30 miles for Mom

I couldn't help posting a picture of my kids on Mother's Day. Iris here is a real Mother's Day baby, she was born on Mother's Day seven years ago. Her birthday is May 13. Happy birthday, Iris. Trying to get the girls to cooperate with the Badwater hats on was an ordeal. Isabelle wouldn't let me take a good picture at all. Here's what we went through:

A little guilt is appropriate for Mother's Day. I felt bad about being away from Dennis and the girls all day today, but I had to get a run in, and the weather was supposed to be hot.
I ran 6 Rock Repeats and overdressed for the last 4. It was impossible to overdress for the first two because I needed all those layers just to keep warm, the temperature was 33 degrees when I left for my run this morning!

I wanted to go back to sleep this morning but I wasn't able to, so I got up and hit the trail by 7:30. For some reason the time seemed to be passing so slowly today. Usually this run goes by fast, but this morning it felt like forever getting through each repeat. My legs felt good, but it must be sleep deprivation.

I tried some hard core trance music and that didn't help. I wanted to fall asleep, and I was freezing the whole time during the first two hours. I fumbled with my MP3 to get some variety. I found a song buried in there with the non-trance tunes. A Horse with No Name by America. I forgot I had that in there. Perfect for Badwater training. Sometimes you have to do whatever it takes to snap out of your bad mood. It worked for me.

The sun came out on the 3rd repeat and it started getting warmer. By the last repeat I decided to add one more layer just to make it that much tougher at the end. The run kept getting better with each up and back. When I started my last Rock Repeat, I was starting to feel guilty about not running longer, because I felt like I hadn't exerted myself enough. I thought about doing an extra repeat to make it seven.

On my way down to the parking lot at the end of my sixth repeat, about 1/2 mile from the car, I ran into Amy Hayman, she was hiking with her husband and three kids on the Southridge Trail. I knew Amy when she and her twin sister Sarah were in high school and I was in graduate school at CSU and we all worked together at Foot of the Rockies, the local running store. Amy and Sarah were standouts on the cross country and track teams for Poudre High School back then. A long time ago! Amy made the ceramic finishers medals for the Colorado Marathon.

Amy asked me how many times I was running the Rock and I told her, "Six" and that I was at the end. Somehow that made the decision final, I was going to stop after six and not do an extra one or two. I need to not be impulsive and overdo it. Thirty miles and 6000 feet of vertical gain and descent is a good run. I feel like I should be up there all day and run 50 miles but I know I have a hard week coming up at the end of May. I remember this feeling from training for Leadville, you know you're ready for a race when you do long runs and they don't feel long anymore.

Ready for the miles, but not the heat. I'm working on it. I drove home from the run with the heater cranked, it's a good 20 minute drive across town. When I got home, I got an e-mail from Ken. He wrote back after I told him my worries about being prepared for the heat. He told me he spent as much time as possible in his truck dressed in a down jacket, hat and gloves with the heater cranked when the weather wouldn't cooperate the year he did Badwater. It worked for him.

I'll do my sauna session tonight. Tomorrow, more heat training...