This is the coverage of the ultra I did this year.

Tarawera Ultra 100km

Almost enough to make me want to do it again...

Finally got a chance to watch this. Wow! What a beautiful place and inspiring course. Thanks so much for posting that link. I suspect I'll be watching it again from time to time. They make it look so easy, don't they? those pointy-end peeps.  In our dreams, we run like that too.

We are getting a spike in warmer temps for a few days. Supposed to be 70F (21C) when I meet Shelly for a run in about 3 hours. The forecast for our vacation next week is changing from 70F and sunny to about 5-10 degrees cooler and cloudy with showers. I'd prefer that to heat. Any forecast is totally unreliable in my book though; so today I'm "heat-training"

Ayola, I had not had a cold or anything in a long time until that bad one in Feb/March. I found running helped clear the crud. I kept apologizing to my running partners because I pretty much coughed the whole time - but it was effective. The rest of the day, that crap just sat there.  My trail running buddy believes that getting your core temp up with running helps "burn off the sickness." So there's all sorts of opinions on this. Do what feels right for you.

Good for you, Ayola!

I wish I had your motivation to go outside and do yardwork. Instead, I'm going to do some food prep, my upper body weights workout, and hopefully pack my bag for the vacation today. We drive down there next Thursday. So I have two more runs scheduled before then: tomorrow and Tuesday. Since DH is off tomorrow, we'll hit the trail for one last shot at agility-training.  Today's run was not as warm as predicted (no surprise there); so no heat-training was accomplished.

Checking in with my update from last weekend. We had a great time without mishaps of any kind. The Rogue River Canyon has some dramatic scenery which I loved.

Pete and his crew really do a superb job of organizing everything. The food was absolutely wonderful. We were begging him to put out a cookbook once we found out that Pete plans all the meals. We had about 20 people in our group. People came from all over: Australia, New York, Georgia, California, Colorado. It was a marvelous mix that was interesting and fun.

There were very few mosquitoes or other bugs - yay! Poison oak was rampant though. I used Tecnu soap at day's end and didn't get a rash. The weather could not have been better. Apparently last week they had a super hot spell and the group that went has some heat-related issues. On the other hand, for us this past weekend it was partly cloudy and temps were in the 50's to 60's F - perfect! No rain during the entire excursion, although it poured buckets the night before when we checked into the lodge AND the evening of the last day when we were arriving back at the lodge. Weird.

The trail was more rocky than what I'm used to running on and we walked across most of the stretches of rubble and jagged rocks. It was that or twist an ankle or take a header off the cliff!  We walked up all the really steep stuff as well.  So there was more walking than I would have liked, but I think it enabled us to complete the distance without any problem or soreness afterward.  In fact, my legs felt best on the third day and DH said he also felt like he could run more at the end. So we did good! There was champagne at the final lunch which was a very nice touch. The total distance for the 3 days was 40 miles, with 3 hours the first and last days and 4 hours the middle day.

That's it for now. Must get ready for work which has been crazy-busy this week. ~A