Ah, its great to be alive...I awoke this morning at 4:45am ahead of my watch alarm; got up and made an espresso, mixed a half gallon of my briny cranberry juice mix and hit the trailhead at Eaton Canyon at 5:30am for the second half of my weekend double header, a 20 miler up Mt Wilson and back. The day broke warm and humid and my legs were a bit stiff from yesterday's adventure circumnavigating Eaton Canyon via Mt Lowe and Mt Wilson. The plan was to powerwalk up to the summit (9.8miles), hit the faucet, reload, and then run down. Last week I made the summit in 2:33 and completed the out and back in 4:15; today I made it in 2:50 up and 4:14 total round trip, go figure.
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| June 30 Mt Wilson run |
The track shows a slow degradation in pace as the climb progressed: But when I ran down I felt great and burned it up, making up the time lost in my slower hike up the mountain. This bodes well- fast downhill running takes strength but uses not so much energy, and I hope to run like this at AC100: Walk the ups, run the downs, and run them fast. The training program I am on is developing my walking muscles- hip extension, toe lift, but I am also gaining the strength to run reasonably well downhill.
I ran again in the Merrell Ascend Gloves: Normally I do runs that are 20 miles or less in the TrailGloves, but I was thinking to go easy on my feet given the high total mileage this week. Really, the Ascend Glove is a superb trail shoe; its very effectively armored with a good rock plate, but as I've written before, the footstrike is totally natural in these shoes, I forget that I am wearing shoes. Also today was my first test drive wearing gaiters. I'd ordered "Dirty girl gaiters" on the recommendation of a friend; made of spandex, they breath well and put a complete stop to the problem of getting rocks and sand in my shoes. It was worth the awkward explanations I had to make to my wife yesterday when a mysterious package labelled "Dirty girl garters"...err, gaiters showed up in the mail :)
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