Ramping up & Ramping Down

A quick post for the record books.  I am into week 8 of my Grand Canyon Ultra training plan and just over 12 weeks out from my first big race of the season.  Mileage is starting to ramp up, which means some creative time management, efficient meal planning, and a constant struggle to find enough hours in the day to sleep.  I'm between about 70-80K/week for mileage now, and it's only going up from here.  I've been doing long runs out at Birds Hill Park on a nice meandering forested trail, which has nice variety but a noticeable lack of elevation as does every outdoor run here in Manitoba.

Still smiling...me at Todd rocking the running kilt!

So, once per week I've started making the drive out to a small town east of Winnipeg to run treadmill hill intervals with my training buddy Todd.  His gym kindly lets us prop one treadmill up on a step (~15% down grade) and we put another treadmill at +15% incline.  After 1 mile warm up, we have been doing 10 min intervals on each treadmill, trading back and forth.  We are now at 6 intervals.  With the warm up and cool down that totalled 2 hours 20 min and 12.5 miles (~20K) of running and trekking.  Argh!  Can we say stinky and sweaty not to mention brain numb afterwards?  However, after these runs I feel the exact type of DOMS and fatigue in my legs that I used to after mountain runs, and since that is the only time in the week that I can train for sustained climbs, those nasty treadmill intervals are going to get longer.  I (we) plan to add more variety to the intervals as time goes on, and try to start replicating portions of the GC course as closely as humanly possibly on a treadmill.

On another note, last weekend I volunteered for an 8 hour all night shift at the Actif Epica race.  It was very inspiring seeing runners and cyclists come into our aid station with 15 of 125km or 160km left to run/ride, in up to -40C wind chill weather.  My Sunday morning 30K run was at 5:30am on no sleep the night before.  Good training as I've never run that mentally tired before.  My legs were fine, but I almost nodded off mid step!

Finally, I tried a new nutritional supplement yesterday called UCan.  Thanks to a friend who told me all about it during the long night at Actif Epica, I think I may have discovered something amazing.  I hesitate to shout about it too loudly yet, but it's a slow release complex carb drink mix made from non-GMO corn that gave me seriously sustained steady energy for over 3.5 hours of running on only 2 servings of the powder (42g carbs!).  I can't handle gels for hours, and prefer whole foods, but they are heavy to carry and always have fiber.  Stay tuned as I experiment over the next few runs and try to further my body's ability to burn fat rather than sugar.