Don’t put the horse before the cart. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. There are probably a few other clichés to describe my efforts this week. I really wanted to run the Mesa Trail much more than just once a week, so I thought I might as well try to run it every day this week. Well, not very far into this week, I upped the ante a bit by tossing in an attempted summit of Green Mountain. Note the use of “attempted”. Not only did I fall short of summiting Green by a mile, but I blew the other objective of running Mesa all week. My trip to Telluride on Friday compressed my 54 mile week goal into a four day slot, so this undoubtedly added more pressure to these goals. The week started strong and quickly unraveled before my tired ass. In the end, I ran only 37 miles.
Tuesday was a nice start to the week though, with a mix of Mesa Trail, South Fork Shanahan, and Big Blue Stem. I mainly wanted to run the steep stuff on South Fork Shanahan since I haven’t run this route in months. The whole run was terrific. Not only was it a bit of a divergence from the usual Mesa route, but it fortified my confidence in my climbing efforts.
With my compressed schedule for the week, this meant that I had to run every day, including a 20 miler on Friday morning before hopping in the car to drive 8 hours to Telluride. So, after work on Wednesday, I headed to Eldorado Springs to run the same Mesa mix from the day before. The traffic leaving Boulder was gnarly and my impatience got the best of me, so I headed up to NCAR to run Bear Creek Canyon to the summit of Green Mountain. Mind you, the temperatures were in the mid-80’s. It was the classic plane crash scenario of how an airplane typically doesn’t crash due to one singular problem, but a compounded mix of a few problems. Not only did I decide to run Green Mountain, which is a much different run than the Mesa, but I wanted to do it in the heat, and let’s throw in one more newly created concept – run it faster than last time. That plan was a disaster, which I would have loved to realize before attempting this run. Let’s use another cliché – hindsight is always 20/20.
I maintained a pretty strong pace for most of this run, but as I started to make my way up the final ascent to the summit, I quickly realized I was not feeling good to maintain even a slow pace, especially since the sun was setting and I really wanted to be off the mountain before I couldn’t see the technical sections of the trail. I bailed out at mile six of a seven mile run. Lame, I am aware.
That wasn’t the lamest part of the week though. The fact that this run burned me out so much that I couldn’t run at all the next day was what really drove the nail into the coffin (boom – fourth cliché). So, Thursday was a zero-mile day. I figured I could simply recover enough to, at the very least, run my long run on Friday morning. I did just that. I put in a solid effort on Doudy and Mesa to wrap the week with 37 miles of stupidity.
(I got over the crappy running earlier in the week with a little r&r in Telluride)
Tuesday – 11 mi (1:53, 1,900 ft) Mesa Trail, South Fork Shanahan
Wednesday –6 mi (1:22, 1,600 ft) Green Mountain via Bear Creek Canyon
Friday – 20 mi (3:35, 3,450 ft) Doudy, Spring Brook, Mesa
Totals for the week:
Miles: 37
Climbing Feet: 6,950
Time: 6:51
No comments:
Post a Comment