No April Fool's jokes here, yet.

130 miles in March and my first race in 9 months. Some ups and downs with recovery taking longer than expected, probably because I tried to resume some heavy training too soon after my race.

205.58 miles for March with 13,901 feet of gain. Not too terribly much hill work, but I don't count my hikes in my mileage total. My coach wants me to progressively build as I have a rather tough schedule for an older guy who will be 56 this month. Leaving this Wednesday for Croatia to run a 100k trail race this Saturday with over 12,000 feet of gain. As usual the big worry this week will be the logistics of the event, it has a long bus ride before a very early 5 am start in a foreign country etc.

I have been very busy at work, and we have two older dogs at home that are both on the edge of leaving this world, so being away for almost two weeks we know we could lose one. We have excellent people looking after and checking up on them though. I also have a brother in rough shape with lung cancer that I am doing all of his finances and care etc. and he has an appointment Friday while I am gone, but it is spreading and I don't think there is anything they will do about it. I wake up at night almost every night and I start thinking of things I have to do, or things that can go wrong so I have not been sleeping very well lately either. I hope to finish the race in the time allowed and enjoy the rest of my time in Croatia, Slovenia, and then Venice.

Glad to put March behind me!  Bronchitis, travel, and low mileage, around 119.  Did one 25k race but canceled the other. Have Napa Valley 50k on 4/14, could drop to 35k if lungs are still iffy.  Hopefully not.  It’s one of my favorite races, technical and scenic with almost 8000’ of climbing. I’ll be hiking a lot , suffice to say. 

Alan, bummer about not having a job, but maybe not if the job sucked. 

RP, if you’re getting insider info from Krash, you’ll do great on the trails.  What’s the goal, TRT 100?  Or TBD?

nOOky, that’s a lot of stressful stuff on your plate. Go enjoy your trip and the run.  

WC, hope there are more ups than downs in your training. 

Did we lose Badger?  Haven’t heard from him in a while.

MY week:

two workouts. First was a 20 minute tempo. Second was 10x2 minutes Hard on hills. I did 3 up, 1 down twice then two more up. I learned I can run downhill really fast, and watched some vides about why it was important to practice downhill running hard. Also took what Krash told me about training for trails. I was aiming for 10k of vert, worried about doing "too much too fast" and possible causing an injury, and surprised myself with how I was able to do this and not be DESTROYED. I always knew I could get 5k of vert at work. I just never did it.

I work on the 4th floor so on my breaks I walked the stairs to earn myself some vert. I had one or two people tell me they'd count stair climbing as vertical gain (hey, Garmin does) and figured it couldn't hurt anything.  I also did a "Mountain Leg" workout which felt horrible and decided once or twice I could just skip steps on my stair climb to do the "same thing" without making my lunch much longer.

Saturday was super muddy for about 1.5 miles. It wasn't hard but I was glad I did 45 minutes dowhill and planned for a 1:15 return. I think my wife recognized I was running trails (out of the ordinary for me) and it's just a new challenge I seem to be getting better at when I try new things.

Sunday I joined a new age group.

Currently I think my goal is to get time on feet comparable to marathon training. 60-70 mile weeks on trails would take a lot of time and the trails required 30 minutes of driving to access. I do have one I can do just by leaving my house and it is 13 miles long, takes about 2 hours and accounts for maybe 1,600 ft of vertical gain. Uphill from the start to the turn around. I might do it as a Sunday run in the near future just because I know it so well.

Weekly for period: From: 04/01/2024 To 04/07/2024

Totals: Time: 11:18:49 - 🦅Imperial: 61.77 mi - Metric: 99.39 km

I don't think I was drinking enough. I recall filling a water bottle at an aid station, and at the next one it was still really full. I wasn't really concerned about it until towards the end when it finally felt like I could urinate and telling myself its a sign of dehydration to go 11 hours without a feeling of needing to urinate.

Alan, have a good race on Sat and don’t let the taper crazies get to ya. 

Krash, nice week. 

RP, belated happy birthday!  My coach recommend the mountain legs workout and I should do more of it. I tend to run dehydrated and pee very little.  I was looking at Silver State, but 50k would make more sense than 50 miles for me, and I’m not sure it’s worth the travel for a 50k. We’ll see.

nOOky, hope your travels are going well and the race was fun. 

I’ve got Napa Valley 50k on Sunday. Could be muddy, there’s rain in the forecast for Sat. Sun is just overcast.

79.56 miles last week with 13,983 feet of gain including the race. The race was harder than expected, much rockier and warmer than I was used to. It was fun though, and spring in Croatia is very beautiful what with the Mediterranean climate and warm temperatures and recent rain the spring flowers were really out and the trees beautifully budding out. The goal going in was to try and use it as a long run and not really a race. My coach emailed and asked me what took so long though. He didn't read it correctly because it claimed about 4000 meters of gain and he thought that was feet and said jeez if I would have known that I would have trained you differently. It ended up being about 13,300 feet of gain and temps in the 70's.

Next up is WS100 in a few months already.

2024 Istria 110K Race Report

The Istria 110K race is a trail running race held in the Umag, Croatia area in early April. It features a few different distances, and I chose the 110K because it is not as long or hard as the 100 miler, but long enough to use as training for WS100 coming up 11 weeks later. It claims around 4,000 meters of elevation gain or just over 13,200 feet. Weather was perfect, if a bit warm. I believe it got over 77F during the day, but never lower than 56F in the morning or at night. Almost perfect, with cloudless sunny skies and not enough wind to matter. Shorts and short sleeve shirt weather.

We traveled on a Wednesday overnight flight and arrived Thursday evening after two flights and about a 3 hour drive to Zagreb. Our first night we found a great pizza place and I had a beer and really good pizza. Friday we slept in as much as we could because neither of us slept much on the flight, and then went to packet pickup and walked around town a bit. Packet pickup was about what you’d expect from a trail race. UTMB races typically make you carry a lot more gear for safety than most trail races, but they never checked my gear at any time.

After packet pickup we tried to eat dinner early in order to get to bed early and also facilitate pooping earlier in the morning as I had to get up at 3:50 am to walk a kilometer to catch a 4:45 am shuttle bus to take all of us to the start of the race. My race started 30 miles away in a town named Buzet and would run around that town in the mountains before making its way back to Umag. 110K is about 68.35 miles and my watch ended up at about 69.8 miles.

The race start was uneventful except for the hour-long bus drive with no toilet on it, and then a one hour wait before the start of the race at 7:00 am. They did have a cafe open and you could buy coffee or croissants etc. and I did have an espresso before the start that another runner bought for me because I had no Euros with me. I honestly did not sleep a wink the night before the race. I went to bed thinking I’d get 6 ½ good hours in, but I was never able to fall asleep. That made me even more worried that I would feel like shit during the race because the overnight travel and 7 hour time difference surely didn’t help the mental and physical preparation either.

I did not feel that bad at the start though, and once the gun went off I tried to start out mid-pack and at a conservative pace. I have been using a coach to guide me as I have 3 very hard races this year, and he told me to basically take it easy and not overdo it. The race went through town on paved roads for a bit, before transitioning to the dirt. The start had a pretty big climb, and I was surprised how rocky and rough the trail was. I carried running poles, and got them out on the first big climb, and never put them away after. Poles help you move over rough terrain with some added confidence, and they can help you use your upper body to take some of the work from your legs. As you can see the trail goes up rather quickly.

<https://photos.app.goo.gl/mv2kgsayXTEYX4J87>

Supposedly the first 30-ish mile loop around Buzet would be the hardest part, then the rockiness and climbing would ease up and it would become easier. I honestly never really felt that lol. I thought I was taking it conservatively and would be able to maintain that pace throughout the race. I remember trying to stay hydrated and fueled to keep energy levels up and for practice for the future. Somewhere around mile 33 I started to feel my energy waning, and I was conscious enough of it to look behind me on the trail and say to myself “if I fucking lose it the rest of the race right there is about where it happened” as I pointed at a particular spot in the dirt. It was early afternoon, what felt like hot out to me, and not even halfway through the race yet.

There were 7 aid stations throughout the race, with me losing it was right after the 3rd.To try and recover I slowed down, drank a slug of water and had an energy gel etc. I also came upon one of those unique things in these mountain races in the form of a fresh water trough that almost every little mountain town has. It’s cold water runoff and it usually tastes great. I drank a bunch, and wet my hat and my buff in it and splashed a lot on me to cool off. It came at about the perfect time. Apparently the area had a lot of rain the week before, and there was quite a bit of mud in the low spots of the trail and along the mountain streams that wound down the slopes. I would stop a lot this day to dip my hands and hat in the streams.

I swear some of the climbs during the latter part of the race were simply the dry areas of rocky gulches that water washes out downhill during intense rains. Loose, slippery rocks, uneven sized wobbly rocks to negotiate, etc. it was tough.You’d start a climb and it would be on a dirt trail for a bit, but then you’d see the washed out rocks again and say to yourself “really?!”. But what can you do, you just go up, then go down, and repeat.

I stopped and took a short video at sunset. Sunset was in an orchard for me, with apple trees on one side, and olive trees and wine grape vines on the other. I went through a couple of very rustic and very scenic small towns. Usually they were on the side of the mountain after maybe a steep climb up a rough cobblestone road, and then out of town the trail would take over and maybe be agricultural until it got too steep. At one of the towns at dusk I went through there were people sitting at the cafe right next to the path eating and drinking and cheering a little bit. At no point did I want to quit and sit down and have a beer and a burger with them, nope.

Some of the runnable sections at night were gravel roads, but had rather large gravel and two distinct ruts where wheels would create them. Staying in them and running was a chore, but doable. At one point I got distracted for just a second and I tripped and went sprawling face first. I skun up muh knee a little, but mainly I bent my right thumbnail back and also took a decent piece of meat out of that thumb, likely from digging into the sharp gravel to stop myself as I skidded to a stop. It bled some, and I squeezed it to let the blood clean it out, then it started to hurt. There was a flap of skin still hanging on with enough that when I tried to tear it off, it did not come off and just hurt more.

That was before the 6th aid station. The problem with the fall was that I started to not want to run the gravel roads after that because falling again and using my hands and digging into the same spot just seemed gross. It was in a bad spot, right where you use your thumb for gripping. At the 6th aid station I asked the medical person there to put a bandaid on it, but all he had was gauze and tape, and I ended up ripping it off because then it just became a hindrance. I had been messaging with the wife a little bit during my race. She agreed to come pick me up with the car after the race rather than have me walk the 1.7 kilometers home at 3:00 am after the race. I was told to message her when I got to the last aid station.

Arriving at the last aid station, there was 13.9 kilometers to go to the finish. IIRC my wife said it was easy and all downhill. It was not really easy, and it was not really runnable to a fat old man who had been out for 17 hours already. It was a lot of flat two track trails that you had to choose a rut to run in. I decided to hike in as fast as I could since I wasn’t exactly racing at that point. I was moving pretty well for a hike, but doing the math in my head I was still looking at over two hours at a 15 minute pace fast walk. Trotting a 12 minute pace would shorten that to 20 minutes less, but I was tired and didn’t care. The lack of sleep from the previous few days got the best of me finally, and I didn’t have much fight in me to try and salvage a 229th place finish, haha.

It was now after 1:00 am and it got chilly and the ground was wet with dew. I put my jacket on and tried to still eat and drink regularly even though I did not want to. I like running at night. The birds were especially loud at night, I was listening as I hiked and I was thinking damn they are still going at it even at 2 am. I suppose they were enjoying the nice night and the early spring as well.

With about 3 or so miles to go I started getting passed by other runners behind me wanting to be done, so I begrudgingly started to trot again myself. At that point in a race like this you feel like you are in last place, and it feels lonely, even though I could see other headlamps around me. With a couple miles to go we hit pavement, and you almost have to run on flat pavement no matter what. With about ½ mile to go I could see and hear other runners trying to pass me, but I did have enough left to say oh hell no, and stayed ahead of them. The finish was subdued as it was almost 3:00 am, but we wound our way through town and eventually got there. The wife was there, asking what took me so long. Trust me honey, I wanted to be done long ago lol.

There was no food for those that finished so late, so after a couple of pictures we walked back to the car, and drove home. My official time was 19:54:19 or 234th out of 432 starters. My watch showed 69.80 miles with 13,209 feet of gain which is a respectable race in my humble opinion. I got a race medal, a decent backpack with the race logo, and a race tee shirt that fit a bit large. I also got a chunk out of my thumb, one slightly skinned knee, and the sorest thighs I’ve had since I can remember.

I did a few things right during the race, which I am documenting for future reference. My feet were not sore, thanks to Altra Olympus 4 shoes and Darn Tough socks. I carried my phone in the thigh pocket of my shorts with the inner stretch liner, but took it out after the chafing became too painful. I wear a compression shirt so my running pack slides over the shirt, my shirt does not slide over my skin and make it chafe. My pack was pretty heavy, but I refilled my hydration bladder twice with no issues.

Highlights of the race were the venue, the weather, the scenery, and the course. Umag is a cool little town right on the Adriatic sea, with lots of great places to eat, especially the fresh fish. It’s a cool town to walk around in, and it’s nice to watch the sunset over the sea. The weather while we were there was fantastic. We even just sat outside on the veranda of our airbnb and relaxed in the sunshine, something we rarely do as we are always so busy in life. Spring in Croatia is awesome, so many wildflowers and birds and people out and about gathering and hanging out like Europeans like to do. And the race course went through some really cool little towns with a very homey and Euro vibe with an eclectic air about them, almost like looking into the past.

We did perform some other tourism whilst there. We went to Pula to see some Roman arena remains, the fabulous aquarium there, and the delightful olive oil museum where we learned lots. We went to Venice for about a half day, which was enough. Turns out Venice is mostly vendors trying to sell souvenirs amongst the religious attractions. We also spent our last two days in Zagreb. Wednesday we stopped at Plitvis Lakes park and hiked over 9 miles viewing all of the waterfalls. Thursday we took a walking tour of the downtown area, visited the Nikolai Tesla museum, and the chocolate museum. Overall I’d recommend the race and the area for tourism, it was really fun. The food we had was almost exclusively fantastic, except for one questionable dining choice that still had a good sea view.