So...how's WSER training going?

I think this is the question I get most often. It has officially surpassed questions about what I am eating. I am for sure happier to talk about this right now than the food I am eating. I’ll answer that question first, I am a human garbage disposal and I am not mad about it. I am eating the good stuff (the Gnarly protein drinks for work are helping me so much!) and also the stuff I get for free (like white bread, cookies, chips and open packages of stuff leftover from races). It all goes in and burns well enough. I am also on a roasted potato kick, which I top with cheese and beans. Kind of like poutine meets nachos.

So training, that’s the fun part right? I can say that it is coming along. Since Gorge my feet have been an interesting bucket, but that is consistent with how they have been my whole career. I can remember the infected toe I got training for the Olympic Trials. I remember the collapsed arches I got after my road 50 miler in the fall. Of course who could forget the stress reaction (undiagnosed but lets be honest) I had last March and April which meant I trained for my first 100k using the elliptical. My feet are a genetic piece of work and when I am not frustrated with them, it’s kind of funny. The amount of pictures I’ve sent to Ian of my feet, you’s think he had a fetish and I was supporting myself selling him photos.

I have been loving the line of On shoes that were sent this season. My favorite models are the Cloudstratus and Cloudmonster for roads and the Cloudventure Peak for trail races. The regular Cloudventure and Cloudultra are also great too. I was sent a pair of the new Cloudvista, which is marketed as a shorter trail shoe. I haven’t had the chance to try them yet, but perhaps this weekend.

I have transitioned into the final phase of training, the endurance phase. Before Gorge I did an interval phase and came into a tempo phase after coming off my short break from the race. With about 5 weeks to go until Western, I am fully into the most race specific phase of training, focusing on endurance runs with steady state sections, getting in enough climbing when I can and time on feet. An example workout would be the one I did yesterday, 2 hours of endurance running finishing with 45 minutes of steady state pace. Then today I did an endurance run of 90 minutes. This is midweek, and hopefully this weekend I’ll get in a pair of 3 hour efforts focusing on nutrition.

The past few weeks my training has been interesting. I went down to PA to race the Dirty German and got hypothermia. Then I jumped into one of Ian’s races, just doing the 25k…which took me over 4 hours. It was an effort that left my climbing legs toast, but didn’t really provide any leg turnover. The 25k featured over 5,000 feet of gain which I learned is quite a lot. I wasn’t sure how that would translate to my training nor how I would recover from it. I was terribly sore going up stairs for the next day or two and ran flat just thankful my feet felt good. Yesterday was three days post race and I did that two hour workout feeling like I could go forever. Either the climbing led to some strength gains OR it prevented me from going too hard during a longer effort and rested my aerobic system. Either way, I am thankful for how I feel. No matter how the race goes I just enjoy getting the chance to do this everyday. I am able to run and laugh and be content with whatever happens.

That’s how training is going.