary fitness," an increasingly popular trend embraced by a loosely organized but fast-growing global community of health enthusiasts, medical professionals, and athletes. The movement is often lumped under the "paleo" rubric, but it's more than just a prehistoric way to eat and exercise.
The most fervent paleos prefer raw meat (thankfully, our workshop meals were always cooked), eschew footwear, fast periodically, and entertain themselves by dissing vegetarians—especially vegans, who they believe are misguided about human nutrition. But most paleos are more moderate, embracing the 80/20 rule: don't despair over the occasional bagel or sundae, as long as you adhere to the diet roughly 80 percent of the time.
The basic tenets of the paleo diet have been kicked around for years, but its watershed moment came in 1985, when an anthropology professor at Emory University named S. Boyd Eaton published "Paleolithic Nutrition: A Consideration of Its Nature and Current Implications" in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggesting that the paleo diet could be a public-health panacea. While the paper made a sizable splash, it wasn't until Loren Cordain, a professor of exercise science at Colorado State University, came across the piece a couple of years later that the idea began to reach a larger audience. Cordain eventually became the reigning authority on paleo nutrition and, in 2001, published The Paleo Diet.
Interest in the paleo lifestyle sputtered along for a few years, with help from flag bearers like Ray Audette, the author of NeanderThin, and Frank Forencich, author of Exuberant Animal, as well as a few primal-exercise proselytizers, like Art De Vany, a buff eptuagenarian and former economics professor from Los Angeles whom many credit with launching the evolutionary-fitness idea and whose latest book, The New Evolution Diet, is due out this month. But toward the end of the aughts, something curious happened: Cordain's royalty checks began to fatten up, and The Paleo Diet crept into Amazon.com's top 100. Cordain attributes much of the book's sleeper success to Robb Wolf, a former champion power lifter and biochemist who apprenticed with him in 2006.
In the late nineties, Wolf had suffered a series of health problems, including ulcerative colitis, high blood pressure, and depression. "I was augering into the mountainside," Wolf told me. Two years later, ailments cured by the paleo diet, Wolf discovered CrossFit, the popular strength-and-conditioning system that combines weight lifting, sprinting, and gymnastics. Eventually, Wolf took the paleo message to the greater CrossFit community, speaking often at gyms and events. Word spread with viral intensity, and as CrossFit mushroomed—the brand grew from 13 affiliated gyms in 2005 to 2,200 by 2010—so, too, did paleo's popularity.
These days, low-carb, high-protein diets are embraced by everyone from professional athletes to suburban moms. While the paleo approach is considerably more holistic than, say, the now disparaged Atkins diet, not everyone is buying it. The influential nutritionist Marion Nestle, for example, has questioned the wisdom of completely eliminating grains and dairy from our table. "It's never a good idea to restrict food groups unless you have to," Nestle says. "These foods have been eaten by humans for a long time with much pleasure as well as nutritional value." Others, like Katharine Milton, a respected anthropologist at UC–Berkeley, argue that paleos' fundamental presumption—that we have been unable to adapt to relatively new types of foods since the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry—is flawed. Humans, Milton argues, have always, even in Paleolithic times, adjusted to their changing environment, nutritional and otherwise, quite well.
Despite the lack of consensus, by the time I get to caveman camp, premodern diets and exercise are a small but growing phenomenon. NFL veteran John Welbourn preaches the paleo diet to his former teammates on the New England Patriots. Endurance gurus like Joe Friel, who, along with Cordain, co-authored The Paleo Diet for Athletes, urge triathletes to try it. Similarly, books like Christopher McDougal's Born to Run, about Mexico's Tarahumara tribe, are inspiring people to run barefoot or nearly barefoot, helping jack sales of Vibram FiveFingers by a factor of five in just the past year. Countless Web sites, books, and blogs have sprung up too, along with a handful of local paleo clubs across the country whose members gather to do things like learn archery and make grass-fed-beef jerky.
AT CAMP, WE FALL INTO a familiar pattern: up by seven, hearty breakfast, some warm-up drills, a skill-building session on barefoot running or proper log-lifting technique, lunch, siesta (or "MovNap"), a combo circuit, a swim in the lake, meaty dinner, and a lecture on topics such as lipid metabolism or the value of vitamin D.
So far, considering there was no fitness test required, attrition has been pretty minimal. A few of us have missed meals because we weren't feeling well, though some have been hit worse than others. There's a strict no-snacking policy, and Dave Csonka, the computer programmer from Florida, who's a buff six-five, has been begging for bananas because his blood sugar keeps crashing. Worse, his arms are covered in poison ivy. On one of our daily 40-minute barefoot hikes to the lake, Oswald Fombrun, one of the brothers from New Jersey, gets nailed just beneath the eye as we dash past a hornet's nest hidden in some rocks. The hikes have been a favorite part of my day, in which I imagine myself a wily hunter tracking down lunch, until I get stung twice on the arm.
Most of our training takes place in a shady grove near camp, where Verdier and Le Corre have built a temporary outdoor gym, with timbers lashed at different heights between trees, a complement of rocks and logs, several four-by-four balance beams, and a couple of picnic benches for high jumps. Verdier mostly hovers quietly in the background, while Brodeur keeps the food processor and blender humming back at camp.
On occasion, Le Corre will interrupt what we're doing to demonstrate proper technique or impress us with feats of skill and strength. After a few of us fail to move a massive log, he comes over, levers the tree trunk (which must weigh more than 300 pounds) onto his shoulder, and carries it the 100 yards to camp, where he plunks it by the campfire, dusting the bark off his arm with a theatrical flourish.
Le Corre is tall and tawny—the kind of physique you might expect to find if you waxed the hair off a Neanderthal. Still, for all the hard-bodied exterior and motivational speeches, he's no drill sergeant. His coaching is seasoned with quasi-mystical declarations, like "Oxygen is an accident, breath is intentional," and tips, like how listening to more reggae encourages rhythm and flow. At one point, I find him standing in the grass, performing some sort of sun prayer, head bowed, one arm raised to the sky. "I was just having a moment of gratitude," he says. He owns an iPhone, drives a Land Rover, and, perhaps due to his Frenchness, is comfortable wearing tight black briefs at the lake.
By the third morning, I'm filthy and sunburned and have acquired hundreds of tiny cuts and scratches that sizzle in a glaze of sweat. Even so, my body has (mostly) adjusted to the diet, and I'm feeling surprisingly good as we squirm around on crackling brown grass under a blistering sun, practicing an evasive move that might help us escape an attacker. Le Corre barks that we have become domesticated, that our sterilized and hermetically sealed lives have left us intolerant of nature. "But you can train dirt!" he exclaims, making an oblique reference to the fact that being exposed to grit and germs helps bolster our immune systems.
Not only does exercising outdoors make us more resilient, says Le Corre; it's also a better conduit for fitness than the typical cardio penance or preacher curls popular at big-box gyms, where waist trimming and biceps bulking are the main motivators. MovNat advances a concept that certain athletics coaches have pushed since the seventies, one that treats the body as a tool for dynamic movement, not a topiary sculpture.
Later that afternoon, after practicing more barefoot running ("Fall forward, catch yourself on the front of your feet"), Le Corre adds a twist to our trip to the lake. Along the way, we have to stop and carry a partner on our backs. I team up with Christoph Zürcher, 44, the journalist from Switzerland, who's six-two and has about 20 pounds on me. We're sweaty and shirtless, and I awkwardly hop on his back while he hooks his arms under my legs and starts lumbering forward. "Uuuuugghhhhh," he groans. "How far are we supposed to go?"
"Switch!" Le Corre shouts after about five minutes, and I stagger down the trail, bent under my crushing Swiss payload. At last we scramble over large rocks and emerge at the lake.
"The more we move, the smarter we become," Le Corre says as we sprawl on the rocks after our swim. "We're less stressed when we see green, like leaves and grass." A motorboat whizzes by, towing a water-skier. "I love technology," he continues. "I love all the modern conveniences that we have now, but we have to ask: When do we use it, and at what cost?"
LE CORRE GREW UP RUNNING around the fields and forests on the outskirts of Paris. He dabbled with ball sports—soccer, tennis—but hated the rules and boundary lines. At 15, he moved on to karate, quickly surpassing older, more experienced opponents. But he also found karate's formal protocols and tense competitions too staid and confining.
Then, at age 18, he happened to watch a television show about a 45-year-old Parisian stuntman named Jean Haberey. At one point, Haberey jumped out of a helicopter into an iceberg-strewn ocean wearing only swim trunks. It was the most outrageous thing Le Corre had ever seen—and he wanted to do it, too. A year later, he tracked Haberey down, and for the next seven years he followed him and his other disciples around the French metropolis, playing high-risk games: a "fight club of natural movement," as Le Corre puts it.
"He was the first guy to take people up onto the roofs of Paris," Le Corre said. "He also took us down into the underground, always barefoot, with no gear at all, to train people how to move silently like cats through urban obstacles … especially at night, when everyone was asleep."
Once, Haberey and Le Corre held a sit-up competition while dangling by their legs from a bridge over an eight-lane superhighway. Another time, Le Corre climbed along the transom of a tower crane, legs dangling in the void nearly a hundred feet above the ground. "It was crazy," Le Corre recalls, "but you just felt so alive."
Haberey's urban antics helped kick off the parkour craze, but Le Corre, like most of his followers, eventually grew disillusioned. "I supported him for a while," Le Corre says, "but it turned into a cult of his personality. It became too dark and underground, all about helping him, not others."
For a few years, Le Corre delved into endurance sports, competing in Ironman-distance triathlons while supporting himself with odd jobs, including making soap and men's jewelry. But turning himself into a perpetual-motion machine wasn't his raison d'être, either. Finally, in 2004, he stumbled upon an online comment about Methode Naturelle, an obscure training manual published in 1912 by Georges Hébert, a French naval officer. The book featured black-and-white photos of robust young men in briefs performing all kinds of primal-movement exercises: jumping, running, swimming, climbing, etc.
"I was like What?! This is exactly what I was doing before, but this guy had given it a name," says Le Corre. "He had systematized it, and I thought, That's the way to go."
Hébert's motto was "Being strong to be useful," a concept largely inspired by the defining event of his life. On May 8, 1902, Hébert was stationed on the Sughet, a naval ship just offshore of Saint-Pierre, on the island of Martinique, during the infamous eruption of Mount Pelée. In minutes, the blast flash-fried most of the town's 30,000 citizens, searing them with pyroclastic ash before burying them in tsunamis of mud. Amid the carnage, Hébert and his shipmates were credited with saving some 700 lives, pulling from the sea scalded men, women, and children, some of whom had been blown hundreds of feet through the air by the blast.
Preparing your body and mind for real-world, life-or-death applications is at the root of MovNat. Our workshop activities (throw a rock, climb a tree) may seem random, but they're intended to cultivate what Le Corre refers to as "selective tension," a kinetic reaction in which muscles relax and contract in patterns that help you move efficiently, especially in unpredictable situations. To underscore their practical value, Le Corre would often cite imagined modern-day scenarios during our training. "What if you had to pull someone from a burning building?" he asks one morning. "Or a flood," Verdier adds. "Sometimes survival comes down to who can run up a flight of stairs and who can't."
One afternoon, Le Corre shows me a video on his laptop, basically the director's cut of The Workout the World Forgot. I recognize a few scenes: Le Corre scrambling through brambles and running on the beach in Corsica. But there's other, more dramatic stuff in this version. "I can't put this online for liability reasons," he says as he appears onscreen jumping, from boulder to boulder, across a raging, flood-swollen river.
In the next scene, as a large wave subsides, Le Corre leaps from a cliff into a frothing sea; it looks as if he's about to be pulverized into human bouillabaisse. As the next wave arrives, he angles his body and kicks—a subtle, fishy move that lines him up in front of an impossibly narrow opening in the rocks. The wave breaks, but Le Corre rides it like driftwood into the small alcove. He vanishes briefly as the chaotic surf washes over the shore. The water retreats, and there he is, crouched on the rocks, unscathed.
"I'm not trying to show off," he says, perhaps sensing my disbelief. "I'm just showing you what's possible."
TOWARD THE END OF the week, Verdier finally takes center stage. It's combat time. "The best option is always to get away," Verdier says. He speaks with a measured calm that reminds me of David Carradine in Kung Fu, a TV series I loved as a kid. "But if we have to fight, we should be ready to fight to the end." Street battles are "total chaos," he says. "You're flooded with adrenaline, and most fights don't last more than a minute."
Verdier passes out muay Thai strike pads, and we take turns punching the pad as hard and fast as we can. I team with Fred Fombrun, 26, one of the brothers from New Jersey. Both Fombruns are serious amateur boxers, and Fred's first punch is so powerful I stagger backwards and almost fall over. It takes all my energy to keep my feet during his flurry. My own assault is considerably less impressive; at one point, I notice Fred checking messages on his iPhone while I hammer away at the pad.
After fight class, we adjourn to camp, where Brodeur has lunch waiting. Spaghetti! Oh. No. It's zucchini, shredded to look like spaghetti: zughetti! Still, the veggies are dressed with raw campari tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh basil, garlic, oregano, olive oil, and cracked black pepper—and it's delicious. I'm famished, and I gulp it down like a starved coyote, shamelessly licking the sauce from the bottom of my plate.
Despite my frequent anti-paleo cravings (the movie version of which I'm calling Quest for Fritos), I feel great. My skin feels thicker, my sunburn has faded into a honey-wheat sheen that it hasn't sported in years, and the soreness in my back and arms has dissipated completely. Only Dave Csonka, the big dude from Florida, seems to still be in decline. In addition to the poison ivy and low-blood-sugar spells, he's also tweaked his neck. "I'll be fine," he says, gamely playing along even though he has to rotate his whole torso to address us individually.
One question we all seem to be pondering is finally asked out loud by Fred Fombrun: "What exactly am I supposed to do when I get back home?" he says. "There aren't a lotta parks where I live in northern New Jersey."
Le Corre is working on an answer. In 2009, he met Robb Wolf, the influential CrossFit instructor and The Paleo Solution author, through a mutual friend. Inspired by Wolf's story and the viral success of CrossFit, Le Corre began hammering out a business plan modeled on it: he hopes to train and certify instructors, who will license the brand for their own gyms or create grown-up outdoor playgrounds like ours. Or both.
I could see the appeal as a general fitness program, especially because Le Corre believes that, if the regimen is intelligently designed, you have to do only a few circuits a week—no more dailies or oppressive dates with the treadmill. "A specialized athlete can improve their game, because training like this helps prevent injury and improve balance," he says. I figure it will also translate to the things I like to do, like skiing and cycling, because it's helping my body move the way it was designed to. Best of all, it's way more fun than doing intervals with a heart-rate monitor.
In the meantime, Le Corre is writing a book about MovNat. He also continues to crisscross the country, hosting one-day clinics, seminars, and other events. In October, he was a VIP guest at New York City's first annual barefoot run. A few weeks later, he and Wolf traveled to the Johnson Space Center's Wyle Laboratories to introduce and discuss the benefits of paleo diets and MovNat with NASA.
WORKING OUT On an empty belly, in a "fasted state," paleos argue, increases production of human growth hormone. So on the last morning, Le Corre has us begin our final, skill-culminating circuit sans breakfast. We begin by walking around the grassy hill near camp, twisting and bending, followed by body-weight squats. Then we drop down and prowl around the hill on all fours. "Scan the horizon," Le Corre instructs. "Stay low! You don't want to be seen. Remember: in nature we are ever mindful. Always alert."
He ratchets up the intensity with push-ups and wheelbarrows, a partner holding your feet, and then tells us to drop to the ground and roll down the hill, like logs. I'm so dizzy by the bottom, I can't stand up. Nearby, our other Dave, Dave Beretta, a young kid from East Greenwich, Rhode Island, is doubled over, dry-heaving.
Le Corre keeps throttling. We stagger into the wooded training zone for log lifts and stone carrying. Next, it's balance-beam walking and high jumps. Le Corre throws in some mind games, telling us we're doing an exercise on a ten count but stopping at eight and then counting backwards or repeating a number over and over: "Seven, seven, seven, seven …"
"Do we function in sets of ten in the wilderness?" he asks. "How do we know how long we will have to do something?"
After more than an hour grinding through the drills, we step up to the high bar that we attempted on the first day. I jump up, hook my leg, and … burst out laughing when I monkey myself on top of the bar. One by one, nearly everyone else, so embarrassingly defeated at the beginning of the week, pulls off the same feat. "See?" Le Corre says, a look of satisfaction on his face. "Progress."
I leave West Virginia inspired. Back home, I invent circuits in a neighborhood park—sprint barefoot across a field, jump over a bench, crawl on all fours down some stairs—even though I notice dog walkers and parents with small children altering course to avoid me. In the evenings, I cook my girlfriend dinners of grass-fed beef and roasted vegetables, with sliced watermelon for dessert. But it requires a level of dedication, planning, and self-control that I can't sustain, and soon I'm caught in the undertow of enchiladas and triple cappuccinos and driving a few blocks to the grocery store. My training fades to once a week, then once a month, and finally to watching 10,000 BC on Netflix.
I might have anticipated this while sitting at my gate in the Charleston airport, glumly half-watching a chattering news anchor talk about the Gulf oil spill while pudgy kids trundled by, clutching waffle cones the size of their heads. It dawned on me how each day boils down to a series of decisions centered on convenience and comfort. As I slumped in my chair, sipping water, our final morning in camp already felt distant and dim.
After the last day's circuit ended, we followed Le Corre down a game trail, deep into the woods. We weren't allowed to talk and had to move as quickly and quietly as possible. It started to rain, and soon we were not only sweaty but soaked and spackled with forest grit. At one point, Le Corre dropped down on all fours, and we did the same. Crawling down the trail, I crunched over some thorns but didn't feel a thing.
Eventually, we came to a small, fecund amphitheater, at the center of which was a dark bog, maybe 20 feet in diameter. The air was ripe with the smell of moss and ammonia, and the foliage flicked and glistened neon green. For the first time in 20 minutes, Le Corre finally spoke. Wearing only shorts and a dark-green bandanna, and streaked with mud as if someone had outlined his muscles with a black magic marker, he looked downright feral. "Adaptability is the holy grail of MovNat," he told us. "This is what we have done throughout human history. But we have lost touch with the world that created us."
With that, he charged across the swampy black hole, sinking instantly up to his waist but diving his arms and chest into the muck and thrashing his way to the other side in one sustained, growling effort.
The rest of us stood there dumbstruck, a couple of people shaking their heads while Le Corre beckoned from the other side. Finally, one by one, we splashed across to join him. And then, as if to underscore the fact that, yes, we had at last reawakened and it wasn't so bad, we slogged across the bog again—not once, but twice.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
One man to run two marathons per day for eleven months
Came across this story and had to share it, 13,000 miles in 11 months. Impressive!!!
PS- If you are viewing this in Facebook or Google Reader, ect you will have to come over to the blog to see the video as a FYI. I just noticed it does not show up in Google Reader.
PS- If you are viewing this in Facebook or Google Reader, ect you will have to come over to the blog to see the video as a FYI. I just noticed it does not show up in Google Reader.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Top 4 ultra runners in the Boulder area
Last week at the BTR (Boulder Trail Runners) talk they had the top 4 ultra runners in the US. I was not able to go but did find this blog giving us the low down on the talk.
You can find it by clicking below.
http://www.activeataltitude.com/blog/?p=121
And of course the video!!!!
Enjoy!!!
You can find it by clicking below.
http://www.activeataltitude.com/blog/?p=121
And of course the video!!!!
Boulder Trail Runners - Q&A with Scott Jurek, Anton Krupicka, Dave Mackey and Geoff Roes from Alpine Works on Vimeo.
Enjoy!!!
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
The Runner in Winter (Boulder Colorado)
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
The Grossman Motivation Series Part 10
These are great motivation pieces written by a great runner, Eric Grossman. I had to copy these from Running Times just for my own record in case this is ever removed from the site. LOVE IT! You can find it by clicking here or just read below.
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Maybe you saw me on TV. The Western States 100 was featured on NBC's World of Adventure Sports in July of 2007. I was interviewed the day before the race as well as at mile 56. You might have noted my deliberate and rational mental preparation during the former, and my almost complete mental breakdown during the latter. I was stopped. Though desperate for water, I could barely sip any fluid. Though desperate for calories, I could only nibble at food. Everything was making me sick. The run had already completely stripped me of all pretense and all hope of finishing competitively. When asked how I was doing, I could only respond: "I can't imagine going on."
I have only been able to muster the desire to run Western States on alternate years. I ran in 2005 until I dropped out at mile 78. At mile 20, my vision completely blurred in one eye, I collided with a sharp branch and gouged my right thigh. Over the next 50 miles, the inflammation grew intolerable. In 2009, I once again organized my training around preparation for this pre-eminent ultramarathon. I sprained my ankle at mile 12. Although I finished, I wasn't able to run again until late fall that year. When I did start training again, I developed chronic Achilles tendinitis that stayed with me through the five ultras I started in 2010. When I became simultaneously plagued by an acute hamstring pain, I stopped running. Instead, I began to saw and split large fallen trees for firewood. Seriously. I gave myself a hernia.
That was two and a half weeks ago. Last Thursday, I was scheduled for a follow-up exam with the surgeon. I jogged lightly in the morning. Knowing my propensities, he asked if I had been running since the surgery. He checked my incision, cut a suture and sent me out with a pass to ramp up training again at my discretion.
Early last spring, after months of trouble with my Achilles, I was told that recovery would likely depend on spending a year limited to very light running. I had reasons to try and run anyway. For several years I've enjoyed the benefits of competing with a sponsored ultrarunning team. I wanted to keep my place on the team. So, I ran even when I would have been better served by resting. Now I have given myself no real options.
That is the ultimate truth we have to contend with: Decision making, like politics, is local. Each depends on nearby factors. Appearances notwithstanding, choices aren't freely made. The decision to run depends on the rewards we get by doing it, offset by the costs we incur. So why are some people able to exercise moderation and work toward their long-term interest while others fall prey to temptation, overdo it and end up injured?
Freedom emerges where the person inserts long-term interests into near-term calculations. This doesn't involve magic, but it does involve reflection and effort. My purpose in the previous nine parts of this series has been to elucidate the kind of reflection and effort required. One pitfall we both face when I write about willpower is that we may both be convinced it is something I have and you need. So I keep reminding myself, and you, that willpower doesn’t work that way. We cultivate the freedom we desire. When we imagine that it is a gift that some just happen to have, it immediately evaporates.
Aligning short and long-term interests mostly requires a comfortable relationship with the passage of time. Yes, patience is a virtue, and your best ally in cultivating freedom. As I hope I’ve shown, I’m not particularly patient. When I start training after a layoff, my impulse is to see how far or how fast I can go. After a few weeks I feel good — I’ve readjusted to the immediate metabolic demands and my legs itch to move faster. The short-term gratification I get from running longer and faster does not align with the long-term benefits I’ll get from coming back slowly.
I’ll need to refer to my own playbook to manage. If you haven’t already read them, check out parts 1–9 in this series (see "related articles" below). At the core of developing willpower is one central tenet: feelings change. What feels good today may not feel good tomorrow and perhaps, more importantly, what feels painful today may not cause pain tomorrow. One of the greatest appeals of running ultramarathons is that we are forced to realize that it never always gets worse. That’s because you will have run into the wall. The race is so long, though, that you have time to come out on the other side. The most striking thing you find is that what had seemed hopeless can be recovered. You will rise and fly again and quite likely feel ecstatic for having transformed yourself.
If you did catch that episode of World of Adventure Sports, and stuck it out through the last commercial break, you saw the backside of a tall scrawny runner as he strode through the undergrowth en route to a respectable sub 24-hour finish at the Western States 100. I was conferred the Energizer Bunny award for getting back on the trail and finishing despite my near total collapse only a little over halfway through the run. The reward of finishing was reason enough for withstanding the trials of that day. The real value of the experience, however, was outlasting my impulse to stop. Nearly every bone in my body cried to be still and rest. A very subtle chord resonated through me that this too shall pass. So I hobbled out of the aid station, then walked, jogged and finally ran again. All it took was time.
Eric Grossman is a member of the Montrail ultrarunning team. At age 40, Grossman won the 2008 USATF 50-mile national championship. Check back next week for more of Grossman's motivational tips.
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Maybe you saw me on TV. The Western States 100 was featured on NBC's World of Adventure Sports in July of 2007. I was interviewed the day before the race as well as at mile 56. You might have noted my deliberate and rational mental preparation during the former, and my almost complete mental breakdown during the latter. I was stopped. Though desperate for water, I could barely sip any fluid. Though desperate for calories, I could only nibble at food. Everything was making me sick. The run had already completely stripped me of all pretense and all hope of finishing competitively. When asked how I was doing, I could only respond: "I can't imagine going on."
I have only been able to muster the desire to run Western States on alternate years. I ran in 2005 until I dropped out at mile 78. At mile 20, my vision completely blurred in one eye, I collided with a sharp branch and gouged my right thigh. Over the next 50 miles, the inflammation grew intolerable. In 2009, I once again organized my training around preparation for this pre-eminent ultramarathon. I sprained my ankle at mile 12. Although I finished, I wasn't able to run again until late fall that year. When I did start training again, I developed chronic Achilles tendinitis that stayed with me through the five ultras I started in 2010. When I became simultaneously plagued by an acute hamstring pain, I stopped running. Instead, I began to saw and split large fallen trees for firewood. Seriously. I gave myself a hernia.
That was two and a half weeks ago. Last Thursday, I was scheduled for a follow-up exam with the surgeon. I jogged lightly in the morning. Knowing my propensities, he asked if I had been running since the surgery. He checked my incision, cut a suture and sent me out with a pass to ramp up training again at my discretion.
Early last spring, after months of trouble with my Achilles, I was told that recovery would likely depend on spending a year limited to very light running. I had reasons to try and run anyway. For several years I've enjoyed the benefits of competing with a sponsored ultrarunning team. I wanted to keep my place on the team. So, I ran even when I would have been better served by resting. Now I have given myself no real options.
That is the ultimate truth we have to contend with: Decision making, like politics, is local. Each depends on nearby factors. Appearances notwithstanding, choices aren't freely made. The decision to run depends on the rewards we get by doing it, offset by the costs we incur. So why are some people able to exercise moderation and work toward their long-term interest while others fall prey to temptation, overdo it and end up injured?
Freedom emerges where the person inserts long-term interests into near-term calculations. This doesn't involve magic, but it does involve reflection and effort. My purpose in the previous nine parts of this series has been to elucidate the kind of reflection and effort required. One pitfall we both face when I write about willpower is that we may both be convinced it is something I have and you need. So I keep reminding myself, and you, that willpower doesn’t work that way. We cultivate the freedom we desire. When we imagine that it is a gift that some just happen to have, it immediately evaporates.
Aligning short and long-term interests mostly requires a comfortable relationship with the passage of time. Yes, patience is a virtue, and your best ally in cultivating freedom. As I hope I’ve shown, I’m not particularly patient. When I start training after a layoff, my impulse is to see how far or how fast I can go. After a few weeks I feel good — I’ve readjusted to the immediate metabolic demands and my legs itch to move faster. The short-term gratification I get from running longer and faster does not align with the long-term benefits I’ll get from coming back slowly.
I’ll need to refer to my own playbook to manage. If you haven’t already read them, check out parts 1–9 in this series (see "related articles" below). At the core of developing willpower is one central tenet: feelings change. What feels good today may not feel good tomorrow and perhaps, more importantly, what feels painful today may not cause pain tomorrow. One of the greatest appeals of running ultramarathons is that we are forced to realize that it never always gets worse. That’s because you will have run into the wall. The race is so long, though, that you have time to come out on the other side. The most striking thing you find is that what had seemed hopeless can be recovered. You will rise and fly again and quite likely feel ecstatic for having transformed yourself.
If you did catch that episode of World of Adventure Sports, and stuck it out through the last commercial break, you saw the backside of a tall scrawny runner as he strode through the undergrowth en route to a respectable sub 24-hour finish at the Western States 100. I was conferred the Energizer Bunny award for getting back on the trail and finishing despite my near total collapse only a little over halfway through the run. The reward of finishing was reason enough for withstanding the trials of that day. The real value of the experience, however, was outlasting my impulse to stop. Nearly every bone in my body cried to be still and rest. A very subtle chord resonated through me that this too shall pass. So I hobbled out of the aid station, then walked, jogged and finally ran again. All it took was time.
Eric Grossman is a member of the Montrail ultrarunning team. At age 40, Grossman won the 2008 USATF 50-mile national championship. Check back next week for more of Grossman's motivational tips.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
The Grossman Motivation Series Part 9
These are great motivation pieces written by a great runner, Eric Grossman. I had to copy these from Running Times just for my own record in case this is ever removed from the site. LOVE IT! You can find it by clicking here or just read below.
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I'd like to challenge you to a race. If you accept, we'll meet at a time of my choosing, run a distance of my choosing along a course that, yes, I choose. I'll inform you of my choices only as you absolutely have to know them. I'll text you 15 minutes before the start so you can get your shoes on. I'll have the course marked clearly, but you will only be able to see markings as you approach them. You will not know how far you have to go, or what lies ahead. You won't know where the finish is until you get there.
You may want know my reasons for challenging you. OK, let's say that I just want to beat you. Suppose that you also want to beat me. Will you accept? If we have similar abilities, do I gain an advantage by knowing the parameters of the race? You probably feel that I do. I'll be able to plan, after all. I'll eat the optimal pre-race foods, ensure I get enough sleep and choose the best shoes and clothes for the distance and terrain. I would certainly understand any reluctance you might feel about racing me.
What if I told you that my purpose is actually to see how fast I can get you to run? I know how you are before races. You get all wound up. You obsess over race preparation, exhausting yourself before you even start. And the night before? You barely sleep. I'm offering you a way around all that tiresome hassle. I've got your best interest at heart, so will you accept my challenge now? I want you to imagine that you can actually run better by knowing less about the race, even as you run it. You can shut down your brain and just run, pleasantly unaware of your remaining mileage. I’ll do the thinking for you, and set a pace that I think will be optimal.
Those who compete in trail races, especially trail ultramarathons, get a small taste of how this kind of challenge plays out. Trail races are difficult to measure and mark, so there is an element of surprise, especially the first time runners compete on a given course. Most race directors do not post mile markers, and even posted mileages are notoriously inaccurate. The Hellgate 100K may be the most sinister ultramarathon you can run. It starts at midnight on a Friday night in December near Fincastle, Va. I was certainly in the dark the first year I ran it. Because of snow and ice, the crew assigned to mark the course fell behind, so I ended up in front of them. Not only was I unsure of mileage, but I was also unsure of the route. When I started climbing, I had no idea whether I was in for 100 or 1,000 vertical feet. There are nine aid stations where runners can grab food, refill bottles and try to regain sanity. If you are deliberate enough while you are there, you'll think to ask about the distance to the next aid station.
After running through the night and into the frigid dawn, stamping postholes into interminable stretches of snow and ice for over 50 miles, you will arrive at the eighth Hellgate aid station. If you are collected enough to ask, they'll tell you it is 6.6 miles to the ninth, and final, aid station (click here a complete course description). That doesn't sound too bad, so you stride out on the lengthy downhill section of gravel road, thinking that this second-to-last segment will pass quickly. When you turn onto meandering single track, you are slowed. You climb hills and go around corners, always thinking that just around the next turn you'll see some sign of the aid station. It doesn't come. You were thinking you'd finish that section in an hour. You are already at 1:20. Your suffering is protracted, but what happens to your performance? Did thinking you only had 6.6 miles until the next break cause you to run a little faster than you might have had you known the actual distance was at least 8 miles? How does your consideration of the distance to be run in any race affect your pace and your perception of effort?
When Jure Robic died in a collision with a car in September, he cut short a legacy of perhaps the greatest feats of endurance achieved by any person. He rode his bicycle an average of 28,000 miles every year. He holds the world record for a 24 hour ride: 518.7 miles. He has won the Race Across America an unparalleled five times. According to a New York Times story from 2006, Robic left decisions during events to his crew, termed his "second brain." Robic was allowed to choose the music he listened to, but all the other decisions, including speed, breaks and fueling, were left to his crew. Significantly, they kept him uninformed about remaining mileages. So was keeping Robic in the dark a good way to promote top performance? Perhaps my challenge to you was not so unfair after all!
The year after I graduated from college, I traveled to Japan with an invited group of athletes to compete alongside Japanese collegians in an Ekiden. I ran the final leg, some 21K, for our eight-person team. I was handed the team sash in the middle of the countryside en route to the holy city of Ise. I ran completely alone through a light drizzle all the way to the famous Shinto shrine, where the race finished. I had no feedback about pace or distance other than my watch and my own senses. I simply ran, unreflectively soaking up the sensations of a strange land while metering out my effort. Afterwards, I had to be shown how my split stacked up against those of my Japanese counterparts. I had the second-best time for that leg.
So maybe I can persuade you that a seemingly unthinking approach to running can yield good results. That isn’t my intention. Training and racing are ultimately exercises of your intelligence. What I want is for you to broaden your concept of running intelligence to include all the things you do with and without conscious awareness. Even if you don't offload training and racing decisions to a separate crew, you should still locate and use your own second brain. It extends through your body and into every extremity. It is your activity and your feedback. You can call it intuition, but it isn't mindless, and it requires honing just like any other intelligence.
It is me.
So what do you say? Let’s see how fast we can run this thing.
Eric Grossman is a member of the Montrail ultrarunning team. At age 40, Grossman won the 2008 USATF 50-mile national championship. Check back next week for more of Grossman's motivational tips.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'd like to challenge you to a race. If you accept, we'll meet at a time of my choosing, run a distance of my choosing along a course that, yes, I choose. I'll inform you of my choices only as you absolutely have to know them. I'll text you 15 minutes before the start so you can get your shoes on. I'll have the course marked clearly, but you will only be able to see markings as you approach them. You will not know how far you have to go, or what lies ahead. You won't know where the finish is until you get there.
You may want know my reasons for challenging you. OK, let's say that I just want to beat you. Suppose that you also want to beat me. Will you accept? If we have similar abilities, do I gain an advantage by knowing the parameters of the race? You probably feel that I do. I'll be able to plan, after all. I'll eat the optimal pre-race foods, ensure I get enough sleep and choose the best shoes and clothes for the distance and terrain. I would certainly understand any reluctance you might feel about racing me.
What if I told you that my purpose is actually to see how fast I can get you to run? I know how you are before races. You get all wound up. You obsess over race preparation, exhausting yourself before you even start. And the night before? You barely sleep. I'm offering you a way around all that tiresome hassle. I've got your best interest at heart, so will you accept my challenge now? I want you to imagine that you can actually run better by knowing less about the race, even as you run it. You can shut down your brain and just run, pleasantly unaware of your remaining mileage. I’ll do the thinking for you, and set a pace that I think will be optimal.
Those who compete in trail races, especially trail ultramarathons, get a small taste of how this kind of challenge plays out. Trail races are difficult to measure and mark, so there is an element of surprise, especially the first time runners compete on a given course. Most race directors do not post mile markers, and even posted mileages are notoriously inaccurate. The Hellgate 100K may be the most sinister ultramarathon you can run. It starts at midnight on a Friday night in December near Fincastle, Va. I was certainly in the dark the first year I ran it. Because of snow and ice, the crew assigned to mark the course fell behind, so I ended up in front of them. Not only was I unsure of mileage, but I was also unsure of the route. When I started climbing, I had no idea whether I was in for 100 or 1,000 vertical feet. There are nine aid stations where runners can grab food, refill bottles and try to regain sanity. If you are deliberate enough while you are there, you'll think to ask about the distance to the next aid station.
After running through the night and into the frigid dawn, stamping postholes into interminable stretches of snow and ice for over 50 miles, you will arrive at the eighth Hellgate aid station. If you are collected enough to ask, they'll tell you it is 6.6 miles to the ninth, and final, aid station (click here a complete course description). That doesn't sound too bad, so you stride out on the lengthy downhill section of gravel road, thinking that this second-to-last segment will pass quickly. When you turn onto meandering single track, you are slowed. You climb hills and go around corners, always thinking that just around the next turn you'll see some sign of the aid station. It doesn't come. You were thinking you'd finish that section in an hour. You are already at 1:20. Your suffering is protracted, but what happens to your performance? Did thinking you only had 6.6 miles until the next break cause you to run a little faster than you might have had you known the actual distance was at least 8 miles? How does your consideration of the distance to be run in any race affect your pace and your perception of effort?
When Jure Robic died in a collision with a car in September, he cut short a legacy of perhaps the greatest feats of endurance achieved by any person. He rode his bicycle an average of 28,000 miles every year. He holds the world record for a 24 hour ride: 518.7 miles. He has won the Race Across America an unparalleled five times. According to a New York Times story from 2006, Robic left decisions during events to his crew, termed his "second brain." Robic was allowed to choose the music he listened to, but all the other decisions, including speed, breaks and fueling, were left to his crew. Significantly, they kept him uninformed about remaining mileages. So was keeping Robic in the dark a good way to promote top performance? Perhaps my challenge to you was not so unfair after all!
The year after I graduated from college, I traveled to Japan with an invited group of athletes to compete alongside Japanese collegians in an Ekiden. I ran the final leg, some 21K, for our eight-person team. I was handed the team sash in the middle of the countryside en route to the holy city of Ise. I ran completely alone through a light drizzle all the way to the famous Shinto shrine, where the race finished. I had no feedback about pace or distance other than my watch and my own senses. I simply ran, unreflectively soaking up the sensations of a strange land while metering out my effort. Afterwards, I had to be shown how my split stacked up against those of my Japanese counterparts. I had the second-best time for that leg.
So maybe I can persuade you that a seemingly unthinking approach to running can yield good results. That isn’t my intention. Training and racing are ultimately exercises of your intelligence. What I want is for you to broaden your concept of running intelligence to include all the things you do with and without conscious awareness. Even if you don't offload training and racing decisions to a separate crew, you should still locate and use your own second brain. It extends through your body and into every extremity. It is your activity and your feedback. You can call it intuition, but it isn't mindless, and it requires honing just like any other intelligence.
It is me.
So what do you say? Let’s see how fast we can run this thing.
Eric Grossman is a member of the Montrail ultrarunning team. At age 40, Grossman won the 2008 USATF 50-mile national championship. Check back next week for more of Grossman's motivational tips.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
The Grossman Motivation Series Part 8
These are great motivation pieces written by a great runner, Eric Grossman. I had to copy these from Running Times just for my own record in case this is ever removed from the site. LOVE IT! You can find it by clicking here or just read below.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The energy in the dorm would just be ramping up when it was time for me to trek across campus to the Blue Room. Every Saturday night, I donned my apron and stood behind the counter, mixing frappes for the slow trickle of customers until close. I maintained this trade-off throughout college; I gave up socializing on Saturday nights. In exchange, I gained a small amount of money, but, more importantly, I was always up for the Sunday morning long run. To be fair, all of my teammates made the run as well. The difference was that, on occasion, some of them felt a lot worse than I did.
College students, even serious athletes, occasionally succumb to the temptations readily available on weekend nights. When I was in college, Saturday morning races meant we retired early on Friday night. Saturday nights were more negotiable. In the balance? We all knew about the workout for the next day: It would be the time honored Sunday morning over-distance run. Early on Saturday evening, a runner might well decide to lay off the alcohol and turn in before the wee hours of the morning, knowing that the quality of the next day's run would be higher. The calculus changes, however, with the developing circumstances of the evening: more friends arriving, better music playing, a girl lingering.
We attributed a weakness of willpower to those who fell prey to such temptations and would show up in less-than-optimal condition on Sunday morning. We imagined that temptation stood, like the devil, on one shoulder and outmaneuvered the angel on the opposite shoulder. “Poor sucker!” we'd think, “If only he had listened to the angel!” He could have been cruising through the relatively easy 6:30 per-mile pace. Instead, he’d grit his teeth and barely cling to the back of the group. He may have even expressed regret for his lack of restraint. If the run was bad enough, he may have remembered it well enough for his little angel to bring it up the next time. “Hey dummy,” the angel would say, “You remember what happened last time!”
This raises an important question: If the angel prevails the next time, will our runner be any less of a sucker? Isn’t he still just doing what he is told and obeying the immediate pros and cons as best presented to him? I want to convince you that responding to the angel takes no more strength of will than responding to the devil.
The bottom line is that any choice is ultimately a calculation that pits the pros and cons against each other. Every decision has its reasons. We may think a particular decision ill-considered, but who are we to say? If the Sunday run is important enough to trump Saturday night festivities, then it will. We let the angel and the devil duke it out, and side with the most convincing.
This dynamic implies an existential and practical problem for runners. Like G.W. Bush, we want to be “the decider.” We want credit for our accomplishments. Before the season, we want to set goals for what we can do and afterward, we want to reflect on what we did. If every decision was simply a cost-benefit analysis that depended only on the circumstances at the time, we really can't take credit for any of it. Worse, much of what we want to take credit for is our effort. If our decisions to exert ourselves are really out of our hands (and in the hands of talking critters) then how can we claim that effort as our own? Any autonomous motivation seems doomed to dry up before we even get started.
You may like to think that you really are like the president and can exercise veto power over your little critter advisers. Well, suppose that I grant you veto power? You get to decide now between that next drink and going home early. What sways you? Some reason, right? You didn’t just make the answer up, did you? In that case, you might just as well have rolled the dice or consulted a random answer generator. You can’t then turn around and claim credit for that decision! So while I don't think we can escape the immediate calculus that goes into our decisions, I would like to explore the sliver of light that gives us some leverage over our decisions.
We think of decisions like they happen on the spot, when we have to provide the answer to the perennial question: “Should I stay or should I go now?” This is thankfully false. Your ray of light is that you can make decisions over time that build a long perspective to deal with the question. The trick is to stack the negotiation so that the best answer is the one that is supplied by your critters.
There are a lot of ways to stack your decisions. I’ll provide three that I think provide potent examples:
1. Set the default to "run." Suppose the devil and the angel provide equally compelling cases. Instead of a “jump ball,” have a possession arrow and keep it pointed on the same team. The angel always wins the ball. So, the weather’s really bad, but you skipped the last one and you really need this workout. The scales are about even. Check the arrow: It says “run.”
2. Invert the incentives. Hard workouts can be uncomfortable. Your devil critter can use this against you. “You’ll suffer if you try these hill repeats,” he’ll say. You can, over time, make the discomfort its own reward, like training for a hot race by turning on the heat in the car during the summer. By continuously reprogramming your own responses to dreaded stimuli, you can make them feel positive. “Bring on the heat,” you’ll say. Likewise, late on Saturday night, you can embrace your monastic celibacy.
3. Raise the stakes. Think of the runner who stops at a port-a-potty, and, fiddling with his running shorts, accidentally drops his keys into the froth. He bangs open the door, takes off his wedding ring and throws it in after the keys. His buddy, waiting outside, exclaims “What are you doing?” to which the runner retorts, “You didn’t think I was going in just for the keys, did you?!” Similarly, you can give your runs epochal significance by making them seem disproportionately important. You can imagine that missing a run or even being less than ready to do one well, will set you back compared to your competition. While it may not, strictly speaking, be true, the motivation to put running first may indeed serve to keep you ahead of your nearest competitors. And that motivation is increased by stacking the negotiation.
Eric Grossman is a member of the Montrail ultrarunning team. At age 40, Grossman won the 2008 USATF 50-mile national championship. Check back next week for more of Grossman's motivational tips.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The energy in the dorm would just be ramping up when it was time for me to trek across campus to the Blue Room. Every Saturday night, I donned my apron and stood behind the counter, mixing frappes for the slow trickle of customers until close. I maintained this trade-off throughout college; I gave up socializing on Saturday nights. In exchange, I gained a small amount of money, but, more importantly, I was always up for the Sunday morning long run. To be fair, all of my teammates made the run as well. The difference was that, on occasion, some of them felt a lot worse than I did.
College students, even serious athletes, occasionally succumb to the temptations readily available on weekend nights. When I was in college, Saturday morning races meant we retired early on Friday night. Saturday nights were more negotiable. In the balance? We all knew about the workout for the next day: It would be the time honored Sunday morning over-distance run. Early on Saturday evening, a runner might well decide to lay off the alcohol and turn in before the wee hours of the morning, knowing that the quality of the next day's run would be higher. The calculus changes, however, with the developing circumstances of the evening: more friends arriving, better music playing, a girl lingering.
We attributed a weakness of willpower to those who fell prey to such temptations and would show up in less-than-optimal condition on Sunday morning. We imagined that temptation stood, like the devil, on one shoulder and outmaneuvered the angel on the opposite shoulder. “Poor sucker!” we'd think, “If only he had listened to the angel!” He could have been cruising through the relatively easy 6:30 per-mile pace. Instead, he’d grit his teeth and barely cling to the back of the group. He may have even expressed regret for his lack of restraint. If the run was bad enough, he may have remembered it well enough for his little angel to bring it up the next time. “Hey dummy,” the angel would say, “You remember what happened last time!”
This raises an important question: If the angel prevails the next time, will our runner be any less of a sucker? Isn’t he still just doing what he is told and obeying the immediate pros and cons as best presented to him? I want to convince you that responding to the angel takes no more strength of will than responding to the devil.
The bottom line is that any choice is ultimately a calculation that pits the pros and cons against each other. Every decision has its reasons. We may think a particular decision ill-considered, but who are we to say? If the Sunday run is important enough to trump Saturday night festivities, then it will. We let the angel and the devil duke it out, and side with the most convincing.
This dynamic implies an existential and practical problem for runners. Like G.W. Bush, we want to be “the decider.” We want credit for our accomplishments. Before the season, we want to set goals for what we can do and afterward, we want to reflect on what we did. If every decision was simply a cost-benefit analysis that depended only on the circumstances at the time, we really can't take credit for any of it. Worse, much of what we want to take credit for is our effort. If our decisions to exert ourselves are really out of our hands (and in the hands of talking critters) then how can we claim that effort as our own? Any autonomous motivation seems doomed to dry up before we even get started.
You may like to think that you really are like the president and can exercise veto power over your little critter advisers. Well, suppose that I grant you veto power? You get to decide now between that next drink and going home early. What sways you? Some reason, right? You didn’t just make the answer up, did you? In that case, you might just as well have rolled the dice or consulted a random answer generator. You can’t then turn around and claim credit for that decision! So while I don't think we can escape the immediate calculus that goes into our decisions, I would like to explore the sliver of light that gives us some leverage over our decisions.
We think of decisions like they happen on the spot, when we have to provide the answer to the perennial question: “Should I stay or should I go now?” This is thankfully false. Your ray of light is that you can make decisions over time that build a long perspective to deal with the question. The trick is to stack the negotiation so that the best answer is the one that is supplied by your critters.
There are a lot of ways to stack your decisions. I’ll provide three that I think provide potent examples:
1. Set the default to "run." Suppose the devil and the angel provide equally compelling cases. Instead of a “jump ball,” have a possession arrow and keep it pointed on the same team. The angel always wins the ball. So, the weather’s really bad, but you skipped the last one and you really need this workout. The scales are about even. Check the arrow: It says “run.”
2. Invert the incentives. Hard workouts can be uncomfortable. Your devil critter can use this against you. “You’ll suffer if you try these hill repeats,” he’ll say. You can, over time, make the discomfort its own reward, like training for a hot race by turning on the heat in the car during the summer. By continuously reprogramming your own responses to dreaded stimuli, you can make them feel positive. “Bring on the heat,” you’ll say. Likewise, late on Saturday night, you can embrace your monastic celibacy.
3. Raise the stakes. Think of the runner who stops at a port-a-potty, and, fiddling with his running shorts, accidentally drops his keys into the froth. He bangs open the door, takes off his wedding ring and throws it in after the keys. His buddy, waiting outside, exclaims “What are you doing?” to which the runner retorts, “You didn’t think I was going in just for the keys, did you?!” Similarly, you can give your runs epochal significance by making them seem disproportionately important. You can imagine that missing a run or even being less than ready to do one well, will set you back compared to your competition. While it may not, strictly speaking, be true, the motivation to put running first may indeed serve to keep you ahead of your nearest competitors. And that motivation is increased by stacking the negotiation.
Eric Grossman is a member of the Montrail ultrarunning team. At age 40, Grossman won the 2008 USATF 50-mile national championship. Check back next week for more of Grossman's motivational tips.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Tor des Geants
I have never even heard of this race before today but this makes any race in the US look like child's play. HOLY CRAP!
The Tor des Geants, held this year from Sept. 12 to 19, is a 200-mile race through the Italian Alps, with a couple dozen passes, rough and rocky trails, and nearly 80,000 feet of climbing. Beat (guy in the video from CA) finished the race in 132 hours - more than five days - on less than five hours of sleep. He didn't intend to try to convey the entire experience of the Tor des Geants, just touch the surface of what it might be like to barely sleep for five days and cross 25 steep passes in the Italian Alps.
Freakin NUTS!! I think this one might have to go on the bucket list.
The Tor des Geants, held this year from Sept. 12 to 19, is a 200-mile race through the Italian Alps, with a couple dozen passes, rough and rocky trails, and nearly 80,000 feet of climbing. Beat (guy in the video from CA) finished the race in 132 hours - more than five days - on less than five hours of sleep. He didn't intend to try to convey the entire experience of the Tor des Geants, just touch the surface of what it might be like to barely sleep for five days and cross 25 steep passes in the Italian Alps.
Freakin NUTS!! I think this one might have to go on the bucket list.
No sleep 'til Courmayeur from Jill Homer on Vimeo.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
The Grossman Motivation Series Part 2
These are great motivation pieces written by a great runner, Eric Grossman. I had to copy these from Running Times just for my own record in case this is ever removed from the site. LOVE IT! You can find it by clicking here or just read below.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On a warm spring afternoon in 1987, Sue and I were splayed across the bed in her dorm room, listening to The Eagles' greatest hits. She was trying to work. She gripped her pencil tightly, annotating the margins of her book, fighting to keep her attention fixed. I lay on my back, one leg crossed over the other, thumbing through the pages of my book. I was more interested in Sue than in my work. When I had gleaned what I needed from my reading I put the book down and pestered her. It didn't take long to distract her away from her toils. Her study sessions looked to me like open combat — an effort to willfully execute a despised command. I knew she would be up late, feeling guilty for having procrastinated, forcing herself to stay awake to continue her work. She was in difficult pre-med courses, but wondered aloud why I wasn't, considering that the work seemed to come so easily to me.
Sue ran track with the same intensity. It was always a struggle. She literally gritted her teeth through hard intervals. After practice, she'd be worn out. It'd be 5:30 p.m. and time to eat and she'd crash for a short nap. I warned her to no avail that napping would keep her from falling asleep at bedtime. Sue beat herself up for a lot of things. She'd eat tiny portions at mealtime, wanting to keep her weight down, and then scarf a pint of Ben & Jerry's before bed. She occasionally raged at me for making everything look easy. I don't remember if I understood this then, but I've gradually realized that I make things look easy because I've made a science of anticipating what I can and can't do.
Dan Challener, the men's distance coach, told us to run 20 minutes and meet him at the track. Brown's stadium is a 10-minute jog from campus, so we looped through the affluent neighborhoods on the hill just north of downtown Providence. We knew the workout would be different. We were left wondering what we were in for.
Head coach Bob Rothenberg (Berg) was there, along with Dan. He told us we would run the measured two-mile course on the road, finishing at the stadium, and, without pausing, we were to run a mile hard on the track. He told me, along with some teammates including our captain, Fergal Mullen, to run the two miles at 5:40 per mile pace and then the track mile at 4:45. We were to repeat this twice more, without pausing in between.
I told our coaches that I wasn't sure we could do that. Berg looked at the ground and gave me a well-worn shake of the head. Dan stared at me, his agitation visible. I knew what they wanted, and Fergal was quick to give it to them. "Ah, we can do that! Come on, guys, let's be positive!"
We hadn't done a workout like that before. We'd certainly done mile repeats, though, and doing a set of 4:45 miles was a tough effort. We'd also done plenty of tempo runs, and 5:40 pace was close to threshold. We were getting pretty fit, but I was apprehensive. The guys were starting to bounce, stretch or do strides. They may actually have thought that believing they could do it was enough. Or maybe they thought that whatever coach said they could do, they could do. Or maybe they just didn't think deeply about it. Most likely, I suppose, they had learned that expressing a "can do" attitude worked in getting along with other people. I took the task at face value and tried to get my head around it. It made my heart beat harder and my hands turn clammy.
I wanted to nail that tempo pace and maximize my running economy. It would devastate our chances to finish if we got carried away from the beginning. When we started, we stayed bunched together. When I stuck behind one of the guys, I could lower my arm just a bit so that it would swing just under his. My gait was low and quiet. We hummed through the splits right on pace. When we transitioned to the track, I kept in mind that the acceleration wouldn't feel so abrupt coming off the 5:40 pace. Starting an interval from a standstill gives the body a jolt that takes a little while to accommodate. Shifting gears, as we did in this workout, actually made the first mile interval feel comparatively easy.
We were doing the work, though, and it started to show on the second two miles on the road. The guys were having some trouble keeping pace. I clocked off the splits like a metronome, barely deviating even for the slight inclines. By the time we were back on the track the guys were starting to string out behind me. I nailed the second one-mile interval on the track. I transitioned slowly to try and let the other guys catch up for the final two miles on the road. They were coming apart. I went on to complete the workout as prescribed.
The surest path to a struggle, and an apparent lack of willpower, is to be either thoughtless or wrong about what you can do. I remember a runner named Mike Haggerty from Saint Xavier High School in Louisville. He was two years ahead of me, and I knew he was a fast half-miler, so I watched him during cross country season. He'd bolt to the lead in every race, stay there for up to a mile, and then fade and get passed by any decent runner who went out at a sustainable pace. In some important sense, he just never figured out that he could have run better over 5K if he went out slower. While it may have looked like a lack of motivation (to sustain that early pace), it really was Mike's inaccuracy about his abilities. Conversely, we look like iron-willed heroes when we "talk smack" and get it right. We may fool others, and even ourselves, when we decide to achieve a goal — say a sub-2:30 marathon — and then we just "make it happen." More likely, we accurately predicted that, with proper preparation, we would meet that goal. And we were right.
Motivation doesn't start with an ambitious goal. Once our minds are clear of distractions, the key step is an accurate appraisal of what we can do. I called my own attempt to know myself a science because, like science, this requires objective observation and data. Fortunately for us, every run, workout and race yields plenty of data. Use that data — not your perceptions of what you "could have" done — to guide your goal setting. You'll find it a lot easier to exert your will, meet your goals and stay motivated.
Eric Grossman is a member of the Montrail ultrarunning team. At age 40, Grossman won the 2008 USATF 50-mile national championship. Check back next week for more of Grossman's motivational tips.
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On a warm spring afternoon in 1987, Sue and I were splayed across the bed in her dorm room, listening to The Eagles' greatest hits. She was trying to work. She gripped her pencil tightly, annotating the margins of her book, fighting to keep her attention fixed. I lay on my back, one leg crossed over the other, thumbing through the pages of my book. I was more interested in Sue than in my work. When I had gleaned what I needed from my reading I put the book down and pestered her. It didn't take long to distract her away from her toils. Her study sessions looked to me like open combat — an effort to willfully execute a despised command. I knew she would be up late, feeling guilty for having procrastinated, forcing herself to stay awake to continue her work. She was in difficult pre-med courses, but wondered aloud why I wasn't, considering that the work seemed to come so easily to me.
Sue ran track with the same intensity. It was always a struggle. She literally gritted her teeth through hard intervals. After practice, she'd be worn out. It'd be 5:30 p.m. and time to eat and she'd crash for a short nap. I warned her to no avail that napping would keep her from falling asleep at bedtime. Sue beat herself up for a lot of things. She'd eat tiny portions at mealtime, wanting to keep her weight down, and then scarf a pint of Ben & Jerry's before bed. She occasionally raged at me for making everything look easy. I don't remember if I understood this then, but I've gradually realized that I make things look easy because I've made a science of anticipating what I can and can't do.
Dan Challener, the men's distance coach, told us to run 20 minutes and meet him at the track. Brown's stadium is a 10-minute jog from campus, so we looped through the affluent neighborhoods on the hill just north of downtown Providence. We knew the workout would be different. We were left wondering what we were in for.
Head coach Bob Rothenberg (Berg) was there, along with Dan. He told us we would run the measured two-mile course on the road, finishing at the stadium, and, without pausing, we were to run a mile hard on the track. He told me, along with some teammates including our captain, Fergal Mullen, to run the two miles at 5:40 per mile pace and then the track mile at 4:45. We were to repeat this twice more, without pausing in between.
I told our coaches that I wasn't sure we could do that. Berg looked at the ground and gave me a well-worn shake of the head. Dan stared at me, his agitation visible. I knew what they wanted, and Fergal was quick to give it to them. "Ah, we can do that! Come on, guys, let's be positive!"
We hadn't done a workout like that before. We'd certainly done mile repeats, though, and doing a set of 4:45 miles was a tough effort. We'd also done plenty of tempo runs, and 5:40 pace was close to threshold. We were getting pretty fit, but I was apprehensive. The guys were starting to bounce, stretch or do strides. They may actually have thought that believing they could do it was enough. Or maybe they thought that whatever coach said they could do, they could do. Or maybe they just didn't think deeply about it. Most likely, I suppose, they had learned that expressing a "can do" attitude worked in getting along with other people. I took the task at face value and tried to get my head around it. It made my heart beat harder and my hands turn clammy.
I wanted to nail that tempo pace and maximize my running economy. It would devastate our chances to finish if we got carried away from the beginning. When we started, we stayed bunched together. When I stuck behind one of the guys, I could lower my arm just a bit so that it would swing just under his. My gait was low and quiet. We hummed through the splits right on pace. When we transitioned to the track, I kept in mind that the acceleration wouldn't feel so abrupt coming off the 5:40 pace. Starting an interval from a standstill gives the body a jolt that takes a little while to accommodate. Shifting gears, as we did in this workout, actually made the first mile interval feel comparatively easy.
We were doing the work, though, and it started to show on the second two miles on the road. The guys were having some trouble keeping pace. I clocked off the splits like a metronome, barely deviating even for the slight inclines. By the time we were back on the track the guys were starting to string out behind me. I nailed the second one-mile interval on the track. I transitioned slowly to try and let the other guys catch up for the final two miles on the road. They were coming apart. I went on to complete the workout as prescribed.
The surest path to a struggle, and an apparent lack of willpower, is to be either thoughtless or wrong about what you can do. I remember a runner named Mike Haggerty from Saint Xavier High School in Louisville. He was two years ahead of me, and I knew he was a fast half-miler, so I watched him during cross country season. He'd bolt to the lead in every race, stay there for up to a mile, and then fade and get passed by any decent runner who went out at a sustainable pace. In some important sense, he just never figured out that he could have run better over 5K if he went out slower. While it may have looked like a lack of motivation (to sustain that early pace), it really was Mike's inaccuracy about his abilities. Conversely, we look like iron-willed heroes when we "talk smack" and get it right. We may fool others, and even ourselves, when we decide to achieve a goal — say a sub-2:30 marathon — and then we just "make it happen." More likely, we accurately predicted that, with proper preparation, we would meet that goal. And we were right.
Motivation doesn't start with an ambitious goal. Once our minds are clear of distractions, the key step is an accurate appraisal of what we can do. I called my own attempt to know myself a science because, like science, this requires objective observation and data. Fortunately for us, every run, workout and race yields plenty of data. Use that data — not your perceptions of what you "could have" done — to guide your goal setting. You'll find it a lot easier to exert your will, meet your goals and stay motivated.
Eric Grossman is a member of the Montrail ultrarunning team. At age 40, Grossman won the 2008 USATF 50-mile national championship. Check back next week for more of Grossman's motivational tips.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Leadville 100 mile run- Race Report
This past Saturday the last 2 years of training/racing finally came to age, I finally completed my goal of running 100 miles on my 3rd attempt. It was a good thing also because before the race I was telling myself that 3 strikes and I was out of this 100 mile thing and going back to shorter faster races which I seem to do good at if I train for them.
Leadville is a classic course that you have to give respect to, if you don't it will chew you up and spit you out. On paper when you compare the climbing with other hundred milers you may think that it really is not a big deal, the problem is that a large chunk of the climbing happens between miles 40-60. After all that climbing you still have 40 miles until the finish, this is where it becomes a huge challenge. With the average elevation at 11,000 feet above sea level it is one of the highest 100 milers in the US and below is my experience in 2010.
Race Website
Event Description:
50 miles out and back in the midst of the Colorado Rockies. Lowest point is 9,200 ft. and the highest point is Hope Pass, 12,600 ft. The majority is on forest trails with some mountain roads. Pacers allowed after the 50 mile point. 11 well-supplied aid stations with cut-offs; 5 are medical checks. (I only did 2 medical checks).
Here is the race Profile, you read the 1st 50 miles left to right then backwards for the second 50.
Course Map
View Leadville Trail 100 2009 map in a larger map
Weather:
The weather forecast for both Saturday the 21th and Sunday the 22th was a high of 71, low of 40 with a 0-10% chance of rain. It was perfect weather!
Race Report:
Some sections will be long and some parts will be short. It all comes down to if anything eventful happened in that section and to what I can really remember. 28 hours out on the trails and roads in the mountains kind of blend together in a lot of parts.
The first time in the header is the split for that section of trail and the second time is the total running time.
Pre-Race Meeting
Start to Mayqueen 2:24/2:24
The night before the race was really bad as far as trying to get some sleep. We decided to camp since we were taking the dog with us. So in the 6 person tent we had the 3 of us and the dog, needless to say the dog was climbing all over me driving me mad. It was a good thing that I was able to take out my hearing aid so I never heard the other campers that were up drinking just feet away well past midnight. That would explain why the dog would not lay still. Oh well….
The Family at the Starting Line
Got my butt out of bed around 2:30-2:35 just before the alarm was set to go off and we piled into the car for the drive into town. There was so many people at the start that I really did not know where I should line up at to start. My plan this first section was just to cruise nice and slow, if that meant I was in the back of the congo line then so be it. As I was walking up to the crowd I spotted an old frat brother from CSU Brian O’Malley who was also running. This would be his first attempt at the distance and he all sorts of questions. I lined up with O’Malley as the gun when off and spent the first 6ish miles jogging along with him catching up on the past 15 years since we have seen each other. It was great to see Brian and as we hit the single track around the lake he fell in behind me and that would be the last I would see of O’Malley. I was really bummed on Monday when I saw in the results that he dropped at 50. If anyone who is reading this has the contact info for Brain please let me know I would like to get a hold of him to hear his race story.
The rest of this section was pretty uneventful as I cruised into Mayqueen. I told my crew not to meet me here on the outbound due to the large amount of people running this year. It was just way to stressful for both the crew and myself to try and find each other in this crazy crowd.
I grabbed some food, refilled my bottles and hit the road, not spending more than 1-2 mins in this aid station.
Mayqueen to Fish 2:08/4:32
This section was even more uneventful. After leaving the cluster of an aid station I just fell into line on the single track and did the walk/jog up to Haggerman Pass road. The Colorado Trail up to the road is a nice mellow climb for the most part but there is no where to pass so it is best just to fall back into line and follow everyone.
Once on the dirt road we had to climb up to the top of the Powerlines at about 11,200ft. For being where I was among middle/back of the pack I was shocked to see how many people were trying to run this road to the top! There was no need to do this. I just power hiked up it without killing myself. There was this one dude who was trying to kill this road with all of his might, he was breathing super hard and looked like he was about to pass out. With all that effort he only beat to the top by a mere minute or so, I passed him heading down the other side. I memorized his race number and sure enough, he did not finish. One thing is that it sure was entertaining to watch how much people where trying to kill themselves on this climb. It helped pass the time.
This is the 1st place that I saw my crew, I passed off my night stuff, grabbed my sunglasses and hit the road.
Leaving Fish Hatchery
Fish to Halfmoon 1:32/6:05
Now it was time to roll for a little bit. This is a flat road section of about 8-9 miles with a mix of both asphalt and jeep road. About halfway across this section is a location called Treeline that I could meet my crew. I felt really good through this section and just cruised along catching and passing lots of people who had killed themselves climbing in the last section. I never felt like I was running hard but just out for a nice easy Saturday morning long run. This is a great section to make up a little bit of time without putting out a big effort to do so. I was just rolling through here and really don’t remember a lot from this section.
Meeting the Crew at Treeline
Halfmoon to Twin 1:42/7:47
This is another pretty uneventful section that I really don’t have a lot to write about. It is a great section of rolling Colorado Trail that is well shaded from the morning sun. My goal on this section was just to walk the uphills, run the downhills, and try to get some food into me for the upcoming big 3500 or so foot climb up Hope Pass in the next section of the race. As I was jogging the down the final ~1000ft into Twin Lakes I came across a guy limping along and as I slowed down to make sure he was ok I discovered it was Donald Beuke. His year long battle with a tight IT band was rearing its ugly head again. He said it is fine uphill and on flats but was killing him on the downhills. I was able to talking him into jogging down the road with me and we came into Twin Lakes at mile 40 together. I was just happy to have some company even if it was short lived. I left Twin Lakes before Donald and did not see him again which is a huge bummer. We did some training together this past spring and it would have been cool to run with him a little farther.
At the aid station I grabbed my coat, gloves, hat, and some food hitting the road eating as much as I could to ready myself for what I consider to be the heart of Leadville 100, the double crossing of Hope Pass.
Coming into Twin Lakes
Twin to Winfield 3:56/11:44
Now the fun really starts. I left Twin Lake eating a Mojo Bar trying to get as much energy as I could for the up coming climb of Hope Pass. You cross a flat 2 miles or so to get to the base of the 3 mile ~3000ft climb. On the way to the climb one has to do a river crossing. This year the cold water that came up to just below my knees felt great on the tired legs, but did cause a weird burning feeling in my feet which passed quickly.
The climb from this side of Hope was just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. I just put my head down and worked my way up to the aid station on the top of the pass trying not to work to hard because I do have to come back over this again. Once at the Hopeless aid station close to the top of the pass I took a 5 min breather and ate some soup. This was the first real break at any aid station all day and I could feel my stomach starting to get weak so I thought some soup would help calm it a little.
After a finishing my soup I got my butt up to finish the last ~500ft to the true top of the pass and jogged down the other side. This is a cool part of the race due to the out and back nature of the course. I was able to see all my buddies who were in front of me coming back over. I made pretty quick work of the downhill and the 2.5 mile road into the Winfield (halfway mark) to pick up my pacer Fred. Now the fun really begins.
Winfield to Twin 5:34/17:18
Before I start digging into the meat of this race I want to share some advice that 2 friends gave me before the race. There were many more responses to this list from Facebook but I took the top 15. Then reason that I bring them up is that I start breaking these rules in this section.
Gerber and Misti’s Tips for Leadville and other 100s.
1. YOU CAN NOT BANK TIME! Don’t do it or even think about it.
2. Don’t sit down ever, unless you are changing your shoes.
3. Don’t go anywhere NEAR the fire or propane heaters at the aid stations. The gravitational field of them is amazing.
4. EAT early, eat often, and as much as you can assimilate.
5. Take your electrolytes, even if you aren’t cramping. They help with digestion too.
6. Sometimes it feels better to just puke it up and get on with the show.
7. The fastest times on this course are out in 45% of total time and back in 55% of total time.
8. Training is over 2 weeks before the race. Nothing you do the week before will help you. Take an easy, relax, and eat some bacon.
9. Try to remember that “it never always gets worse.” Seriously, this is the miracle. You can trust it.
10. Red Bull is your friend.
11. For the 1st 50 miles listen to your body, for the second 50 stop listening.
12. If you don’t think you are going absurdly slow the first 50, you’re going to fast.
13. When gels start making you gag, try bacon. Seriously!
14. A cold beer at mile 70 is pretty darn good.
15. If you drop for some lame ass reason, it is going to stick with you for 364 days.
I was weighed in at Winfield and was up 2 pounds, that was good news. I found my crew, took a load off for a few minutes trying to eat some more for the big climb to come. After a few more minutes chatting with my wife I grabbed a cup of soup and my pacer Pastor Fred and hit the road back to the trail head to go back over the pass.
About 1.5 miles up the road from Winfield the trouble started, I suddenly had to poop-BAD! I grabbed some paper and ran into the woods, of course I did not grab enough paper so I had to run back out to the road to get some more from Fred. After getting cleaned up I was walking out of the woods when out of no where the puke just started flying everywhere. I spent the next few minutes on my hands and knees puking valuable calories and energy into the dirt. Darn it, I need those calories to get back over the freaking pass!
Fred and I just kept walking and started the climb back over. About every 10 minutes or so I would heel back over and throw down some more calories into the dirt. As this was going on my pace was getting slower and slower due to running out of energy. Just before tree line I saw a nice big rock on the side of the trail and took Fred’s suggestion, I curled up into a ball on top of the rock and took a 10 minute nap. The hope was to get my system to settle down a bit and it worked. From that point on I was able to keep a very very slow but steady pace the rest of the way up Hope Pass only puking a couple more times and taking a couple short breaks to catch my breath. At the top I kept up the hiking all the way to the aid station just ~500ft or so down the other side. It was time to problem solve and get this race going again, I was losing too much time if I wanted to finish this thing.
At the aid station we came across Gerber and his runner who started giving me a hard time about breaking the rules. I was sitting around the camp fire feeling sorry for myself trying to eat. After a few minutes of heckling from Fred (my pacer) and Gerber the four of us left and started a slow jog down the pass back to Twin Lakes. Slowly I was starting to get my stomach back, a gel here and Clif Block there. I was starting to rebuild the foundation to finish this thing. Before I knew it we were back in Twin Lakes (mile 60) and it was time to change my socks/shoes and get the heck out of there.
Breaking the Rules on top of Hope Pass
Twin to Halfmoon 2:49/20:08
Being silly at Twin Lakes
Last pose before leaving Twin Lakes
I really don’t remember a lot about this section. I do remember that Fred and I agreed just to take an easy on the uphill and recover as much as possible. We needed to keep building on that new foundation that we just started laying down. I spent most of this section walking all the uphills at an easy pace and slow jogging the downhills while trying to eat a Clif Block every 15-20 minutes. We kept this cycle up all the way into the aid station. I was starting to get sleepy but held off on taking anything. Fred wanted me to hold off from taking the No Doz as long as I could so that it would have a more dramatic effect in the early morning hours when I would need it most.
Halfmoon to Fish 2:32/22:41
At Halfmoon the lady in charge of the cut-offs came up to me and start questioning me. I must have looked like crap. At this point I don’t think I was much more than 30 mins ahead of the cut-offs. I started asking her questions like. “If the cut-off is 2:30am (don’t remember the real time) then that is how many hours from the start?”. I had a running hour total on my watch and I could not do the math, I was too tired. She just looked at me and said, “You ask way too many questions.” and walked away. Guess my mind was working a little.
We walked the jeep road all the way from Halfmoon to my crew car at Treeline. I was getting more and more tired. The stomach was not feeling that great either and the legs hurt like hell. I am running out of time and feeling really down on myself about it at this point.
At Treeline I broke the rules again. I sat down in a chair for no other reason than just to get off my feet. I was really pondering the thought of quitting. As I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself because I was hurting my mind drifted off to the last time I saw my grandfather who passed around the end of June. This was nothing compared to what I saw him go through as cancer was taking over his body! Between that thought about grandpa, the frustration in my wife’s voice, and the disappointed look on Fred’s face I asked my wife to fill my bottle with Ginger Ale, popped some No Doz and I kept walking. I did not care if we made the cut-offs or not, we were going to walk this whole thing even if it was unofficially.
We just kept walking all the way to the Fish Hatchery getting a little quicker with every step. By the time we got to the Fish Hatchery about an hour later we were power hiking and I had finished off both bottles containing ginger ale and water. I had also eaten a whole pack and a half of Clif Shots.
Fish to Mayqueen 2:45/25:26
At Fish Hatchery I had to run up and check in before meeting my crew. I was starting to cut it really close to the cut-off. After checking in I grabbed a turkey wrap and told Fred I was hitting the road all within about 30 seconds to a minute. He said back that he needed to stay behind and eat a little and will catch-up shortly. On the way out I stopped to kiss my wife aka my crew grabbing 2 new bottles of water and ginger ale along with a bunch of Clif Blocks. I asked to send some an extra bottle with Fred since we had about 11ish miles to Mayqueen with the last big climb.
Once on the road to the base of the Powerlines (last big climb) I decided since it was a rolling downhill that I would try jogging and see how that felt. I ended up running all the way to the base of the climb where I went into a quick strong power hike. There are 3 false summits on this climb, I was hiking so strong that my pacer (Fred) did not catch up to me until between the 1st and 2nd false summit. I was moving very strong and passing people like mad. I had no idea why I was moving so good but I went with it. Once on the top of the Powerlines at about 11,200ft above sea level we took a quick break to refill my bottles from Fred’s pack.
From this point on I just started rolling, Fred and I jogged down the Haggerman Pass road together to the start of the Colorado Trail single track that would take us to Mayqueen. Once on the single track I took off! I felt really really good! I ran every step from this point all the way to Mayqueen passing all kinds of people. As I was coming into Mayqueen I started looking for Ashley (crew/wife) so I could get an extra bottle to carry since I lost my pacer. I still had 13 miles to go to the finish and 2 bottles was not going to cut it. Not locating her anywhere I went into Mayqueen and sat down breaking the rules again. I had to wait for Fred to catch up so I had enough fluids to finish this thing.
About 5-8 minutes later he came rolling in and after a fluid top off in his backpack and some more food for both of us we hit the last section of trail without ever seeing Ashley.
Mayqueen to Finish 3:12/28:39
What to say about this section but I never would have believed that I could still run like this between miles 90 to100. Just shocking! I got rolling again and lost Fred again which had me freaked out about having enough fluids to finish this. I ran for the next 5 or so miles coming into Tabor Boat ramp to lots of cheering people and empty bottles. I asked a person camping right there off the trail if they could fill my bottles with water and they did! Awesome!! Lets Roll!!! As I got about 20 feet past the boat ramp I heard someone yelling my name, I turned around and my wife was running down the boat ramp. She found me!!!! She was just as shocked as I was on how good I was feeling. I dumped out one bottle of water and topped it off with ginger ale, kissed her, grabbed a hat and headed towards the finish. I was able to maintain a run all the way on the single track trail to the final road that would take me into town. The final 5 miles of road I did a run/walk cycle all the way to the finish coming across in 28:39, one hour and 21 minutes ahead of the cut-off! Awesome!!!!! I really had no real emotions as I ran up the red carpet with Braden who did the last ½ mile with me. I was just happy to be done. I never would have thought that it would hurt less to run than to walk the final miles of this thing.
Views from this section
Tabor Boat Ramp
Finishing it up with Braden
Some Happy Campers!
The Under 30 Hours Buckle
Final Thoughts:
I know that I am not a great writer but I hope that you enjoyed sharing this little story with me. I would like to thank Ashley who has been putting up with me and my training for the past 3 plus years we have been together, I love you babe. And of course a big shout out to Pastor Fred Ecks who delivered me from the gates of hell back into the Lands of the Holy Trails. Thanks for pushing me through the rough patches dude.
I learned a lot about myself and what I am capable of. There were only 5 people who left the mile 76 aid station Fish Hatchery later than me that finished and I ended up in front over 140 people by the time I hit the red carpet in Leadville, you can do the math to see how many people I passed the last 25 miles. You can recover from the deep dark places if you take the time to do some problem solving to why you are there in the first place and just walk it out. I also learned a great deal about the great people that I have surrounded myself with. Next time we will go even faster!
Here are some great videos that some friends made during their adventure at Leadville.
Olan's Video:
Brandon's Video:
Leadville is a classic course that you have to give respect to, if you don't it will chew you up and spit you out. On paper when you compare the climbing with other hundred milers you may think that it really is not a big deal, the problem is that a large chunk of the climbing happens between miles 40-60. After all that climbing you still have 40 miles until the finish, this is where it becomes a huge challenge. With the average elevation at 11,000 feet above sea level it is one of the highest 100 milers in the US and below is my experience in 2010.
Race Website
Event Description:
50 miles out and back in the midst of the Colorado Rockies. Lowest point is 9,200 ft. and the highest point is Hope Pass, 12,600 ft. The majority is on forest trails with some mountain roads. Pacers allowed after the 50 mile point. 11 well-supplied aid stations with cut-offs; 5 are medical checks. (I only did 2 medical checks).
Here is the race Profile, you read the 1st 50 miles left to right then backwards for the second 50.
Course Map
View Leadville Trail 100 2009 map in a larger map
Weather:
The weather forecast for both Saturday the 21th and Sunday the 22th was a high of 71, low of 40 with a 0-10% chance of rain. It was perfect weather!
Race Report:
Some sections will be long and some parts will be short. It all comes down to if anything eventful happened in that section and to what I can really remember. 28 hours out on the trails and roads in the mountains kind of blend together in a lot of parts.
The first time in the header is the split for that section of trail and the second time is the total running time.
Pre-Race Meeting
Start to Mayqueen 2:24/2:24
The night before the race was really bad as far as trying to get some sleep. We decided to camp since we were taking the dog with us. So in the 6 person tent we had the 3 of us and the dog, needless to say the dog was climbing all over me driving me mad. It was a good thing that I was able to take out my hearing aid so I never heard the other campers that were up drinking just feet away well past midnight. That would explain why the dog would not lay still. Oh well….
The Family at the Starting Line
Got my butt out of bed around 2:30-2:35 just before the alarm was set to go off and we piled into the car for the drive into town. There was so many people at the start that I really did not know where I should line up at to start. My plan this first section was just to cruise nice and slow, if that meant I was in the back of the congo line then so be it. As I was walking up to the crowd I spotted an old frat brother from CSU Brian O’Malley who was also running. This would be his first attempt at the distance and he all sorts of questions. I lined up with O’Malley as the gun when off and spent the first 6ish miles jogging along with him catching up on the past 15 years since we have seen each other. It was great to see Brian and as we hit the single track around the lake he fell in behind me and that would be the last I would see of O’Malley. I was really bummed on Monday when I saw in the results that he dropped at 50. If anyone who is reading this has the contact info for Brain please let me know I would like to get a hold of him to hear his race story.
The rest of this section was pretty uneventful as I cruised into Mayqueen. I told my crew not to meet me here on the outbound due to the large amount of people running this year. It was just way to stressful for both the crew and myself to try and find each other in this crazy crowd.
I grabbed some food, refilled my bottles and hit the road, not spending more than 1-2 mins in this aid station.
Mayqueen to Fish 2:08/4:32
This section was even more uneventful. After leaving the cluster of an aid station I just fell into line on the single track and did the walk/jog up to Haggerman Pass road. The Colorado Trail up to the road is a nice mellow climb for the most part but there is no where to pass so it is best just to fall back into line and follow everyone.
Once on the dirt road we had to climb up to the top of the Powerlines at about 11,200ft. For being where I was among middle/back of the pack I was shocked to see how many people were trying to run this road to the top! There was no need to do this. I just power hiked up it without killing myself. There was this one dude who was trying to kill this road with all of his might, he was breathing super hard and looked like he was about to pass out. With all that effort he only beat to the top by a mere minute or so, I passed him heading down the other side. I memorized his race number and sure enough, he did not finish. One thing is that it sure was entertaining to watch how much people where trying to kill themselves on this climb. It helped pass the time.
This is the 1st place that I saw my crew, I passed off my night stuff, grabbed my sunglasses and hit the road.
Leaving Fish Hatchery
Fish to Halfmoon 1:32/6:05
Now it was time to roll for a little bit. This is a flat road section of about 8-9 miles with a mix of both asphalt and jeep road. About halfway across this section is a location called Treeline that I could meet my crew. I felt really good through this section and just cruised along catching and passing lots of people who had killed themselves climbing in the last section. I never felt like I was running hard but just out for a nice easy Saturday morning long run. This is a great section to make up a little bit of time without putting out a big effort to do so. I was just rolling through here and really don’t remember a lot from this section.
Meeting the Crew at Treeline
Halfmoon to Twin 1:42/7:47
This is another pretty uneventful section that I really don’t have a lot to write about. It is a great section of rolling Colorado Trail that is well shaded from the morning sun. My goal on this section was just to walk the uphills, run the downhills, and try to get some food into me for the upcoming big 3500 or so foot climb up Hope Pass in the next section of the race. As I was jogging the down the final ~1000ft into Twin Lakes I came across a guy limping along and as I slowed down to make sure he was ok I discovered it was Donald Beuke. His year long battle with a tight IT band was rearing its ugly head again. He said it is fine uphill and on flats but was killing him on the downhills. I was able to talking him into jogging down the road with me and we came into Twin Lakes at mile 40 together. I was just happy to have some company even if it was short lived. I left Twin Lakes before Donald and did not see him again which is a huge bummer. We did some training together this past spring and it would have been cool to run with him a little farther.
At the aid station I grabbed my coat, gloves, hat, and some food hitting the road eating as much as I could to ready myself for what I consider to be the heart of Leadville 100, the double crossing of Hope Pass.
Coming into Twin Lakes
Twin to Winfield 3:56/11:44
Now the fun really starts. I left Twin Lake eating a Mojo Bar trying to get as much energy as I could for the up coming climb of Hope Pass. You cross a flat 2 miles or so to get to the base of the 3 mile ~3000ft climb. On the way to the climb one has to do a river crossing. This year the cold water that came up to just below my knees felt great on the tired legs, but did cause a weird burning feeling in my feet which passed quickly.
The climb from this side of Hope was just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. I just put my head down and worked my way up to the aid station on the top of the pass trying not to work to hard because I do have to come back over this again. Once at the Hopeless aid station close to the top of the pass I took a 5 min breather and ate some soup. This was the first real break at any aid station all day and I could feel my stomach starting to get weak so I thought some soup would help calm it a little.
After a finishing my soup I got my butt up to finish the last ~500ft to the true top of the pass and jogged down the other side. This is a cool part of the race due to the out and back nature of the course. I was able to see all my buddies who were in front of me coming back over. I made pretty quick work of the downhill and the 2.5 mile road into the Winfield (halfway mark) to pick up my pacer Fred. Now the fun really begins.
Winfield to Twin 5:34/17:18
Before I start digging into the meat of this race I want to share some advice that 2 friends gave me before the race. There were many more responses to this list from Facebook but I took the top 15. Then reason that I bring them up is that I start breaking these rules in this section.
Gerber and Misti’s Tips for Leadville and other 100s.
1. YOU CAN NOT BANK TIME! Don’t do it or even think about it.
2. Don’t sit down ever, unless you are changing your shoes.
3. Don’t go anywhere NEAR the fire or propane heaters at the aid stations. The gravitational field of them is amazing.
4. EAT early, eat often, and as much as you can assimilate.
5. Take your electrolytes, even if you aren’t cramping. They help with digestion too.
6. Sometimes it feels better to just puke it up and get on with the show.
7. The fastest times on this course are out in 45% of total time and back in 55% of total time.
8. Training is over 2 weeks before the race. Nothing you do the week before will help you. Take an easy, relax, and eat some bacon.
9. Try to remember that “it never always gets worse.” Seriously, this is the miracle. You can trust it.
10. Red Bull is your friend.
11. For the 1st 50 miles listen to your body, for the second 50 stop listening.
12. If you don’t think you are going absurdly slow the first 50, you’re going to fast.
13. When gels start making you gag, try bacon. Seriously!
14. A cold beer at mile 70 is pretty darn good.
15. If you drop for some lame ass reason, it is going to stick with you for 364 days.
I was weighed in at Winfield and was up 2 pounds, that was good news. I found my crew, took a load off for a few minutes trying to eat some more for the big climb to come. After a few more minutes chatting with my wife I grabbed a cup of soup and my pacer Pastor Fred and hit the road back to the trail head to go back over the pass.
About 1.5 miles up the road from Winfield the trouble started, I suddenly had to poop-BAD! I grabbed some paper and ran into the woods, of course I did not grab enough paper so I had to run back out to the road to get some more from Fred. After getting cleaned up I was walking out of the woods when out of no where the puke just started flying everywhere. I spent the next few minutes on my hands and knees puking valuable calories and energy into the dirt. Darn it, I need those calories to get back over the freaking pass!
Fred and I just kept walking and started the climb back over. About every 10 minutes or so I would heel back over and throw down some more calories into the dirt. As this was going on my pace was getting slower and slower due to running out of energy. Just before tree line I saw a nice big rock on the side of the trail and took Fred’s suggestion, I curled up into a ball on top of the rock and took a 10 minute nap. The hope was to get my system to settle down a bit and it worked. From that point on I was able to keep a very very slow but steady pace the rest of the way up Hope Pass only puking a couple more times and taking a couple short breaks to catch my breath. At the top I kept up the hiking all the way to the aid station just ~500ft or so down the other side. It was time to problem solve and get this race going again, I was losing too much time if I wanted to finish this thing.
At the aid station we came across Gerber and his runner who started giving me a hard time about breaking the rules. I was sitting around the camp fire feeling sorry for myself trying to eat. After a few minutes of heckling from Fred (my pacer) and Gerber the four of us left and started a slow jog down the pass back to Twin Lakes. Slowly I was starting to get my stomach back, a gel here and Clif Block there. I was starting to rebuild the foundation to finish this thing. Before I knew it we were back in Twin Lakes (mile 60) and it was time to change my socks/shoes and get the heck out of there.
Breaking the Rules on top of Hope Pass
Twin to Halfmoon 2:49/20:08
Being silly at Twin Lakes
Last pose before leaving Twin Lakes
I really don’t remember a lot about this section. I do remember that Fred and I agreed just to take an easy on the uphill and recover as much as possible. We needed to keep building on that new foundation that we just started laying down. I spent most of this section walking all the uphills at an easy pace and slow jogging the downhills while trying to eat a Clif Block every 15-20 minutes. We kept this cycle up all the way into the aid station. I was starting to get sleepy but held off on taking anything. Fred wanted me to hold off from taking the No Doz as long as I could so that it would have a more dramatic effect in the early morning hours when I would need it most.
Halfmoon to Fish 2:32/22:41
At Halfmoon the lady in charge of the cut-offs came up to me and start questioning me. I must have looked like crap. At this point I don’t think I was much more than 30 mins ahead of the cut-offs. I started asking her questions like. “If the cut-off is 2:30am (don’t remember the real time) then that is how many hours from the start?”. I had a running hour total on my watch and I could not do the math, I was too tired. She just looked at me and said, “You ask way too many questions.” and walked away. Guess my mind was working a little.
We walked the jeep road all the way from Halfmoon to my crew car at Treeline. I was getting more and more tired. The stomach was not feeling that great either and the legs hurt like hell. I am running out of time and feeling really down on myself about it at this point.
At Treeline I broke the rules again. I sat down in a chair for no other reason than just to get off my feet. I was really pondering the thought of quitting. As I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself because I was hurting my mind drifted off to the last time I saw my grandfather who passed around the end of June. This was nothing compared to what I saw him go through as cancer was taking over his body! Between that thought about grandpa, the frustration in my wife’s voice, and the disappointed look on Fred’s face I asked my wife to fill my bottle with Ginger Ale, popped some No Doz and I kept walking. I did not care if we made the cut-offs or not, we were going to walk this whole thing even if it was unofficially.
We just kept walking all the way to the Fish Hatchery getting a little quicker with every step. By the time we got to the Fish Hatchery about an hour later we were power hiking and I had finished off both bottles containing ginger ale and water. I had also eaten a whole pack and a half of Clif Shots.
Fish to Mayqueen 2:45/25:26
At Fish Hatchery I had to run up and check in before meeting my crew. I was starting to cut it really close to the cut-off. After checking in I grabbed a turkey wrap and told Fred I was hitting the road all within about 30 seconds to a minute. He said back that he needed to stay behind and eat a little and will catch-up shortly. On the way out I stopped to kiss my wife aka my crew grabbing 2 new bottles of water and ginger ale along with a bunch of Clif Blocks. I asked to send some an extra bottle with Fred since we had about 11ish miles to Mayqueen with the last big climb.
Once on the road to the base of the Powerlines (last big climb) I decided since it was a rolling downhill that I would try jogging and see how that felt. I ended up running all the way to the base of the climb where I went into a quick strong power hike. There are 3 false summits on this climb, I was hiking so strong that my pacer (Fred) did not catch up to me until between the 1st and 2nd false summit. I was moving very strong and passing people like mad. I had no idea why I was moving so good but I went with it. Once on the top of the Powerlines at about 11,200ft above sea level we took a quick break to refill my bottles from Fred’s pack.
From this point on I just started rolling, Fred and I jogged down the Haggerman Pass road together to the start of the Colorado Trail single track that would take us to Mayqueen. Once on the single track I took off! I felt really really good! I ran every step from this point all the way to Mayqueen passing all kinds of people. As I was coming into Mayqueen I started looking for Ashley (crew/wife) so I could get an extra bottle to carry since I lost my pacer. I still had 13 miles to go to the finish and 2 bottles was not going to cut it. Not locating her anywhere I went into Mayqueen and sat down breaking the rules again. I had to wait for Fred to catch up so I had enough fluids to finish this thing.
About 5-8 minutes later he came rolling in and after a fluid top off in his backpack and some more food for both of us we hit the last section of trail without ever seeing Ashley.
Mayqueen to Finish 3:12/28:39
What to say about this section but I never would have believed that I could still run like this between miles 90 to100. Just shocking! I got rolling again and lost Fred again which had me freaked out about having enough fluids to finish this. I ran for the next 5 or so miles coming into Tabor Boat ramp to lots of cheering people and empty bottles. I asked a person camping right there off the trail if they could fill my bottles with water and they did! Awesome!! Lets Roll!!! As I got about 20 feet past the boat ramp I heard someone yelling my name, I turned around and my wife was running down the boat ramp. She found me!!!! She was just as shocked as I was on how good I was feeling. I dumped out one bottle of water and topped it off with ginger ale, kissed her, grabbed a hat and headed towards the finish. I was able to maintain a run all the way on the single track trail to the final road that would take me into town. The final 5 miles of road I did a run/walk cycle all the way to the finish coming across in 28:39, one hour and 21 minutes ahead of the cut-off! Awesome!!!!! I really had no real emotions as I ran up the red carpet with Braden who did the last ½ mile with me. I was just happy to be done. I never would have thought that it would hurt less to run than to walk the final miles of this thing.
Views from this section
Tabor Boat Ramp
Finishing it up with Braden
Some Happy Campers!
The Under 30 Hours Buckle
Final Thoughts:
I know that I am not a great writer but I hope that you enjoyed sharing this little story with me. I would like to thank Ashley who has been putting up with me and my training for the past 3 plus years we have been together, I love you babe. And of course a big shout out to Pastor Fred Ecks who delivered me from the gates of hell back into the Lands of the Holy Trails. Thanks for pushing me through the rough patches dude.
I learned a lot about myself and what I am capable of. There were only 5 people who left the mile 76 aid station Fish Hatchery later than me that finished and I ended up in front over 140 people by the time I hit the red carpet in Leadville, you can do the math to see how many people I passed the last 25 miles. You can recover from the deep dark places if you take the time to do some problem solving to why you are there in the first place and just walk it out. I also learned a great deal about the great people that I have surrounded myself with. Next time we will go even faster!
Here are some great videos that some friends made during their adventure at Leadville.
Olan's Video:
Leadville 100 Trail Run 2010 from Melissa Young on Vimeo.
Brandon's Video:
Leadville Trail 100 2010 from Brandon Fuller on Vimeo.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
My Leadville Plan!!
Figured since everyone else is blogging their race plans I better put mine out there also.
1. When I can I will run.
2. When I can't run I will walk.
3. I will eat as much as my glass stomach will allow me too.
4. I will hit Winfield when I get off of Hope Pass around the time I get there.
5. My goal finish time is when I cross the finish line.
Pretty simple, any questions?
1. When I can I will run.
2. When I can't run I will walk.
3. I will eat as much as my glass stomach will allow me too.
4. I will hit Winfield when I get off of Hope Pass around the time I get there.
5. My goal finish time is when I cross the finish line.
Pretty simple, any questions?
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Pacing at Hardrock
Not a lot to say but it was a kick ass time. I will wait until JT puts up his race report before I write one. In the mean time here are the photos that I took out on the 48 mile of the course that I was on. Enjoy!
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Burned again at the Red Hot 50K
The three of us (Ashley, Braden, and I) decided on Thursday morning to leave and drive part way to Moab and try to beat the forecasted snow storm in the high country on Friday, we made it to Glenwood on Thursday night where we stayed in the worse motel that I have ever been in. I can not remember the name but it is right across the street from the Village Inn, STAY AWAY!!! Friday morning we left for Moab arriving before noon. After an easy lunch we spent the rest of the day driving around in the mountains southeast of town then went to Pasta Jays on Main St for a little carbo loading and an early bed time.
We got up the next morning around 6am leaving the hotel at 7:15. I decided not to use any of the allowed drop bags since I never use them. I figured between the Nathan pack I was running with and the aid stations that I should be fine. The weather also looked like it might just be ok today, little windy the 1st half of the race but that was it.
Right at 8am the race started up a dirt road. The first mile was a climb up and over the mesa. The plan was to just run what felt like an easy effort the first 17 miles and try and push the second half hopefully finishing under 6 hours, which is not what happened. I had water on my back and I was planning on drinking Cytomax at every aid station and eat whatever looked good.
The first half of the race was a mixture of rolling hills, some moderate climbing, jeep 4X4 roads, and sandy trails. I just tried zoning out and running what felt like an easy effort but this proved to be hard to do, my legs felt really heavy and I just was not hungry so I was not eating at the aid stations like I planned. I crossed aid station 3 at mile 17 in 2:35. Right were I wanted to be for a sub 6 hour finish. At aid station 3 I was finally able to see Ashley and Braden, it was the only place on the course that they had access to until the finish line. Braden who is 8 years old ran with me down the road from aid station 3 to where the road turns off into the trail (about a mile), he had a blast doing that and kept up with me the whole time, future ultra runner maybe???
From aid station 3 to aid station 4 was about 6-6.5 miles and a good size climb. The fourth aid station was on top of the mesa some 1500 or more feet above us. I did some walking in this section on the big uphills but overall felt fine. I came into the 4th aid station around 3:45 into the race. This aid station was at mile 23. My stomach was starting to turn on me at this aid station. I did not throw up but did what I call spit up at this station. About 2 miles after leaving this aid station my stomach turned fully against me and up came breakfast on the side of the trail (the fresh fruit I ate was still in there). Maybe I should not have eaten that fruit this morning?
From aid station 4 to aid station 5 I was just trying to run as much as my stomach would allow me to. The entire section was mostly run on slickrock and there was no real trail to follow on this section. We just went from pink flag to pink flag hanging from the brushes. Sometimes there were no pink flags and you had to find the painted symbol on the rocks to figure out where to go. I got off track a few times and added about 1/4 mile or so to this section with backtracking I did, but it was not as bad as last year. Last year they used pink flags for the right way and red for the wrong way, it was hard to tell the difference in the color with sunglasses on. This year they used blue flags to mark the incorrect way which made a world of difference. I lost some time on this section but was able to run/walk a lot of it. There was one last climb up the slickrock to the 5th aid station at mile 29. I came into this aid station around 5:15 hours after starting and of course lost my stomach again behind the jacked up jeeps. By this point I have not really had anything since mile 17, including water. Every time I tried to take something in it would come up a few minutes later.
From the 5th aid station to the finish line was only 5 miles. The first 1/2 mile or so was up a small hill of slickrock from there you jump on a 4X4 jeep road that you follow to the finish line mostly downhill. Last year I was still able to jog this into the finish despite my problems, this year I just did not have the energy so I just took my time and watched my 6 hour goal slip away as I walked down the road to a 6:30:32 finish. Crap…… Oh well I guess I got burned again at the Red Hot.
Lesson Learned:
1. I can not eat fresh fruit before a race.
2. Small bowl of Corn Flakes along with the fruit is not enough food before the race.
3. A gel, half a Snicker bite size bar, and some Cytomax is not enough calories for the 1st 17 miles.
4. Sucking on hard candy did not help me get my stomach back.
Here is the link to the website and results.
Red Hot 50K
2009 Results
I will try and get my pictures up tomorrow, I forgot the camera cable at home this morning.
Shad
We got up the next morning around 6am leaving the hotel at 7:15. I decided not to use any of the allowed drop bags since I never use them. I figured between the Nathan pack I was running with and the aid stations that I should be fine. The weather also looked like it might just be ok today, little windy the 1st half of the race but that was it.
Right at 8am the race started up a dirt road. The first mile was a climb up and over the mesa. The plan was to just run what felt like an easy effort the first 17 miles and try and push the second half hopefully finishing under 6 hours, which is not what happened. I had water on my back and I was planning on drinking Cytomax at every aid station and eat whatever looked good.
The first half of the race was a mixture of rolling hills, some moderate climbing, jeep 4X4 roads, and sandy trails. I just tried zoning out and running what felt like an easy effort but this proved to be hard to do, my legs felt really heavy and I just was not hungry so I was not eating at the aid stations like I planned. I crossed aid station 3 at mile 17 in 2:35. Right were I wanted to be for a sub 6 hour finish. At aid station 3 I was finally able to see Ashley and Braden, it was the only place on the course that they had access to until the finish line. Braden who is 8 years old ran with me down the road from aid station 3 to where the road turns off into the trail (about a mile), he had a blast doing that and kept up with me the whole time, future ultra runner maybe???
From aid station 3 to aid station 4 was about 6-6.5 miles and a good size climb. The fourth aid station was on top of the mesa some 1500 or more feet above us. I did some walking in this section on the big uphills but overall felt fine. I came into the 4th aid station around 3:45 into the race. This aid station was at mile 23. My stomach was starting to turn on me at this aid station. I did not throw up but did what I call spit up at this station. About 2 miles after leaving this aid station my stomach turned fully against me and up came breakfast on the side of the trail (the fresh fruit I ate was still in there). Maybe I should not have eaten that fruit this morning?
From aid station 4 to aid station 5 I was just trying to run as much as my stomach would allow me to. The entire section was mostly run on slickrock and there was no real trail to follow on this section. We just went from pink flag to pink flag hanging from the brushes. Sometimes there were no pink flags and you had to find the painted symbol on the rocks to figure out where to go. I got off track a few times and added about 1/4 mile or so to this section with backtracking I did, but it was not as bad as last year. Last year they used pink flags for the right way and red for the wrong way, it was hard to tell the difference in the color with sunglasses on. This year they used blue flags to mark the incorrect way which made a world of difference. I lost some time on this section but was able to run/walk a lot of it. There was one last climb up the slickrock to the 5th aid station at mile 29. I came into this aid station around 5:15 hours after starting and of course lost my stomach again behind the jacked up jeeps. By this point I have not really had anything since mile 17, including water. Every time I tried to take something in it would come up a few minutes later.
From the 5th aid station to the finish line was only 5 miles. The first 1/2 mile or so was up a small hill of slickrock from there you jump on a 4X4 jeep road that you follow to the finish line mostly downhill. Last year I was still able to jog this into the finish despite my problems, this year I just did not have the energy so I just took my time and watched my 6 hour goal slip away as I walked down the road to a 6:30:32 finish. Crap…… Oh well I guess I got burned again at the Red Hot.
Lesson Learned:
1. I can not eat fresh fruit before a race.
2. Small bowl of Corn Flakes along with the fruit is not enough food before the race.
3. A gel, half a Snicker bite size bar, and some Cytomax is not enough calories for the 1st 17 miles.
4. Sucking on hard candy did not help me get my stomach back.
Here is the link to the website and results.
Red Hot 50K
2009 Results
I will try and get my pictures up tomorrow, I forgot the camera cable at home this morning.
Shad
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