An everday guy's ultrarunning blog
It’s not completely arbitrary to set new goals each year. In many ways, the earth’s travel along its orbit and the cycle of the seasons this produces creates natural phases in our lives and so as a new year begins it is perfectly reasonable to consider all of the things that we want to achieve during the current cycle. Of course, it should probably be noted that most things worth learning and doing require many trips around the sun before any fruits can be seen.
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Snapshot: 145 miles in February, with 6 long runs (double digit miles), 8 easy runs, and one speed work out.
February has been the most productive training month I’ve had in the past 3 months and I’ve run almost everyday recently. I just hadn’t managed to run with much consistency in December and January, but it’s like something clicked when I ran the Groundhog Day 50K. Maybe sometimes you just need a spark to jump start your motivation and to remind you that you love to run. Before February 1st I had not gone over 20 miles since Tunnel Hill, so maybe breaking that barrier just served to show me that I still had it.
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My First Hill and Speed workout since Tunnel Hill 100
I feel like I’m starting to get back in the groove of things lately. It seems like it’s been a while since I was able to string together a streak of runs like I have over the past two weeks, mostly due to the persistent pain I’ve been having in my left hamstring. It’s definitely not 100%, but it’s getting closer and I can now say that it isn’t really holding me back on the long runs or the faster runs. Mostly, it bothers me going up hills and when I spring into a sprint, which made Tuesday’s work out (Main Street Hill 2/18) a lot of fun.
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Part of fitting ultra running into your life, as opposed to fitting your life into ultra running, is that occasionally things don’t turn out like you had planned. Last year I had gotten onto the wait list for Yamacraw along with my running partner Brent and brother-in-law, Joe Dan. Brent was towards the front of the list and easily got into the race, but he was worried we wouldn’t get in and decided to decline his entry. As fate would have it, both I and Joe Dan would eventually get into the race, but with Brent having already declined entry it didn’t seem right for us to go, so we both decided to forego our entries as well. Hopefully this was the closest thing to a Shakespearean tragedy I’ll ever have to experience. I can live with that.
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February 1st, 2020
You don’t have to register and pay money to run an ultra-marathon. Don’t get me wrong, formal races are a lot of fun and give you official times that you can use to measure your progress (or to measure yourself against others if you’re one of those types, and we all do this to varying degrees). The competition of being on a course with other runners and the adrenaline boost that you get is unique to formal races. The pressure of not only hitting your personal targets, but also passing and being passed is a pressure that is impossible to duplicate outside of an organized competition. I get that. But you can still push yourself to new and interesting challenges without providing your credit card information, and there’s a certain sense of exploration that comes with ultra running that lends itself well to “unorganized” events. So when a friend offered up an open invitation to run from Bowling Green through the Kentucky countryside to the next county over, I didn’t hesitate to join.
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Well, the equally anticipated and dreaded notification from Ultrasignup has finally arrived. My phone buzzed and I looked down and saw the Gmail icon with a notice from Ultra sign up, which could only mean one thing. Over the past several days I had been monitoring the Last Annual Vol State Facebook page with a mixture of fear and quiet resignation as names steadily trickled down through my feed, each belonging to some poor unfortunate soul being informed of their impending doom.
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A new year has arrived and with it one of my favorite races, the Snow Flurry Scurry, which begins at Lost River Cave right here in Bowling Green, KY. This is one of about a dozen or so 5Ks in town and one that I try to run each year. Even an ultrarunner can enjoy blazing along a 5K course every once in a while and I find the change in pace to be refreshing. It’s so easy to get stuck thinking about the miles that I have to put in each week and vacillate on whether to run a particular race or whether to just get my work in. It’s unfortunate but all long distance runners can fall into this mode of thinking, which of course can be perfectly appropriate at times. We all must decide what races we want to run and how seriously we want to approach an event and I would never discount the importance of sticking to a plan! Last year I caught the Snow Flurry Scurry on a long run Saturday and if Strava is to be
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