Miwok Countdown: 81 hours

My favorite running picture ever - courtesy of sarahseads (instagram).  Check my rearview out in Ultrarunning Magazine online!

The training is done.  The taper is almost done.  Less than 4 days out from the Miwok 100 2015 and I'm almost ready.  I have a growing pile of stuff on the floor ready to pack. I've been taking my vitamins, getting extra sleep, drinking extra water.  I've barely run this last week, because I felt that I needed a little more recovery after my last "long" run.

The one thing that I still need to prepare is my mind.  There has been so much going on in our lives this spring that I really have felt unprepared mentally up to this point.  In the past month I finished the bulk of my training, we listed and sold our house, I flew to Winnipeg for job interviews, I hosted 2 kids birthday parties, and participated in the annual Snow to Surf Race last Sunday.  I finally accepted a job offer today that I am very excited about (that allows me to specialize in treating running injuries), which has relieved a HUGE amount of stress and weight from my shoulders.  I realize now that my sense of "not being recovered" was chiefly the stress hanging over my head about our move.  The power of the mind.

Handing off after running a 2k sprint on Sunday in the Snow to Surf Relay. From 2K to 100K in 6 days!

Team ELM and Team ELM Too - a great group of active ladies in the Comox Valley!

So now I can really focus on getting ready to race.  Time to print out the course map and profile, mark out the aid stations, plan the drop bags and race strategy.  After a short run tomorrow the rest of my prep will be all mental which I know is 99% of what I know will get me to the finish line.

Next post: my race report!

Taper Time Again!

Yes this picture is real.  A huge reason I run is that I get to look at things like this.

First of all, I want to thank all of you who are following this blog.  Since I started posting, I have had viewers from Canada, USA, Russia, Australia, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Poland and Peru.  Amazing!  There are people interested in ultra-running all over the world and I am glad that my narrative from this little slice of the world in western Canada seems to interest and hopefully inspire so many.

It has been been a while since my last post, but honestly, I've been busy.  I continued to build and peaked with the highest mileage week last week.  I ran some big weeks with the final back-to-back run being 80 km in 24 hours (30km + 50km) on terrain with elevation that mimicked the race course as closely as possible.  But the end of that final run I was so ready for taper time.  I was tired of always being tired.  I needed a hair cut.  I needed to spend time with my family.  But then life got in the way.

And I hoped on a flight last Thurs to head to the city where we will be moving this summer for job interviews.  I spent 3 days flying, driving to interviews, driving around with our real estate agent, then flying home.  After that, getting up to run only 3.5 hours on Sunday seemed like a gift.  It's all in the perspective.

A week ago, I commented mid run that, "I am in the best shape I've ever been in my life.  No.  Wait a minute.  I'm the most broken down I've ever been in my life."  Which segues nicely into the purpose of taper time.

Many people think that the training makes you stronger.  Those long runs are what make you stronger.  Wrong.  Actually, the training and the long runs break you down.  It's the recovery time, and the time between runs when you actually get stronger.  When you are training, you are asking a lot of your body.  You are microscopically and sometimes macroscopically breaking your muscles and connective tissue down.  You are putting a large demand on your organs and burning fuel stores that are finite.

After all that hard work is done, the real miracle begins.  There is a law in physiology called Wolff's Law.  It relates specifically to bone, but states that bone gets stronger in response to the stress placed upon it.  The rest of the body does the same thing.   Muscle fibers and connective tissue rebuild stronger than they were before in response to the demand that was placed on them.  Energy systems fine tune, organ physiology works to find the balance between demand and ideal function.  Following the SAID principle, the body undergoes Specific Adaptations to the Imposed Demands that the athlete places on it.

The recovery period (and taper time) are where the real magic happens.  I still feel very broken down. I tried to run a tempo run today and my legs felt like lead weights.  But in about 10 days I will start to feel amazing.  Training right up to a race breaks you down and is foolish.  I've learned that entering a race well rested, if even slightly under-trained, is better than entering a race tired.  The longer the race, the longer the taper, and a month of recovery will hopefully allow enough recovery time without deconditioning for my 100km run.

Our human body is an amazingly miraculous piece of machinery that works better the more it is used.  Train it well, feed it well, rest it well, and it will perform.  The human body never ceases to amaze me.  It is so easy to live very narrow lives within very narrow limits.  It is only when we push ourselves to the extremes that we experience an element of divinity, where we witness ourselves accomplish things that defy logic or common sense. That is the essence of ultra-running for me.  Defying common sense to experience something truly amazing.

Mental Toughness

It's been 3 days since our last long run and I finally feel I can blog about it.  Wow.  Talk about training for the mind.  Despite our AMAZING winter (or lack of it) and really early spring here on Vancouver Island, not all runs can produce picturesque postcard Go-Pro pictures worthy of travel magazine or real estate insert covers.  Last week reminded us that running on the island often involves getting wet.  And cold.  And muddy.  And repeat.

Backing up, for the last 2 weeks our family has been fighting all manner of flu and cold bugs. My kids seem to have brought EVERYTHING home from school in 2 or 3 variations this month.  I have been doggedly determined not to get sick.  I've taken my vitamins, oil of oregano, gotten extra sleep by going to bed super early (to make up for being woken in the middle of the night by sick kids), washed my hands repeatedly, even done acupuncture on myself 2x/day, all to boost my immune system to fight those nasty bugs. Going into our 2nd-to-last long run week, I knew I needed to log the miles cause there is no time left.  I managed to get 30K in on Thurs by running 2x that day - all without getting really wet, and got to bed really early.

2 hours in and still smiling

Friday I woke up to wind and light rain.  Sarah and I met in the parking lot at the trailhead at 0600.  Not many words were spoken, we just switched on our headlamps and took off trotting up Queso Grande.  First mental note of the day: my headlamp is sufficient for night road running, but NOT night trail running.  Must get new headlamp before Miwok.  It was a slow first 1.5 hours in the dark up the mountain, but the sky started lightening as we summited Upper Queso and I could relax and stop prancing like an idiot to avoid tripping in the dark.  So much for energy conservation.

Blurry pictures as reflective of how much moisture covered EVERYTHING in my pack.

The rest of the run was a blur of getting wet, wetter, cold and colder.  We looped back to the cars after 3 hours to change socks, grab hot miso soup, restock water and fuel, and say hello to a hard core friend who showed up with her baby snuggly tucked into the jogging stroller to start her own run amidst the downpour.  Ok, maybe it was a drizzle at that point, but I was wet and miserable.

Puddles and mud

At the 5 hour mark, I wasn't doing so well.  We were very high up, the wind was cold, the mist was deeply penetrating into my bones.  I was tired.  I was cold. Mentally, I was DONE.  All I could think about was, "what is the fastest way out of here?"  If it wasn't for the fact that I really needed Sarah to guide me out of where we were, I would have bailed on her.  Whoops - did I say that?  She kept me going, even though all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and sleep in a puddle.  I am NOT kidding. But lesson learned again...

If you just keep going, it gets better.  After a lovely Oskri Pineapple Coconut bar snack, and descending to an altitude that brought the temp up maybe 2 degrees, I felt revived!  I was Chatty Cathy as we picked our way down the mountain, while Sarah was having her own issues with seriously cold body temps.  I bored her with a long narrative summary of my latest audiobook (Running with the Kenyans) to keep her sufficiently annoyed enough to stay ahead of me lol!

My shoes are still holding up!  I wore through 1 pair of socks today though.  Completely shredded.

When we finally made it back to our cars (total time 6 hours), we made a beeline for Sarah's backyard cedar woodfired sauna to stretch and restore our core body temps.  What a treat.  We didn't log the miles we'd hoped for during that run, but the energy expenditure in keeping warm and dodging puddles alone must have counted for 10 extra kilometres.

Miwok, please bring me warm sunshine and shoes that aren't weighed down by water and mud.  But if you don't, my mind is now tougher.

Adaptability

"A lot of people talk about expecting the best but preparing for the worst, but I think that's a seductively misleading concept. There's never just one "worst."  Almost always there's a whole spectrum of bad possibilities. The only thing that would really qualify as the worst would be not having a plan for how to cope." Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

This week I've been thinking a lot about adaptability.  It's mentioned a lot in places like URP podcasts, that ultrarunners have one essential characteristic in common: we are adaptable.  We have to be.  Nothing EVER goes exactly according to plan, especially when your plan can cover several hours and kilometers of time and space, not to mention months and months of training.

Our long run Friday was supposed to be another building week - over 6 hours, 45km with 30km the day before or after.  But things got in the way.  Sarah's body was telling her it was time to back off, so she texted the night before asking me if we could drop down to 3 hours.  I agreed.  Even though I was game for a 6 hour run, I was exhausted from getting the house ready to list and a sick child home from school.  Thurs I had gotten up at 4:45 to run 16K before work, then other 5K that night with the ELM 10K Clinic.  Then that night, my other child woke at 2:00am vomiting.  Needless to say, but the time 5:45 Friday morning rolled around, I was just getting back to sleep rather than leaving the house for a 6:00am long run start as originally planned.

At 7:30 we met at the trail head.  Our original plan had called for more drop down weeks, which left some flex for days like this.  Thank goodness.  We took our time, running some flat miles along the river, then climbing before descending to the bluffs on Goat's Head for this great picture.  It was a lazy, sunny, perfect run day. And we did not feel guilty in the least.

I've learned that when training for a 100K race, you MUST be able to adapt.  Adapt your schedule, adapt your fuel, adapt your mindset.  Injuries. Job stress. Illness. Birthday parties. Vacations.  Life gets in the way.  The only way to succeed at ultrarunning as a working wife and mom is to weave my training into the rest of my life, while having a plan for how to cope. Thanks for the perspective Chris.

One For the Memory Bank

Five days ago we received something we've dreaded for at least the last 5 years.  Notice that my husband's job will require him to move.  This summer we are to move to Winnipeg, Manitoba.  Where there are no mountains, no vistas, no forest.  Only long, flat roads and open prairie.  On which I might take up cycling.  But in the mean time, I want as much trail time as possible!

So, after a down week last week, I was so grateful for an amazing run on Friday in the mountains of Cumberland.  I couldn't start til 0900 after I dropped the kids off at school. Sarah had started at 0600 with another running buddy and was already 3 hours in when I joined her.  It was a perfect sunny spring day, the air still slightly crisp, and the trails almost dry.  We climbed for 2 hours to the highest point in the area and then followed the Trent River for a long loop that brought us back to the parking lot 1 hours later.  Sarah was done at that point and headed for salt hot chocolate from the Wandering Moose and I refueled and headed out for another 2.5 hours.

I had tried to find someone to share the final half of my run with me, but there were no takers.  And honestly, I was ok with that.  I retraced our path back up the mountain to the top in the mid-day warmth.  I felt great.  I had been fueling perfectly, taking Succeed caps every hour, and pacing well.  I honestly felt like I was kissing mountain with my feet with every footstep, trying to keep things light and reverent.  There won't be many more runs like this for me in this area and I was determined to take it ALL in.  The green of the moss, the smell of the ozone in the air, the creaky boardwalks on Thirty Beaver, the lonely tall tree in the middle of a logged out area somewhere near Switchback, the view of the Georgia Strait in the afternoon sun.  For once I didn't even think about cougars and bears.  I felt totally safe and comfortable out there in my endorphin-induced bliss.

I did have one interesting thing happen to me.  I had my first real hallucination.  Which seems weird as I was fueling so well, and felt great.  When I reach the highest point in Cumberland a second time at 4.5 hours elapsed time, I felt a sharp sting on my forearm.  I looked down, actually fearing some crazy bug bite that might leave me incapacitated way out there in the middle of nowhere by myself.  I saw a huge white topped boil on my arm, and I totally freaked out.  I literally blinked once...and it was GONE.  No sting, no boil, nothing.  I blinked again.  Rubbed my arm.  No sign of ANYTHING.  Very weird.

My last long run was 4:40 and I only at 2 bars and a few gummy bears (I was experimenting).  My tummy was actually growling most of that run. Not good.  If I didn't actually bonk on that run, I came very close to it.  This run was 5:40 and I was determined to eat well and kept to my fueling-every-45-min routine.  I stuffed myself with Oskri Bars and Pro Bars, as well as some of Sarah's heavily salted broiled baby potatoes.  Baby potatoes are heaven sent for a runner who has missed lunch and hasn't stopped since breakfast. Take note.

This week will be filled with getting the house ready to list.  It will be a struggle to get my runs in, which might mean some awfully early mornings...so I'm off to bed!

Self Doubt

So the sign ups were done.  It was a week before Christmas, and I realized that the training had to start right then.  Sarah scratched out a training plan on a napkin in Hawaii, took a picture of it and sent it to me.  That was the start of my 100K training cycle (which has been revised since).  We affectionately refer to it as the Napkin Plan.   The first 1/3 of my training happened through Christmas, New Years and into January while single parenting and working almost full time.  My only salvation was the fact Fridays are my day off and with the boys in school, that leaves me 6 hours to run.  I would drop them off and head straight out to the trails for my long run, finishing just in time to shower, hit Costco, and pick them up at 2:30.

Fast forward now to the present.  My husband is back, just in time.  We are 10 weeks out from Miwok and starting to get serious with some long back to back days. If I thought that running 50K was entering a whole new world, then training for 100K is entering a whole new universe for me.  This past week I ran my first 100K week, with loads of elevation.  My body has just gone into uncharted territory and I'm honestly getting really nervous.  I'm starting to have thoughts like..."I just ran in 6 days what I plan to run in 1 day...and I'm exhausted."  "I don't think I can do this."  "What in the world was I thinking?!?!"

All that running took me 13 hours and 22 minutes.  That's a lot of time on the trails.  So what do I think about while I'm out there?  How do I keep my mind occupied and my legs going?

A few weeks ago my husband and I lost a friend to a tragic ice climbing avalanche accident.  It has affected our circle of friends, and really given me pause to think about life in the "rawest" sense of the word.  Last week, even though there was a LOT going on, I cherished my time on the trails in the peace and quiet - to think, to grieve, to just be.

Running has a very spiritual component for me.   I revel in the simplicity of human movement and the wonder of the human body.  I pray.  I appreciate nature as God created it. I worship as the sun rises and the sun sets.  I see the changes of the seasons and the weather as something I am a part of, rather than something to resist and avoid.  I am filled with gratitude that I live in a place where I can run year round in lush rain forests, mud and all.

When I'm alone I listen to a variety of things when I need a diversion from my thoughts.  Which sometimes leads to more thoughts.
1) Audiobooks - Last year Unbroken kept me going for hours. This year Running for My Life is the most inspiring work of non-fiction I've "read" since Unbroken.  I'm currently listening to The Elements of Effort: Reflections on the Art and Science of Running, and War & Peace.  Yes, I figured since I have hours to spend out there, I might as well use the time to become knowledgeable on a classic that I've never taken the time to read.
2) The Bible - I have a daily devotional app that guides me through the Bible in 1 year.  Great way to start an early morning run.
3) Podcasts - UltraRunnerPodcast.com is my favorite.
4) Music - always challenging finding the perfect playlist for the occasion.  Current favorite song: I Lived - One Republic. The music video gives me chills.

For at least one run a week, I have my running buddy Sarah to keep me company.  We have been running stairs, during which time we do not talk as we can barely breathe.  But during our long run, we talk.  We catch up on our lives, plan our futures, talk about work, gardening, etc.  Really, anything under the sun.  I know I couldn't do this without her.


Last week did me in.  I am seriously having doubts I can do this.  But I cannot let those thoughts define me or I'm done.  I have to refer back to my post last year The Biggest Question: WHY. I knew there was a reason I wrote that.  Just when I needed a boost, my dear aunt in CA emailed me today telling me that they are planning to come cheer me on at Miwok.  Wow.  With support like that, I know I can do this.  Little does my aunt know, she might end up scrapping me up off the ground at the finish line :)

One of the reasons I am blogging this is to focus.  When I write, it helps me self-analyze.  Whether or not anyone reads this doesn't matter to me.  But if someone out there is struggling or at least wants to know they are not alone in this crazy ultra-running world of ours, then hugs to you. We can do it!

Back in the Saddle

Well, I'm back in the saddle.  It's been a long time since my last post, and during that time I've continued running, simply for joy and trying to maintain a base level of fitness.  Completing 2 - 50K races last season seemed like quite the accomplishment.  My first foray into the ultrarunning world.  But it took me a LOT longer to recover than I thought. Interestingly, my body recovered much faster than my mind.  I simply could not fathom entering another ultra race.  I volunteered at a few, but avoided entering anything.  I decided to start weight training again and try to achieve some balance in my body after a long season of training in one discipline.  There was a lot of work to do.

That's until Dec came along and it seemed almost all the races had moved their registration dates forward and decided to go to a lottery system.  December is NOT the time of year that I am really thinking about race schedules and training plans. My husband was away with work for a few months and I was in survival mode at home.  But, it was time to consider what 2015 was going to look like.  My friend and running buddy Sarah had identified 2 races that she wanted to do this year.  The Diez Vista 50K in Port Moody, BC and the Miwok 100K in Stinson Beach, CA.  I knew I wanted to push myself again this year, but thought maybe a 50 miler would be the next logical step, not 100K.  In a flurry of texting between Hawaii (where Sarah was vacationing) and Comox, we somehow managed to enter the lottery for both races, never dreaming we'd get in to both.  I figured I would just throw it out there, and God would decide what I was meant to do this year.

Well, we got into both races.  Diez is 3 weeks before Miwok.  I've never run more than 50K before. Tickets were booked to San Francisco, beach house accommodation was booked - all with my husband conveniently absent and unable to be a voice of reason.  What in the world was I thinking?