Stumpy -

Arla - Congrats on the getting the wilderness permit.  Can't wait to hear about your adventures!  Some a little bit more challenge, do the Russian twists while sitting on a BOSU with your feet off the floor.  Just make sure there's nothing around to bonked your head on when you fall off the BOSU.

I did 15.6 miles in the Community Forest on Saturday and it just about killed me.  Suffice to say the Forest chewed me up, spit me out, and laughed at me the whole time.  Not a lot of elevation gain (about 2800 feet), but there's nothing flat about the Forest (profile below).  I, of course, got crap from Karen for running all my mileage there ("You only need to run 5-7 miles of hills a week.'), but the way I see it is if I want to run Dick Collins Firetrails 50 in October, preparation is going to take more than running a few miles a week on hills.  Cripes, a basic 50k in the Marin Headlands usually has around 6000 feet of elevation gain.  Dick Collins has 7800 gain AND 7800 loss.

I was, however, happy with how my legs felt the next day running 7.4 on the basically flat McKay.  Since it was suppose to be an EZ, recovery run, I walked the 2 small hills.  Will do some strength/core training after work tonight.  Didn't feel like getting up this morning (which is par for the course these days).

So here is your "legal" lesson for the day: If you own stock in a company and you elect to have actually stock certificates issued to you, don't lose the certificates!!  We have a client who is the beneficiary of a number of investment accounts.  With four of the accounts, the decedent had certificates issued and so far the certificates can't be found.  If she continues to be unable to find them, she is going to have to pay over $3,000 in processing and bond premium fees.  Ack!  I have yet to tell her the good news.

Bump.

How's everyone doing?

Turned out the coaching/group running thing didn't work for me. I trusted the coach and went on his quick ramp-up with hill repeats, tempos, intervals...it was almost all hard workouts! I had a long talk with him about my belief that it was too much quality over quantity but he somehow managed to talk me into sticking with it. Soon after our talk, my achilles put a stop to it. From now on, I'll stick to the Nobby approach: lots of easy/moderate miles, be very careful when starting hill repeats, and listen to your body!

I agree, Mike E, and the thing is, it's really my fault because I knew better! I remember Nobby's advice about hills, your first hill session should be a single, carefully-run repeat. This coach started us with FOUR! His weekly schedule included 800m repeats on Tue (four of them during week one!), hill repeats Thursday, and a long run finishing with hill repeats Sat or Sun. If you look at, say, Daniels programs, there are only two "quality" runs a week, and he counts the long run as a quality run. I discussed this with the coach and he does not consider the long run to be a quality run. Anyway, I'm back to self-coaching, it's gotten me to Boston and I have a respectable number of AG awards.

Hey Stumpy! Hope your hammies treat you ok. Last day of school was today and I'm off to graduation soon!

Jogging a marathon Sunday, *sigh* it was the one I was training for with the coach, now just for fun. After that I start training for a big backpacking trip this summer (220 miles in 16 days along the John Muir Trail, a trip that elite ultrarunner Hal Koerner did in 3 days!). There will be plenty of running but also some stadiums, cross-training (lunges and such), and some shake-out hikes.