Tag Archives: qr50

Just a heads up – this post is going to be whiny. I had a rough run this weekend and I want to talk about it. However, there is a pretty good chance you don’t actually care about the running part…so I’ll give you a little mountain eye candy.

On Saturday morning we headed west to Buena Vista to run a chunk of the Collegiate Peaks Trail Run 25M course that Chris will be running on next month. He wanted to get a feel for what he would be racing on and I needed hilly miles on single track…done and done! Turns out I was also about to get a miserable dose of reality…and, now that it’s all over, I’m incredibly glad that Saturday’s run sucked. Because I needed a bad run to make me appreciate the good ones…and I needed this craptastic run to go down before race day on a different course.

Earlier last week I saw a post about the Palmer Lake 24 Hour Fun Run. On Friday morning Paula, Chris and I signed up for it. Saturday morning rolled around and we headed south with a few bags of food and many layers of running gear having no idea what to expect.

We went in with the goal of 6 [or 7] hours at the race then heading back to real life and such. We really had no idea what we were doing and if it weren’t for Paula waiting for a ride I may have stayed in bed. The idea of showing up at a small ultra terrified me. It was a laid back event put on for the sake of getting people some training miles but I had decided I was going for a PRD [Personal Distance Record] of at least 32 miles and that got me all worked up.

After writing out my survival plan for Quad Rock 50 I dug up a legal pad and wrote out the dates of all the weeks leading up to the race. They all fit on one side of the paper. Uh oh. That is not very many weeks, for the record. I am well past the point of freaking out about my barely there training plan. It’s been decided that I am going to make the most of the time I have left, which requires a little creativity.

I have befriended two-a-day runs and even taken on a few three-a-days just for fun. It has become rather “normal” to get up early for a country road jaunt, pack up running clothes for some Wyoming runching and then stop by a trailhead on my way home for a few extra miles. It’s not perfect but it is getting me miles on tired legs so I’ll take it!

My first 50M race – Quad Rock – is less than 8 weeks away. Or, in a scarier sense, it is 50-something days away. My training plan is still non-existent and my running has been all over the place. But it’s okay…I have a plan.

In the coming weeks I plan on running a few legit long runs on the weekends, preferably with friends and maybe as races. I plan on focusing on hill repeats when possible – even if it takes me 2 miles to get to the closest hill on my lunch runs. I plan on playing with nutrition and finding something that doesn’t make me want to scrap my taste buds off or yank my intestines out. I plan on getting some value out of each run, whether physical or mental. I plan on turning down stupid “hey, want to run [way too many] miles” opportunities in the two weeks prior to race day in favor of legit “tapering”.

Fun Fact…I have not completely forgotten how to run! Which is good, because just recently I threw a fair amount of money at some seriously terrifying race entries! Funny how all motivation and dedication disappears the minute you lose your mind and commit to crazy things!

The last 3 weeks have been busy, to say the least, and running was not even kind of a priority for me. First it was a week in Park City with Columbia, then a week of storytelling followed up by my first winter camping experience, then a week of…I have no idea what, but running rarely happened!