Hope Springs Eternal

My goal for the next two months is to train up for a 50M race. I still need to qualify for Western States next year, and for some unknown reason, running under the qualifying time gets harder every year. (It can't be that I'm 59 YO, have no inate athletic ability, and am prone to overuse injuries... Of course not!)

So I've been having fun with my co-workers, saying that I needed to find a 'really, really easy 50M race'. Naturally, they all think I'm deranged. It doesn't help when I tell them that, 'anyone can train themselves to run 50 miles'.

If you know the rules for Western States, you will understand that, having lost in the lottery the last two years, all I have to do for 2008 is to run a 50M race under the qualifying time, and I am an automatic entrant. No lottery required. So I'm planning on Helen Klein 50M in November. Probably run Firetrails 50 in October as a warm-up.

But meanwhile I need to train. To keep my overall mileage low, I use the concept of back-to-back long runs. 30M on Saturday, then 20M on Sunday.

Since HK50M is on the bike path in Sacramento, I do these long runs on the local bike path (Alameda Creek). I went out Sunday to test the waters after my 2 week hiatus involving vacation and general sloth.

I started out with full plans to do a 25M loop, but coming back to my car at the 20M point, I'd had enough.

My regime on the bike path loop (as opposed to my usual mountain trail run) is to run the entire way, except the 1/4 mile climb at the start of the Meadowlark loop. It's curious that I can run this, while in the few marathons I've run, I've never been able to run the entire 26M without walking breaks. Usually by mile 15.

I trained for American River this spring with back-to-back runs, and thought it worked pretty well. To mimic the course, I ran 20M on the bike path on Saturday, then 20M on mountain trails on Sunday. The one time I switched and did the trails first, I found that it was much harder to run on the bike path the next day. So we'll see how the bike path goes 2 days in a row.