My Team Is Falling Apart Already!

I'm once again getting addicted to this running thing. I spent most of today talking to one person or another about training or the Sawtooth Relay or injuries. I figure that's a good thing, but I also figure that my friends are going to get pretty tired of me if I don't knock it off.

I'm also at the stage that I get pretty angry at myself if I miss a scheduled run. See, I have to schedule them or I just go ahead and skip them if I'm tired or if I had a long day at work or the wind's blowing or the couch feels comfy or... Sooo, I skipped my scheduled run for Friday. It was supposed to be a seven-miler at 10.5 minute/mile pace - nice and slow. See, I had a headache that wouldn't go away from the long week of work and besides the wind was blowing. You know how easy it is to convince yourself to stay on the couch.

So I had to run on Saturday. I chose to run 3.5 miles up the Sunnyside hill, which is a big hill east of IF. It climbs about 1,400 feet over six miles to top out at about 6,200 feet. It was hard, although the run back down was actually harder, I think because I was running into the wind and going down made my feet and hips hurt. Not the knees though, which is good.

At about the turnaround point, I ran into one of my Sawtooth teammates who was driving down from his run at the top of the hill. He had run into one of the other team members on his drive up and had to drive him back down because his Achilles tendon was bothering him. Uh oh, one down. But one's easy to replace if need be.

Then, today at work, I talked to another of the team members and he told me he'd strained a quad playing soccer in the powerful wind we had Sunday. Ah crap, that's two. Then, a third runner told me he was exhausted from the 35-mile bike ride he did, also in the mighty wind on Sunday. I hope these guys aren't trying to train too hard too fast. I don't want to have a whole team on the injured reserve come June 14th.

So, it looks like I was the smart one who avoided exercising outdoors in that punishing wind on Sunday. I was scheduled for an easy two miles, but I knew that there would be nothing easy about running in that awful gale. Which meant that I'd skipped another run. Today, I made it a point to leave work a little early and hit the road with the intention of doing a little extra because I'd been "lazy". Well, that nasty wind was still blowing and the little extra became one of those runs where you go faster than you want just to get it over with. If I was looking to punish myself, I accomplished that goal. Should make tomorrow's run interesting - a four-mile tempo run at nine minute pace.

Today was NOT a beautiful day!

Ahhh April... Spring has sprung... the grass is getting greener, the flowers are starting to come up, the birds are singing, the snow is blowing sideways at 30 mph... Wait, what?! Oh yeah, this is Eastern Idaho. Winter's not really over until Memorial Day. The high temp yesterday was 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Today, the high was 40. That's a difference of 35 degrees for those of you who aren't mathematics subject matter experts. It snowed off and on and the wind blew more than 20 mph all day today - April 15th!

Kinda stinks to have a five-mile tempo run planned for a crappy weather day like today. I know myself - if I save it until tomorrow, I'll start to take my training plan for the Sawtooth Relay less seriously and probably skip more workouts. So I hit the road after work. Notice that the Weather says "Mostly Cloudy and Breezy". Twenty-three mile per hour sustained winds with thirty-three mile per hour gusts is just a breeze around here. That wind was brutal any time I was running West, which was a good portion of the run. The plan was a mile warm-up followed by three miles at ~9:00/mi pace and a mile cool-down. The first tempo mile pretty much sucked with the wind and freezing rain/snow in my face, the second was way better with the wind at my back and the third hurt, I think because I was worn out from the first. My cool-down was slower than I have run for a long time. Probably a good thing. I hope Friday is more like last Sunday than today. Seven miles in this crap might just kill me (at least all my motivation).

That water's cold. I wouldn't recommend swimming right now.

Man, do I suck at updating a blog. It's just that I can't find that much good to write about.

March was a really bad month for me. I sprained or broke or something in my wrist on that skiing trip back in February and thought I would wait until it healed before lifting weights again. Well, it still hasn't healed so I'm going to have to see a doctor about it. Then, I got the flu and it of course moved right to my lungs, so that kept me from running for a few weeks and made it really hurt when I did start back.

Now, the good news. I have started training in earnest now for the Sawtooth Relay, which is in the middle of June. I've gotten a team together from guys at work who are or have been runners. I'm the captain, which is something I've never done before, always preferring to let someone else do all the organizing. There's a lot more to this than I ever would have realized. So far, I've gotten half of the $330 entry fee from the project we all work for (The AMWTP), which is surprising in and of itself. We've got about two months before the race, and I'm looking forward to bugging the crap out of my team to get them all to train since they're all older than I am and have wives and kids. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

I went fly fishing last Friday, a pastime that always reminds me why I like living in this area. It was a gorgeous day (a little windy, but that's normal) and we floated the South Fork of the Snake River from Shelley to Firth, ID.


We didn't catch a lot of fish, but it was good to just get out and be on and in the river, and we did each catch at least one fish.


The best fish of the day was a 17-inch brown caught by the owner of the drift boat, which is as it should be, but he caught it on a spin-casting set-up, bouncing a big night crawler off the bottom of the river. That'll break the heart of any fly-fisherman. Yes, that is snow at the back right of the picture.

After we got done floating, I decided to go wade a spot we call "The Demon Fish Hole". Last fall we went fishing there several times and got to watch a whole bunch of giant trout jumping out of the water after some kind of flies. We could never get them to take anything we were casting. It was very frustrating. So, I hike out to the spot and get in the water, which is lower and slower right now than it is in the fall. That's a good thing. As I'm wading to a promising-looking riffle, my foot slips on a rock, then slips a bit more and I'm putting my left hand down and bending my knees to keep from going over backward. That's never a good thing when you're standing in three feet of river. I was soaked with cold water and had small streams of it running down the back of my legs. Fortunately, it was a fairly warm day and I kept fishing for about 20 minutes, until I started to feel really cold and I figured it would be a good idea to head back to the car and change into the warm, dry extra set of clothes I always bring with me when I go fishing. Now I know why I do that.