three more bucks

I did a hard brick yesterday. It wasn't meant to be a hard brick, but the weather was truly awesome by Albuquerque standards (wet, cool and slightly humid), so there you are. Great weather + time to train = push it to the redline.

I think I logged 35 miles on the bike including a little jaunt up Tramway (a 6 mile sustained climb) , and followed it up with a very soggy 2.5 mile run.

They opened the La Luz trail back up last Friday. For the first time in months, I finally have access to the thing I have been training for. Even after Thursday's run up the back side of the mountain, I was ready to do some meaningful running on the important part.

This past Thursday, by the way, I had a really outstanding run on the ski area trail, in which I managed to get within 3/4 of a mile of the top without cheating and without losing the trail! I say it was outstanding because I did mostly run the thing, and hardly hiked. Plus I managed 1 hr 50 minutes of nearly sustained (uphill) running - a record for me!

Today, after waking at the butt-crack of dawn to go help at the Women's Distance Festival (help out but not race) I booked some babysitting time so that me and Beloved could go log sometime on the La Luz.

I must mention that every time I run with my beloved, I do way more than I intend to. It's like his craziness rubs off on me or something. We don't run together together - I can't keep up with him - but his goals somehow work their way into mine. So my coach-prescribed 45 minutes up and 45 minutes back down turned into 1 hr and 20 up and about an hour back down (a mountain goat I am not -- I hate running down hill). On the plus side, I managed to get about 4.5 miles up the trail - and blew the doors off my personal time record for sustained running torture. It was mostly running but there was a fair amount of hiking too -- after yesterday and last Thursday the tank was a little bit low.

On the down side, I fell down about 1/3 of the way up the trail, so I'm a little chewed up now, and my ass hurts. Plus now my blisters have blisters. They don't look good. I hate falling.

I also found out there are people out there crazier than me. I ran into the first and second place winners of the same race I volunteered at this morning - running up the trail.

I still don't know how I'm going to do this. So far I've run the first 6.5 miles of a technically difficult 9 and a bit mile run - and not all in one piece. I hear the last couple miles are all about sheer survival - extremely rough terrain.