High Five By 55

After having the good luck to grab a pair of these Saucony Endorphin Elite 2s from the tiny drop in June and sitting on these for nearly six months, I finally got to use them in a marathon on Saturday. And they are sublime, my absolute favorite shoe for the marathon so far. By a wide margin. Yes, exceptionally soft. And also very fast and efficient at any pace I've tried. The fit is very similar to the Saucony Endorphin Elite 1, which is mostly generous yet well held. The toe box is a bit less spacious than the 1, but only by the most marginal amount. Other than that, fit and hold are exceptional both through the midfoot and the heel. I came out of my marathon without a hint of a hot spot or blister or black toenail. My toes aren't even sore. The ride is weirdly forgiving. Run with pace, and it offers pace back. Run easier, and it rolls along efficiently and protectively. Get up on your toes, and you fly. Tire a bit and fall back on the heels, you still fly. Explosive, yet easy...

Saturday I ran the Jacksonville Marathon and am as pleased about how a race went as I have been in a long time. I think it’s safe to say this is probably as well as I will ever execute a marathon. I trained using a “old man” training plan designed to offer a bit more rest and recovery, but still pretty aggressive. I hoped to be able to run in the 2:54.xx range to bring me half way from my current PR to 2:50, which is the lifetime goal I’m chasing.  Training went well and I was pretty confident that I could run Jacksonville well. And run well I did, finishing in 2:54.46. I surprised myself. The weather forecast looked very nice a week before the race, then continued to fall apart as the race approached. 63 degrees and rising, few clouds, 90+% humidity, 16 mph winds were not going to make for ideal conditions. I decided the night before to go for my C goal and run conservatively, which was to take any PR. The B goal I had set weeks before was to run the 2:54.xx if weather was very go...

I shared that I got injured at Bighorn and ultimately didn’t finish the race. That sharing leads me to a thought I’ve been having for a while. The thought, maybe a wondering, is how long should one ignore pain in training or even in a race. At Bighorn, my injure occurred in the 18th mile. I remember it exactly even though there was no specific “event” that can be tied to the injury. Suddenly, while running a downhill section that was relatively smooth dirt trail, a severe sharp pain struck in my right foot. Right along the front external edge where the ankle and foot come together. So sharp I was seeing fireworks each time it struck. It only occurred while running downhill and only when my foot twisted a certain direction. I hadn’t stepped on anything at the moment it struck, hadn’t twisted my foot in any notable fashion, nothing really. Just sudden severe pain. I didn’t ignore the pain initially. I stopped and just sat on a rock for a few minutes absorbing it. Then I continued on expe...

I’ve gone silent here. Actually, I’ve gone silent in with any writing, really. I had a rough spring of waves of getting sick and then recovering and then almost immediately getting sick again. Four or five big waves. It was not fun. It put me in a real funk for many months. It’s not what led me to DNFing at Bighorn 100, but it certainly contributed. I was not as well trained as I would have liked to have been, which was in my head from the beginning of the race. But alas, I want to get back to writing. Writing is rewarding to me. I don’t need anybody to read it, I just need to write. Though when people read and comment positively, that makes me feel good, too. I want to get back in the practice of writing daily. Today I begin taking a stab at that. I’m thinking a theme in my next bit of writing is to explore some basic truisms or tenets of running, in particular mountain ultra running, I can lay out for myself to lean on when things get bad. What do I mean by this? I’m not sure. An exa...

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...