I’ve spent the last 7-8 years mostly treading water from a fitness standpoint. My improved race performances have been driven by better execution of all the little things (pacing, nutrition, hydration, mental focus) and a general conditioning to the excessive pounding of long ultras. I got a little burned out from the relentless grind building…
Time For A Tune-up
I have a confession to make. I don’t really train for ultras anymore. My first 3-5 years were composed of a 20 week training block followed by a race then a month of downtime/recovery. Rinse and repeat. It was a pretty epic grind to build up my endurance base. Once I had finished 10-15 ultras…
How Seriously Should You Take Training/Racing Ultras?
Ultras are basically my job at this point (which I make no income from). This has been a very serious hobby of mine for the past 10+ years. It is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, reading about, and studying intently. I’m analytical in how I train and race. I’m always looking…
Tapering From A 196 Mile Peak Week
tl;dr I have no idea what I’m doing here. My Calendar Club project ended 3 weeks out from my first spring race, which is the perfect timing for a peak week. The good news was that I ended that 7 day period feeling strong and injury free despite running 196 miles. The bad news is…
March 2026 Calendar Club – Month In Review
Last month I completed the Calendar Club which is a running challenge where you run in miles the day of the month. This is a report on how it went. Background and Context Before I get into it, a little background on me. I’ve been running consistently for 13 years now. I crossed 30k lifetime…
March 2026 Calendar Club – Week 4 Update
What an amazing week of running for me. Coming into this project, I guessed that week 4 would be where the accumulated mileage (175 on the week, 410 for the month) would have my legs completely thrashed and I’d be really struggling just to get the miles in each day. In reality? Not so much.…
March 2026 Calendar Club – Week 3 Update
Oh, yeah. I’m deep into things now. I started this week off with my fastest paced effort of the month. It only went downhill from there as the accumulated mileage started to finally catch up with me. My legs have felt pretty decent starting out for each of the runs, however my paces just started…
Caught a (3x) 10K
I hit 30,000 lifetime running miles a couple weeks back. More specifically, 30k from when my current training log started back in 2012. I had done some (undocumented) running before that, however guess it was quite a bit less than 1,000 total so we can ignore those miles for the sake of simplicity. The math…
Running Through A Cyclical Low
Daily running is not a steady state affair. If only. Some days are better than others (stupid rain). Some weeks are better than others (stupid work obligations). And some months. . . This has been one of those months for me. Coming out of Eastern States, I was back to 100% physically within about 10…
I Could If I Wanted To
I mean, that’s the excuse, right? Sure I could do X. Anybody could do X. I just don’t want to. This is something we learn at a young age as a way to push back against our shortcomings. It’s also a nice lie we tell ourselves to boost our self esteem. It’s not that I…