January Training

January was a tiring month. Here's the quick rundown of the stats.

Running - Week of...

January 3: 105 miles
January 10: 129 miles
January 17: 133 miles
January 24: 154 miles

Total Miles for January (31 days, 59 runs): 581 miles
Total Vertical Climbed (8 ski days): 33,685 feet

In the 11 weeks since I decided that I was going to take a shot at the Antelope Island 50K this March, I've averaged 128 miles per week. Never before in my life have I been able to pull off this kind of volume with this kind of consistency. I have 8 more weeks (including this week) until the race. Up until now, the training has been 99% focused on building a strong aerobic base. Some occasional harder efforts, and lots of hill running, but no structured workouts. I'm going to start mixing in some more specific workouts in this next block of training. But first, a race to see where I'm at...


Doesn't that look fun? Well, Antelope Island is twice as long and has 4 times the elevation gain... so for me, this actually does look like it will be a relatively nice course!

This weekend Andrea and I are heading down to Arizona, and we're running an XTerra trail race at McDowell Mountain Park. Its a 15 miler, so it should be a good fitness test. I don't expect to have much leg speed, but I know my aerobic engine is really strong, so hopefully I can grind out a good effort.

If nothing else, its just going to be nice to get out of the cold weather for a few days! The below zero windchills this week have been quite the mental challenge, so a change of scenery should mix things up enough to prevent hitting that mental barrier that inevitably pops up when you're training for 20 weeks for a single event.