High Five By 55

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 ...

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...

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...