High Five By 55

I'm terrible about taking time off from running after races. I usually take two or three days a little easier, then jump right back into a structured and disciplined training pattern. I am committed to not doing that on this occasion. So, I've set myself a little challenge. I have a short 3.5 mile loop in my neighborhood that I often run as a double or on recovery days. I'm challenging myself to see how many days in a row I can run nothing more than this 3.5 mile loop. Nothing longer. No joining the Sunday long run group. The only exception would be the short runs I take with my dog. I'd love to make it to through the month of December doing this. I have not had an unstructured running period since I took 10 days off after Ouray 100 in 2022. I'm just three days in so far, and I'm feeling real joy in having no running focus or structure. But I know I'll struggle to make it nearly a full month. I do really enjoy the structure of a set plan and having to practi...

Today I ran the California International Marathon, regularly called CIM, in Sacramento. About 18 months ago, I had decided to see if I could take the next leap in marathon finishing time and find out if I could finish in under 2 hours and 50 minutes. I decided I’d do all the things and take one big moonshot at the time, chasing a time that seemed probably too big for me. I hadn’t thought I’d be able to run under 3 hours, but did so a few years ago and fairly comfortably. So I wanted to make sure I wasn’t leaving that next big 10 minutes improvement on the table before I gave up marathon time chasing. I picked what is often considered one of the fastest legitimate marathon courses in the country. I worked through a variety of shoes to pick just the right pair. I tested lots of nutrition options. And I followed my training plan almost perfectly, missing only one workout in about 16 weeks. I did the work. And I failed. But even more so, I succeeded. And I’m totally satisfied, even happy, ...

I always forgot, yet it always happens. To me, there's one true sign that I'm deep in marathon training. That sign, I have heavy legs for every single run. The intensity and volume just keep piling on top of one another. And the legs feel heavy day after day after day. But that's not the sign. That's just a product of the training cycle of hard and/or fast run, then long recovery. The real sign is that while the legs are heavy, it doesn't matter. A run starts out with a thought like "no way I can do what's planned today on these heavy legs." The thought somewhere during the run is more like "hey, this is going totally fine despite the heavy legs." It's just heavy legs. The heartrate is where it's expected. The rate of perceived exertion is on point. It's just heavy legs. Layers and layers and layers of training not every quite allowing the legs to fully recovery. Always just enough recovery to be able to do the next workout well. ...

I spent the past weekend in Madison, Wisconsin. I make an annual pilgrimage to the University Of Wisconsin to spend some time with my mother, bring the kids to the old college stomping grounds, attend a Wisconsin Badger football game, and basically revel in bits of nostalgia and memories of likely the most formative adult years of my life. My running hobby also has its roots in Madison. My journey to becoming a regular runner was a long and arduous one over more than a decade with many fits and starts. That first stab at running was while a student at the University of Wisconsin. I had put on a lot of college weight once cut from the college soccer team early in my freshman year. In my final semester, I decided to do something about it and took up running. Short runs from my apartment along Lakeshore Path on the shores of Lake Mendota. It didn't stick long, maybe a couple months. I didn't run far, perhaps 5 miles at most. These were the very early days of GPS watches and I didn...

California International Marathon is less than six weeks away. Five weeks of focused training. And I'll be becoming obsessive for those five weeks. No really thinking about the High Five By 55 projects. No thinking about ultramarathons or running in mountains. Just focused on doing the work to cover 26.2 miles in less then 2 hours and 50 minutes.  I become a pretty boring version of Nathan at this point in marathon training. The training is monotonous. The rhythm is well established. Just churning miles and alternating between easy days and workout days. Hoping for a glimpse of a training breakthrough here and there. Trusting the plan will work. And if it doesn't, well it's just running marathons as a hobby. I think what I like about training for the marathon is this predictability. The structure of the training. There are small shifts along the way and through the weeks. But really, it's the same thing week in and week out. And even the outcome is relatively predictabl...

It finally happened. October 16th we finally experienced our first cool fall front in South Florida. Lows in the mid 60s and highs in the mid 70s. Even more exciting, low humidity by our standards...in the mid 50% range. It was wonderful. It is wonderful today. A warm up returns shortly, but these are a glorious few days and the warm up doesn't appear to bring us back to the mid-summer heat of last week. And with that weather change, my running paces instantly changed, too. A promising development as CIM quickly approaches. Mondays are recovery days from my Sunday long run. Mondays almost always include a double, a really really easy run in the morning followed by a still easy but more conventionally easy effort run in the afternoon for a total of about 12 miles. These runs are heart rate based to make sure I actually stay easy. The morning heart rate band is super low with really no bottom end. I feel like I basically can't run too slow in this particular run. Anything goes. T...

Bighorn 100 registration opened yesterday. I am now registered for Bighorn 100. In my mind, this registration is the unofficial official kick-off of my High Five By 55 project. From the first moment I began thinking about this project, Bighorn was going to be the first race I'd participate in while chasing a Hardrock 100 entry. It's not the Bighorn 100 is the Hardrock qualifier that most excites me. It isn't. But it is a race I look forward to participating in. I had planned to run in 2020. 2020 didn't exactly go as planned. It's a race I've heard is absolutely gorgeous. It's a race that I've heard is plenty difficult, but not totally off the charts like Ouray 100. Unless it's a muddy year. Then Bighorn becomes much more challenging. And muddy years aren't all that rare in that part of the country (as I learned at Black Hills 100 50 miler this year.) But more than anything, Bighorn 100 is very convenient. I travel to Rapid City, SD several times ...

Yesterday I used this space to lament the weather I was facing as I prepared for a long tempo run yesterday evening. And the evening's weather did not disappoint. 92 degrees warm with a dew point of 77 degrees as I began my run. Earlier in the day, I really didn't want to do the run. Dreaded it even. But I had gotten past my frustration, and had approached that run with in a good headspace ready to do the best I could targeting the expected stress of the tempo run. I was going to run by heartrate instead of pace.  And I headed out the door and did exactly that. A mile warm up, then into the 15 kilometers at marathon effort (not pace.) I set my heart rate range to 70%-85% of max heart rate. I would try to stay closer to the 70-75% range for the first 10k, then let things drift higher as heat stress built. And the run was going just as intended for the first mile, even feeling a bit easy with a pace near target marathon pace yet my heart rate below the range I had set. But the he...

Today, I am supposed to run a 15 kilometer marathon pace tempo run in my training for CIM. Today, the weather is forecast to be very high humidity with a high of 94 and low of 81. Today, I don't know what to do about my training. Today is October 12th.  Even in South Florida, where to live here one must accept (or even enjoy, as is the case for me) long stretches of hot and humid weather, 94 degrees with high humidity in mid October is highly unusual. That is 11 degrees over the daily average high for today, a giant number in a place where temperatures are generally very predictable. 83 degrees with a stiff dew point would make for a tough challenging run at marathon pace for 15 kilometers, but also a manageable run. The same is not true in 94 degree heat and high humidity. And I am at a loss. I have yet to have the opportunity to do any extended running at marathon pace is decent weather in my CIM training. I expected that in July, August, and September. I expected to have windows...

I spent my day yesterday in a professional online continuing education program. As one of the presenters was introduced, it was revealed that they are a trail runner and (although the introducer didn't use the word explicitly) an ultramarathoner. The introducer mentioned that this speaker had recently completed a Grand Canyon Rim to Rim to Rim (R2R2R) run.  The speaker/ultrarunner's response as this was being mentioned caught my eye. The speaker seemed a bit embarrassed by the mention of his R2R2R run. He did not acknowledge that part of the introduction at all. Maybe there was even a bit of an eye roll as the adventure was mentioned. What caught my eye, though, was not this reaction that gave off a hint of embarrassment. What caught my eye was that I'd seen that same reaction from other ultramarathoners before, and I have had similar reactions myself. As I thought about this, I realized that it's not embarrassment. At least for me, it's not embarrassment.  And I su...

I have few thoughts to share today. Nothing really. Nothing about the High Five By 55 project. Nothing about my current training. Instead, I'm sitting here staring at the giant print my wife had made for me after my Ouray 100 finish last year. It hangs on the wall across my office above my monitors. The photographer really captured the size and the vastness of running true mountain ultramarathons. My pacer and I are just little bitty things moving through gigantic objects. I love this print. I often look up from my work when things are not going well or when I just need a minute and absorb the image for that moment. I can't recall the exact size of this thing, but it's about 60 inches corner to corner. It dominates my office. I love it. So, today, with no thoughts to share, I instead share a photo of the print and hope it can also offer you a moment of feeling lost and joyful in the mountains.

Yesterday I had a truly bad run. A miserable run. From the first step to the last, it was nothing but challenge and difficulty and discomfort and no joy. 20 miles of bad. Dead legs. Stomach issues. Low energy. Mentally absent. A bad, bad run. Thank goodness for good company, which made the bad run so much more joyful and manageable. Whenever I have a truly bad run, a run where nothing seems to be working properly, a run where it never gets better (most long bad runs eventually turn into okay runs or even sometimes good runs after a few miles), a run where I can't put my finger on something that caused it to be bad; I begin to doubt and wonder. Doubt that I can do the running I hope to do. Wonder what I'm doing wrong. Then I remind myself, bad runs are a part of running. And the more you run, the more frequently bad runs seem to occur. I don't think this is actually true. I think the percentage of bad runs to total runs stays relatively constant. But if you run more, you hav...

Today I'm wishing I had tried to gain entry into the Chicago Marathon instead of targeting CIM. The weather forecast for Chicago race day has been pretty darn near ideal for the past week. And today's update...chef's kiss perfect. Low of 44. High of 56. Overcast. And, most incredibly in the Windy City, fairly benign wind. Incredible. Perfect. A PR type course with PR type weather. Right now, I'm wishing this was the race I had chosen.  But these are the vagaries of picking races. I've picked CIM because it is historically among the fastest courses with great weather far more often than not. And the weather for CIM could still be ideal to chase a PR. Heck, I'd say that's more likely than not to be the case. That's why I chose CIM in the first place. And Chicago could have been completely different. The Chicago Marathon has had very hot years. Had the race fallen a week earlier, conditions would have been completely different evidenced by the cancelation o...

I'm a running shoe geek. I love running shoes. I love reading running shoe reviews. I love trying different shoes. It's just a really enjoyable side habit to the overall running habit. I also own way, way, way too many running shoes. That said, I am absolutely adamant about never letting a shoe go to waste. Even if I don't enjoy running in it much, I'll do just about anything to squeeze at least 300 miles out of them. (There have been two exceptions to this, but just two, and both because they would literally leave my feet a bloody mess.) Right now, I'm testing three different carbon plated marathon racers for CIM: the Nike Alphafly 2, the Saucony Endorphin Elite, and the adidas Adios Pro 3. I have enjoyed running in all three and I'm torn about which shoe to use. Soon, I'll take each out for a Sunday long run when I'll be running some target marathon pace, then I'll decide which felt best for the 35 kilometers. That's it. No targeted testing to ...

A random wondering this morning. I'm wondering if I should look into some kind of hypoxic chamber device and set up for my desk and work area. I've done just a touch of reading into the benefits, or lack thereof, of hypoxic chamber training and have mostly eschewed the idea. This has largely been due to cost, and secondarily due to the research seeming to be less than compelling even leaning on potentially not beneficial when factoring in sleep disruptions and slower recovery times. However, in a decade long project, perhaps some of that concern slips away. And I sit at my desk all day. Could I use a hypoxic chamber around my desk and have it running for hours at a time when I'm not in a meeting or on a call? No sleep disruption of a bed based device. (My wife would never go for the idea of sleeping in an oxygen depriving device anyway!) The slower recovery would still be impactful, but with a training arc viewed over a 10 year period, what's a few extra hours of recove...

California International Marathon takes places two months from today, December 3rd. It will be my final attempt to run a personal best at a marathon. (Yes, I've said this before, but this time I really mean it!)  This is my final marathon training cycle. I can't say I'm as excited as I have been for other marathon training cycles, but I am still looking forward to it. Will a 2:49 or better finish be possible? I have no idea. That's the goal, but I'm pretty blind to my current fitness. It has just been too hot this summer to really get a feel for fitness. But yesterday I was reminded of a truism in running I sometimes, nay often, forget. Occasionally, I just need to force myself to run a bit faster. When I first started preparing my CIM training plan many months ago, I had decided I would run my easy runs around 7:45 pace. Or maybe that's a bit wrong. Many months ago, I had decided that if I was going to be ready to run 2:49 or better, easy runs should simply be ...

Yesterday I got a reminder of perhaps the skill I most need to work on. A skill that a have bizarre mix of real strength and profound weakness. A skill that will really determine if I'm able to finish this project or not. The skill: mental strength. What do I mean by this? In the context of the High Five By 55 project, I mean the mental strength to continue to endure. Endure in the face of adversity. Endure in the face of pain, of boredom, of fear, of uncertainty. Just like the physical training is designed to build the capacity to physically endure the demands of an adventure like High Five 100, I was reminded that I need to mentally train to mentally endure the demands of the same adventure. Yesterday, I ran a fitness test to try to gauge my current fitness as I really begin to dive into training for California International Marathon. The test was a simple one: after a 5 minute warm up, run 25 minutes at a pace roughly between half and full marathon pace, then without any rest ru...

I have never used a coach for running or any of the mountain ultramarathon adventures I have taken on. I haven't done it for a variety of reasons. Chief among them, this is just a hobby and I don't really feel like spending that much money on a hobby. Coaching seems an expensive extravagance for a hobby. I've had a couple informal coaching relationships here and there, but nothing robust and nothing paid for.  I've also found (and had confirmed to me by people that really know) running is a fundamentally simple sport to engage in and even do fairly well at. The concepts and building blocks of a solid training plan aren't tricky to grasp. Applying those fundamentals is not overly challenging. Sure, there are absolutely behavioral aspects that a really in tune coach could help with. It would absolutely be helpful to me to have someone says "just sit this one today out, Nathan." But the building of a training plan and understanding the purpose of the differen...

One of the things on my mind as I think about the High Five By 55 project is putting together a list of skills it would be helpful to build before I try running High Five. I'm not sure what needs to be on this list. I have some items I can think of right away, but more wondering about those things I don't know that I don't know. Wondering about those is what will keep me up at night. So, I'll try to figure out what those unknown unknowns are over the next several years. And I'll get started by putting together my Big List Of Skills that I want to or need to develop. The list so far: - Wilderness safety - my thought is to take a NOLS Wilderness Safety course. Unfortunately, those are not really offered locally, so I'll have to do this during some travel - Understanding rock quality - for the two class 3 climbs, I think it would be helpful to be able to identify between good rock and rotten, crumbly rock - Reading the weather - it'd be great to be really stron...

For the most part, I try to do "all the things" in my running and training. I run consistently, try to sleep well, eat well more often than not, and so on and so forth. I'm not a zealot about all things. For example, I am a bit spotty on keeping up with strength and core work, but do try to make that a habit. I do occasionally pig out (THANKSGIVING!) or eat just for pleasure. But mostly I do just about everything to train reasonably well for a hobbyist. Except recovery. I don't really do much of the recovery stuff. Yes, I am very particular about following a long or hard effort with a really easy one. After my Sunday long run, I try to stay off my feet and eat a bit extra. But that's about it for recovery. I have never tried any of the other recovery things. No sports massage. No compression boots. No red lasers or yoga (okay, maybe yoga for a short while) or recovery drinks or meals. No ice baths. No cryotherapy. No ART. No special supplements. None of it.  I oft...

One of my desires as I pursue this High Five By 55 project is to have a larger impact than just what I get it out of it. I'm not sure what I even mean by "larger impact", yet the idea bobbles in my head. These types of adventures are fundamentally selfish endeavors. Time training. Time away from family. Money spent on gear and to travel and to race. All for me. For me to pursue something. For me to push and find my limits. For me to experience places. Me. Me. Me. And I often struggle with that notion, the selfishness of it. Yeah, there are ancillary benefits that aren't totally selfish. I'm healthy by doing these things which means I should be able to be around for my family longer. My mental health is improved and I'm a nicer and more patient person when chasing big goals and wearing myself out with exercise. I get to help others as they pursue similar goals and projects. But at the end of the day, the pursuit is a pretty individual and selfish one. I'd l...

I skipped my morning run today. It wasn't a big run. Just 30 minutes at a recovery pace. A run of pretty low consequence in my training plan. But I skipped it, and that bugs me like crazy. It'll bug me all day. I'll think about where I might squeeze in a 30 minute run into my work day. And I shouldn't do that. I should just skip the run, let it slide, and move on into my track workout this evening. Why'd I miss the run? I woke up in the middle of the night with an absolute cracking headache. An absolute whopper of pain. I was eventually able to get back to sleep after a heavy dose of ibuprofen kicked in, but then woke up to my alarm still with a background headache and extra tired having lost an hour or so of sleep. It was no longer that same initial pain, but enough to feel really uncomfortable and not at ease. So, a bit tired and a bit uncomfortable, I decided to skip the run. A few minutes of extra sleep. Some moments to try to feel a bit better. Had it not been ...

There has been a small wondering. What if I do this whole High Five By 55 thing, spend the next 7 or 8 years collecting Hardrock lottery tickets, volunteer at Hardrock to boost my lottery chances, and still don't get picked in the lottery? What if demand for Hardrock continues to skyrocket and a 5-10 year window for likely selection becomes 20 years? Will this all have been a failure since it all began with the idea that I wanted to get into Hardrock and run the race, not just volunteer and crew and pace? No. Definitively no. Absolutely no. Purely pragmatically, if I've run 7 or 8 years of qualifiers and have done all the learning I hope to do, I should be absolutely ready to run and finish High Five 100 irrespective of whether I run Hardrock or not. I could simply jump into Ouray 100 in place of Hardrock for that final preparation race, and probably wouldn't require that anyway. So no, this will not have been a failure from that perspective. But far more importantly, no. N...

 My thoughts are a bit focused on CIM at the moment. The race is just over 11 weeks away, and I'm entering the heart of training for race day. High Five By 55 still bounces around in my head pretty much constantly, yet CIM dominates the thought process. And I am planning to pull out pretty much all the stops for CIM. High volume training. Really sharp intensity work. Finding just the right shoes and other gear. Working on my sleep habits. A focus on day-to-day nutrition and a touch of weight management. And I'm going to try something new I've not done before, very deliberate gut training. It's not that I haven't practiced with race day nutrition in the past. I absolutely make it a habit to use my race day nutrition in a few long training runs. But this time I'm going a step further. I'm going to work to train my gut to be able to handle consuming a much higher level of carbohydrates during the race than I ever have in the past. I'm going to target taking...

While I do have this idea and focus and thinking going on around High Five By 55, I am actually training for something completely different right now: trying to run a personal best at California International Marathon (CIM) in December. I feel like at age 45 I'm probably at the end of the line of much pace improvement in running, even though I have not really been running all that long compared to lifetime runners. So I thought I'd put in one more big go at a marathon and see how low I can go.  My goal: 2:4X. So, any time in the 2 hour and 40 minute range and I'd be absolutely delighted. I have no idea if it's possible, if I'll be near that. If I'm being honest with myself, I do think I could run under 3 hours fairly comfortably right now on my current training. I ran an "easy" 3:05 last December pacing a friend on zero specific marathon training, which should also be encouraging. But there's a huge difference between getting under 3 hours and bein...

As a part of this High Five By 55 idea, I will be running a series of big mountain ultras over the next 10 years. They'll be of varying difficulty and with different challenges at each. Some more vert. Some more altitude exposure. Some with bigger logistical challenges to even get there. But they'll all help prepare me for the eventual shot at High Five 100. At least, that's what I'm counting on to happen to get me ready. But I'm truly going to approach each of these races not just as a race, but really as a training opportunity. An opportunity to test something very specific. I will be putting together a list of skills and knowledge I want to learn and earn over the next 10 years, then will pick something off that list to really make the focus of each of these races. For example, when I was training for my first Ouray 100, I ran the Long Haul 100 in Florida earlier in the year. Now, other than both being about 100 miles, Long Haul and Ouray have about as much in co...

I have a large format poster on my wall. It's a photo taken at Ouray 100 in 2022 of me and my pacer heading down some single track at 12,000 feet just after crossing over Hayden Pass. The Red Mountains dominate the poster in the background, while my pacer and I appear to be tiny humans in a massive landscape in the foreground. When the work day is challenging or frustrating or boring, I look over my monitors and spend a moment falling into that mountain landscape. I've wondered why the mountains call to me so. I've wondered why the San Juans do so in a particularly powerful way. It's no answer, but when I ask myself the question I always return to the same memory. Well, a series of memories really that have all become one. The memory is from childhood, me traveling with my family to Switzerland. We'd turn on the TV in our Swiss hotel room in the evening and every single time there would be a channel playing a show with some mountaineers working their way up some loc...

Yesterday I ran a wonderful Sunday long run. Sunday long runs are my favorite runs. I've been running a 20+ mile run on Sundays almost every Sunday for four or five years now. And for those four or five years, pretty much the same route up and down the A1A avenue along the Atlantic ocean. Sunday long runs leave me feeling both wiped out and low energy, and fulfilled and joyful. It's social engagement, comfortable discomfort, pretty views, experiencing the world before most people are awake. Just glorious, even on days it doesn't feel so fun. I love the Sunday long run. I run largely for the Sunday long run. Without it, I probably wouldn't run. Will my chasing a High Five 100 finish in the next 10 years mean I can't regularly run the Sunday 20+ mile long run? Will I need to focus my training more on climbing and descending? Will the Sunday long run be detrimental to my pursuit and training? Every time I dive into a big mountain ultra project, I have this same wonderi...

Is it really going to take me 10 years to get myself ready for High Five 100? That seems like a darn long time. I'm reminded of something I read or heard somewhere years ago and can't attribute properly, unfortunately.  People have a tendency to overestimate what they can get done in 1 year and underestimate what they can get done in 10.  I think this is true. I think I could be ready for High Five 100 far more quickly than in the 10 year period. But that's really not the point, though I've asked myself the 10 year question a few times. Why 10 years? Because I think the likelihood is it will take 7-10 years to actually get picked in the Hardrock 100 lottery and actually get to run that race.  This journey or project or adventure or whatever it should be called isn't just about finishing High Five 100. In fact, it's very little about that. High Five 100 is just the little carrot at the end, the incentive to keep my moving forward and fired up. This really is abou...

I’ve been stuck on idea, a thought, maybe a life philosophy. The idea is simple. This is all a giant cosmic joke. Our lives. Even more so, the cosmic joke is the huge egos we humans have been endowed with when the reality is we’re utterly inconsequential on a cosmic scale, on a geological scale, even in the history of humanity scale. This little life is nothing more than a flicker in time which will be entirely forgotten within a flash of it ending. The joke: we think we mean a damn hell of a lot while we really mean absolutely nothing. What does this have to do with my High Five By Fifty Five idea? Well, everything. We get just a flicker of a moment of time here. To me, that idea is freeing and relieving of pressure. What I do really, really doesn’t matter. Yes, it may matter to me and my family and those who rely on me. But we don’t really matter, not in any real and permanent sense. So, if it doesn’t really matter, how does one choose to live a life? I think that freedom of not mat...

Am I old? Will I be and feel old by the time I get to take my shot at High Five? What is old? These are some questions that rumble around my head as I think about this entire project.  I’ve been told somewhere around age 45 to 50 it becomes much harder to get any fitter and better as a runner. Somewhere in that time period, the chase moves from improvement to being able to maintain what you already have. And then, you get about a decade of fighting hard to maintain before fitness eventually begins to fade…slowly, then fast. So over these ten years, I could move from the end of my improvement period to deep in my “fight to keep what you’ve built” period. Does that mean I can’t finish High Five since I don’t think I really have the fitness today? I hope not. And I don’t think so. I do think I can still become a better climber. I know I can become a better descender. And, far more importantly, I don’t think fitness is going to be the limiting factor in being able to finish. I expect t...