High Five By 55

This weekend was my big kick-off training weekend for the Bighorn 100 ultramarathon. I spent a week in Rapid City for work, and would be spending the holiday weekend there. That gave me the opportunity to get into the mountains a bit for some big training runs and hikes. And, boy, did the weekend deliver! I had initially planned to make the 250 mile drive to the Bighorn 100 course and spend a couple days recee'ing sections of the course. In particular, I was going to take on the big first 4,000 foot climb and then possibly drive out to the second 4,000 foot climb if I could figure out how to get there. However, when I arrived last Wednesday, it had started snowing. The snow forecast did not call for much snow either in Rapid City nor in the Bighorn mountains. But the forecast proved wrong, and the snow continued for 36 hours. What was expected to be just an inch or two of snow ended up closer to 10 inches. After much deliberation and speaking with more winter mountain experienced f...

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to hike and run in the Black Hills of South Dakota in relatively cold and dry air for a few hours. That also gave me the opportunity to test out the Airtrim Sports Mask I recently purchased. The Airtrim Sports Mask is a heat exchanger mask intended to warm and moisten air before the mask wearer breathes it. An interesting idea that would hopefully resolve one issue I have experienced when running high altitude ultramarathons in dry climates. And this trip to South Dakota would be perfect for this test, as I had just wrapped up with a head cold that had also getting into my lungs a bit, and having a way to possibly protect my lungs just made sense. The first year I ran Ouray 100, I dropped out of the race at mile 62. I was actually several hours ahead of the cut off and quite lucid and moving reasonably well. Well enough that the aid stations workers at the spot I dropped were doing their absolute best to get me up and out of the chair. But I wasn't ...

Yesterday evening, I went on my normal Monday afternoon run. A really easy 10k loop with some strides near the end to work out some of the stiffness of the prior day's long run. I have two loops I alternate between for this run, both chosen because they leave from my house and minimize the number of roads I have to cross. I've run this run probably hundreds of times at this point, rarely with any kind of incident. Yesterday was not one of those hundreds of runs. Yesterday, I got hit by a car on my run. I want to be clear, this was not the movie style getting hit by a car at full speed while I cross a street. But it was very close to that, and a bit of reflexive action on my part is the only reason I was not injured more than a bit of shoulder soreness this morning.  I've had many close calls with cars on runs. And they are almost exclusively the same situation. I'm running up to an intersection or driveway or some other location where traffic is interacting from two dir...

I may have found a common factor, a known gastrointestinal distress factor, in the marathons where I have experienced the need to stop and poop. Maltodextrin! From what I understand so far, there are good reasons many engineered nutritional products use maltodextrin as the primary carbohydrate source. However, there also seems to be some research that suggests for some people, maltodextrin basically acts as a laxative.  When I first considered this, I thought maltodextrin wasn't a common factor. At Miami Marathon, I used UCAN Edge gels which do not use maltodextrin. However, I also relied on the on-course hydration drink, Gatorade Endurance. Gatorade Endurance does use maltodextrin. In a potentially frustrating twist, Gatorade Endurance actually works for me quite well. I can drink it for hours and not get sick of it. It doesn't cause me any nausea. It has functioned well to keep me hydrated and not apparently short on electrolytes. I've really liked Gatorade Endurance. How...

As I've turned my attention to Bighorn 100 in June, I have wondered what to make the focus of my preparation. I had decided early in this project that I wanted to give each Hardrock qualifying race a very specific purpose, some area of weakness or lack of knowledge I could build on while training. I have not been quite sure what I wanted to make the focus of Bighorn 100 and had even kind of decided just to make it a kick off to the project without any real focus. Just do good training, plan well, and have a good day and night out on the course. I think I'm going to scrap that plan. Of course, I'll still do all those things. But I have such a glaring area to begin working on that I think I'll make it not just the focus of Bighorn 100, but of 2024 in general. Nutrition. Both race day nutrition and general training nutrition. The Miami Marathon experience of a week ago really drove home how much I need to work on this. At marathons, I'm struggling with GI distress. At ...