Uphill both ways

So they ranked all 20 some ironmans from hardest to easiest:

“Whichever one you are in the process of doing, about halfway through the run, that one is the hardest one of all time.”


went for a long run for the first time in about 6 months. by long i mean about 4-5ish hours. the book has called for shorter runs all the way through - but we decided to bump it up a bit as we have the full on thingy in only 20 days. ( FOCK! )

well, we found a trail that was really wide and smooth. and hilly as all fock. we ended up parking about 1/4 from the end, staged about 3 gallons of water at the other end, also about 1/4 from that end. and for no particular reason, we started running.

uphill.

whoooh. about a year ago i would have walked the grade we ran up. it was pretty steep. the tricky part though was that the hill went on for about 2.9 of the 3.0 miles. then it was just about all downhill coming home. then, after 6 turn around and do it again, and again...

we did end up walking about half a mile all told but. wow, what a difference a year makes. also our pace was faster than our best ever half ironman from january. nice to be 185ish pounds now. also feel a ton better with the breathing. only once was i totally out of breath, and that was on a downhill section - so i must have been running all stupid or something for a while there.

average pace was 10:40. did about 18 miles. got really thirsty! it was about 88 degrees out although as the day wore on the temps plummeted drastically into the low 80s.

managed to eat a banana, 2 hammer gels and some cheatos. the drinking i kept up with even though the amount of sweat i put out was pretty comically ginormous.

i bit sore today as that was probably the hardest running i have done in my life. although for sure i have been pushed a lot harder in runs, i would roughly say i have done 6-8 runs that were harder. none hillier, only a few hotter, none faster... :-) so big improvement. might even run the marathon in canada under 7 hours now. :-)) and The Resa had a slightly better day than i had. she likes hills and heat a bit more than i do.

just to keep me level headed i got stung by a bee. really itchy now.

and sure did meet a lot of interesting people on the trail...

many people parked at the top of the big hill at the end of the trail. we *always* park at the point where you can run up the easiest. so picked the bottom of the run. that way we dont have to dread the last heartbreak hill. well, anyway, we are running up the hill towards the end and a lot of people are ripping past us downhill. the resa and i took a look at each of them after the first lap and made bets on who would be running back up the hill as about 70-80% walked back up. there was the occasional "runner". we saw 2 very good runners, about 7ish people that were better than we were - the rest were in tears.

one of the two fast people was a guy that looked like he stole a car sterio. long stringy black hair and a do-rag to tie it to his head. no shirt. about 140 pounds and maybe 5-8 tall. and he was bombing up the hill at about i would guess an 7min pace. just really going fast. but he looked like he knew what he was doing, not just running a fast quarter mile. did some kinda flicky finger thing at us that we practiced a few times with other runners, but they just stared at us. they were not as cool as we had just become obviously.

the other fast guy was mr hightech. like us he had the underarmor stuff on, the new shoes, also had the ipod going ( which we dont do ). ran along really smooth and just slipped past us at also probably 8min mile pace. this guy looked like he could do several laps at that pace.

of the 7ish people that were just faster, like slowly or somewhat quickly going past us, all of them were women. the resa would yell out stuff like "she is trying to beat us! trip her!" or i would say something else probably both annoying and also unheard through the Lady Gaga.

the biggest group was the what looked like first timers. cotton clothes and goofy running looks. these people all walked back up the hill. although one fat old guy surprised us with doing 2 laps.

at one point in the third lap we saw a chick running downhill towards us. after she went by the resa wondered if it was "Chicks with huge boobs running with a bouncing motion day" at the park as there were plenty of them.

we looked like the shuffling dead most of the run ourselves. but we tried pretty hard to keep from walking. we didnt walk at all until the last lap, and did that pretty much in small sections. another youtube video we like is by a guy Voit who rides the tour, he is from germany and has a very thick german accent. they asked him what does he do when he is climbing the big hills and his legs are screaming at him: "Shuts ups legs! Shuts up!" so we say that as we run when it starts to suck.



so how did it feel?

stingy.

my knees were a bit more sore than they have been in 8 months. also my push to the edge was a lot closer yesterday than in about a year. the book pretty much doesnt ever take you beyond what you can recover from and the longest run up till yesterday was about 90 minutes. so this was almost 3 times that. and i started getting the dizzy, stomach, blistered feet thingies going on. but we think we could have pounded out another lap if we had to. my biggest fear ( and most of my later whining ) was that it would take about a month to recover from this. but i think i overestimated the uncomfortableness and underestimated my new body. :-)

well, that was week 1 of 2 hard ones. 7 days from now the training will be complete... one way or another that is. then its taper to the day of the race. we both surprised ourselves on our good run. sheila joined up and also had the same run as we did. she used to do 4 hour marathons so she is getting stronger faster than we are on her feet.


SCORES!

mentally: 9 - i feel very good about the run, but i found myself being a pain in the ass to the resa... just need to shut up and find help inside myself more. of course all three of us were a pain at some point... but... :-)

physically: 10 - have some small technical issues yet... still not sure what i am going to run in. going to drop the blue jean cutoffs and find some tri-shorts maybe. ( welcome to the 2000s!! )

workouts: 9 - did them all. did them pretty strong. might be blowing off the swim too much. but if we swim hard i think we can get 1:25 and an easy swim would get us 1:35. so... might be better just to take our time, lose the 10 minutes and just get out of the water really happy and ready to go. ( the shear tonnage of stuff i dont know yet is pretty staggering. )



one more week. hardest one ever! then... ? ? ?? ? then we wait and see.