Blog 1

My second week of training for the Greenland 50k is done.  I'm still not sure how I got to this point other than it had to do with Ultra'thoner talking up the long run concept with his detailed emails and blog posts.  So being a good brother I said I'd give it a try.  Why?  The thought of training to run short distance races seems silly to me.  My first race was a marathon; my second was a marathon--see a pattern?  As well as the chance to run a race together was a strong incentive.

This is only my 4th year as a runner.  For years I used to try to run for health; I also tried out for track in high school for all that helped or harmed.  It wasn't until I was much older that I figured out the mental aspect of running.  Up to this point I've always been a hiker, backpacker and, this decade, a alpinist.  When I'm not actually climbing I plan and research future adventures on Summitpost.  So after climbing up a high altitude mountain for the better part of a day I figured I had the endurance and mental ability to run a marathon.  So I try to train and run one race a year since the conditioning really helps my climbing and my cycling.  Yes, you could correctly guess at this point that I don't sit still very often except after a long climb, run or ride.

The snow in Denver this winter has not helped the training these past two weeks.  But even running outside in a couple of inches of the white stuff beats the 1/10 mile track in the local rec center.  This weekend's runs, 8 and 9 milers, wore me out.  I haven't run that much back to back in over a year!

I'm using the Santa Clarita Runners schedule that Ultra'thoner directed me towards.  I was using a marathon schedule from Runner's World that I've used the last several years.  So far, so good.

The biggest part of training for this 50k is the whole run slow and actually walk concept for me.  I've worked to increase my speed for each race, for less than a four hour time, so now I need to really slow my pace.  Hmmm...  This seems to be the biggest challenge so far.  Since I know I can run the 26.2 strong I know the 50k will work out fine short of any weather, (this is Colorado) health or injury issues.  Its just a concept I still need to work out...slow is good?

I don't know how often I'll post here but as the training continues its hard to say what will happen.  Cheers!