"Peak" Condition

Pats Peaks - Henniker NH

Well, another weeks training is in the books.  Even though I ended up at 82 miles, it felt like I was beginning my taper.  Western States is only 3 weeks away and the big talk is how much snow there is.  At this point it's pretty much a given that we will be running a modified course, probably the same as last year.  The record amounts of snow might cause for an even more radical re-route, but regardless I'm excited to do my first 100 of the year.

Beginning of the 5.25 mile loop.  They do a 6, 12 and 24 hour MT. Bike race here every year.

After seeing some of the Western States course last week, I decided that I would get in as much hill training as I can this week and made it out to Pats Peak twice to run the 5.25 mile mountain bike loop.  Only 25 minutes from my house, the course offers some hard climbs, long descents and some beautiful technical single track.  Wednesday was my first time running there this year and I did two loops of the course in 1 hour 39 minutes.  My second loop was almost 2 minutes faster than my first, which is good news for me since my pattern there over the past few years is to see a 2 or 3 minute slowdown between loops.

Fun, muddy, rocky single track

For my 21 mile long run today I returned to see how I would feel after completing 4 loops.  They ended up at 52:50, 52:18, 53:11 and 54:19.  After the second loop I was really tired, so I was happy to see that my pace didn't slow down that much.

View from the top

I officially start my taper next week and I can't wait.  While I'm tired, I think that I've put in the training needed to get me to the starting line healthy and ready. 

As a side note, retyping my regular training runs into this blog is a pain in the ass.  I'm going to assume that showing my weekly total in the right hand column will satisfy most peoples curiosity.  If anybody wants to see the detail of my training log, just go to this link and type in "bikernate" (without the quotes).  I use www.runningahead.com to log all my runs and my user log is public.  I recommend the site.