My Track Record    

As implied by my last entry, my perfect day of training might entail 12 to 15 laps around Green Lake, with the lap times never varying by more than a few seconds.

For many others, though, that situation would essentially be Hell on Earth. Based on my reading of a few fellow ultramarathoners' blogs, here's how they might spend their ideal day of training....

Matt Hart: a few hours of running followed by a few hours of mountain biking, a few hours of skiing, and then perhaps a few hours of kayaking. With a few dozen Clif Shots for sustenance.

Andy Jones-Wilkins: a long run on the Western States course, accompanied by chatty Oregonians. (Has anyone else noticed that 10 of his last 12 posts have mentioned Western States? The man is truly obsessed!)

Anton Krupicka: 30 miles in the morning, at altitude, with lots of climbing, accompanied by Kyle Skaggs (about the only guy who can keep up right now). A quart of ice cream for lunch. And then another mountainous 30-miler in the afternoon.

Brian Morrison: a long run on Chuckanut Mountain followed by several hours of isometric upright posture exercises -- i.e., standing around -- at a Pearl Jam concert.

If anyone else out there wants to describe his/her own unique formula for achieving a "runner's high," please go ahead!

Posted by crowther at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

How does that old saying go? Something like, "You can take the runner out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the runner"?

I'm primarily a road guy not just because of my "drunken sailor" biomechanics on the trails, but also because I'm one of those people who has to time everything. For a given workout or race, I like to know my mile splits, how they stack up against my (and my competitors') previous times, and on and on.

Getting this level of quantitative feedback is harder when running on trails of variable terrain and uncertain distance. But I'm here to say that, with enough research and planning, a trail run can be nearly as regimented and stressful as an equivalent road workout.

(Some would say that I should just loosen up. But if I weren't obsessed with split times I wouldn't be me.)

This week I decided to do the Seattle Running Company's standard 14-mile loop at Cougar Mountain. But how would I judge the quality of the workout? To what would I compare my time?

Fortunately for me, I'm not the only one who keeps careful training records. Uli Steidl's online training logs (2005-2008) list over 20 visits to the Cougar loop, with times ranging from 1:43:38 to 2:16. Even better, he recorded splits for a couple of his fastest runs: 0:12 to Clay Pit Road, 0:31-0:32 to Mine Shaft Trail, 0:42 to the start of the Wilderness loop, 1:04 to the end of the Wilderness loop, and 1:23-1:24 to DeLeo Wall Trail.

So I was off to test myself against Uli (or, to be completely fair, against Uli running at some unknown fraction of his capacity). I matched his splits to the start of Wilderness and then lost about a minute to him on each of the last three sections. I finished in 1:46:42, which seemed respectable.

Perhaps next week I'll see how close I can get to Uli's best two-loop time.

Posted by crowther at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision for the case of Crawford v. Marion. In brief, the Court ruled that the state of Indiana may require voters to present photo identification when voting.

It has been argued that this decision is silly because the Indiana law targets a type of voting fraud that, as far as we know, is attempted by about one person every 100 years or so. Personally, I'm sympathetic to the justices' reasoning. As the father of a creatively destructive toddler, I'm an occasional witness to acts that, while extremely unusual, must be actively discouraged.

Today's example came at breakfast. Before I knew what had happened, I heard myself saying, "Phil! Do NOT drive your race car through the oatmeal!"

Until today, I never would have suspected the need for a ban on the commingling of high-performance automobiles and oat-based cereals. But apparently there is one.

Posted by crowther at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)