Revival

By Steve

6:58am at the start

By my nature, I'm a competitive person.   And as part of that, I have a tendency to beat myself up when I come up short of my expectations.  I had planned on having 2015 be my breakout year.  Instead, after a couple sickness and an injury, I ended up letting every little thing get me down.  Any hurdle that came up in my life or in running I used as an excuse on why I couldn't get a groove in running.  I expected life to stop moving so that I could train the way I wanted to train.  That lead to more failure, which lead to more moping.  And all that moping lead to me not wanting to blog anything.

About 7 weeks ago, I had a moment of clarity.  I realized that I was mostly bringing all this "bad luck" on myself.  Yes, I had some health issues.  Yes, I have some asthma and post nasal drip.  Yes, I'd blamed other people for not working with my schedule.  But those weren't the things that were stopping me from becoming a good runner again.

Over these last 7 weeks, I've found that groove I had been searching for.  By taking responsibility for myself, running has suddenly become much more fun again.  I find myself wanting to talk about running for the first time in a long time.  I find myself wanting to catch up to the best and the fastest of the Wasatch Mountain Wranglers, even though I know I still have some hard work to get anywhere near the main players in this group.

Over this last weekend, a relatively large group of Wasatch Mountain Wranglers organized a run down at the Wedge on the San Rafael Swell down south of Price.  None of the other OTMs were able to go, but for me, that is the ideal place to do a test of my physical level.  I really wanted to use this as a good training run without spending too much time chatting with friends during the run, so I opted to start an hour early by myself, and then after the run I would make a couple dutch oven cobblers for everyone so I would be forced to sit and talk to them all. I'm perfectly happy being an introvert.

After waking up before the butt-crack of dawn, I drove the 3.5 hours and started at 7:00am.  I can now always say that the first place I met Steve Frogley in person was at the entrance to the crapper as we met in the doorway.

Map.  You can see where I cut short the last two out and backs.

I set out with the general goal to see how far I could average a ten minute mile pace.  I knew this was way too fast for me and that there was no way I would sustain that pace for the whole run, but running the whole 50k at the best time possible wasn't the goal.  I plowed through the aid station at nine miles and was able to keep the pace on the slight uphill till the turnaround at 16 miles.  Because I got there so much faster than I thought, I accidentally kept going for another three quarters of a mile along the rim thinking it wasn't time to turn around yet.  Whoops!  After the trail disappeared and I reached another overlook, I finally turned around.  However, at this point I was pretty beat.

I returned to the aid station at a much slower 12 minute mile pace, still relatively happy with how I was doing, but then tanked pretty hard after that.  I walked a bunch of the last five miles, and then even cut off the last two out and backs in order to finish in roughly 6 hours with 30.8 miles, just a quarter mile short of a 50k.

With both Sam's and my dutch ovens, I cooked up a peach cobbler and an apple cinnamon cobbler.  They were a hit with the 22 mile runners who had finished just before me.  The other 50k runners didn't finish for quite some time, so they got it cold.

So... How am I feeling about all of this?  Really good.  I had hoped to do a little better on this run, but it was pretty much what I expected.  Most of all, I feel very confident about this year.  In two and a half weeks, I'm running the Antelope Island 50 miler, and I couldn't be more excited to get out there and enjoy the crap out of it.  It's going to be a good year!

Group Photo of everyone except me.  I was somewhere around mile 9 at this point