A Tumbling Pace

The Bolder Boulder is over and as Jay-Z says: “onto the next one”.  The next one for me is the Leadville marathon (not ultra-marathon) on July 3rd.  After that is the Imogene Pass Run which I signed up for today (you should too if you plan to run it.).  

The big task ahead of me with only a month prep time is the Leadville Marathon.  How do you prepare for a marathon in only 4 weeks?  The good news is, I didn’t train for the Bolder Boulder in the way I should of to be serious about that race, instead I did lots of ATC and local mountain running.  While that hurt my Bolder Boulder chances of a fast time it means I have a good start on my Leadville training.  The most important thing with Leadville right now it to get out and run some long hard runs above 10K feet.  For me that means getting my ass out past Eldora and running my old King’s Lake loop a few times in the next month.  It’s a gorgeous 17 mile (more or less) loop and I would like running peeps so let me know.

From a big picture, what is ahead of me is a  lot of mountain running.  I need to be light and strong.  I have the strength, I need to lose weight.  That means less ATC, more consistent running and watching my diet.  Connie at the ATC wrote a post yesterday encouraging us to concentrate on performance and our sport and I need to take that to heart and remember that I am in a maintenance phase at the ATC.  I also need to have really awesome lungs.   That means lots of steep hard climbs.  So the mountain running challenge is upon me, feeling the weight of it this morning, actually I started thinking about it yesterday evening when I had some alone time after the race.

Performance considerations aside, there is so much beauty to take in while training in the mountains.  This is what we trail runners live for, time to get those La Sportiva’s up in the mountains and soak it all up (as soon as my sore calves clear up a bit from yesterday’s fast 10K).