While it’s true that the purpose of this blog is to document my chase of a hundred 100 mile run finishes (100×100=10,000), this is goal remains so far in the future as to be unattainable. I’ve been running 100 mile races for 18 months now and I’m only 4% of the way there. So I plan to document and celebrate all my 10k accomplishments along the way and this morning I passed my first one: pull-ups. I added pull-ups to my daily workout in January 2013. It’s taken me 1,355 days to reach 10K averaging 7.4 per day, but I’ve finally made it. This is one of my 4 core 4×10 exercises and I think my consistency with this was one of the reasons I did so well at Cloudsplitter. I had never used trekking poles for any extended period of time and while I had a tight muscle in my shoulder blade, my arms and shoulders held up great considering the amount extra use I put them through.
My next 10K will probably be miles ran since I started keeping track in 2012. Based on my current pace of about 1800 miles per year, it looks like I’ll hit this goal sometime in early 2018. That will be a large milestone and one I’ll probably devote a lot more time and effort documenting as I get closer.
Offseason
I’m only 8 days into my offseason, but I’m already champing at the bit to get back out there and pin another 100 mile bib to my shorts. I’ve had an amazingly quick recovery post Cloudsplitter. My legs were fully healed by last Wednesday or so (day 3) and as of this morning (day 8), my feet were pain and discomfort free. Not only do I have a spring in my step, but I’m mentally raring to go. It pains me to sit here and not have a race on my schedule until January 14th (late year’s race report: Phunt 50k). Every bone in my body wants me to rush over to Ultra Sign-up and find a nearby race to sign up for. And while I’m sure I could do another race within the next couple months (I wonder if Stone Mill is sold out), that’s not the smart thing to do. The smart thing is to take my 6 weeks off before starting my training back up again.
I guess part of the reason I feel so mentally sharp is because I haven’t really trained much in the past 2 months. Outside of one 10 mile run in September, everything has been super short. No 5-6 hour jaunts through the countryside. No 4am wakeup calls. I haven’t been ground down by a long training cycle. Just a lot of rest and recovery. Basically, it feels like I’ve already had my offseason only instead of starting up a training cycle, I went out and ran 100 mile. Very strange.
But I have big plans for my next training cycle heading up to Umstead (Project 14Forty). I haven’t sat down and scripted out all the details of my training plan yet, but I know the structure I want to use. I’m going back to the future with it and adding back in several of the things that I think made me successful early in my ultra career (and by early I mean all of 2 years ago). I’m excited to mix together new and old ingredients like a mad scientist to see what I can accomplish. But my next goal race is still 6 months away. Even though I don’t want to step back, the right decisions are typically the hardest to make. So I’ll take a month off and plan.
How do you stay patient when every fiber of your being screams to GO-GO-GO?