High Five By 55

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 ...