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12 Days ’til The Bear

With less than two weeks to go until The Bear, my taper is in full force.

It’s always tough for me to find the balance between over-tapering and under-tapering.  I feel like before the LA Marathon, I “over-tapered” (did I just make up that word?) and I came into the race a little flat (and a little fat, from too many chips I ate during our trip to Mexico).  Anyway… tapering for a road marathon and a mountain 100 are totally different concepts.  For the marathon, I wanted to show up on race morning ready to run fast out the gate and keep that up for 3(+) hours, so I was worried about feeling sluggish or heavy.  For a race like the Bear, I should be much more focused on getting to the starting line healthy, uninjured and well-rested.  As you might remember from the profile, there’s nothing the least bit “fast” about a race that starts with a nearly six mile, 3,400 foot climb.  Of course, I don’t want to start the race feeling sluggish or fat, but I’m guessing that any leg sluggishness (real or perceived) will be wiped out of my mind pretty quickly.

My taper officially started on Monday, September 10, which will give me a 19 day taper.  I hit it pretty hard the three weeks before starting to taper (finishing up with an eight-day period during which I ran 130 miles in about 26 hours, with nearly 28,000 feet of elevation gain ) and by the end of that I was definitely ready to give my body a break.

During those three weeks, I had good runs on Mt. Baldy, the Angeles National Forest, the Santa Monica Mountains, Griffith Park and even Runyon Canyon.  I already wrote about the great run at Baldy with Lukas, Dom and Brian.  Here are some photos of a few others.

Runyon Canyon

Billy and I started from my place and ran up to Runyon Canyon for some local hills.  Right as we were getting started, we ran into Rich Roll and ran with him for a bit.

We also saw a pretty big tarantula – it looked much bigger in real life, really!

Mt. Baldy

For this trip to Baldy, Lukas, Elan and I decided to go a different route.  We started at the same place and ran up Bear Canyon.  This is a great section of that climb near the top when you finally get to do a little running.

We got to the summit at the same time that the helicopter was landing to unload supplies for the aid station at the top of Baldy for the Mt. Baldy Run-to-the-Top, which was happening the following morning.

From the summit, we ran down the Ski Hut trail to Manker Flats.  From there, we hiked up to the Baldy Notch, straight up hill under the ski lift.

This was a crazy tough climb – just about a mile, with 1,300 feet of elevation gain.  Then, we ran along the Devil’s Backbone back to the peak of Mt. Baldy and finally down the Bear Canyon trail. (21.8 miles/9,820 feet of elevation gain/6:54).

Santa Monica Mountains – “Octopus” Run

The next morning, I met up with Jimmy and a bunch of Coyotes to run Jimmy’s “Octopus” Run around the Santa Monica Mountains.  I couldn’t begin to describe the entire route, but after starting at Westridge, we ran up and down and up and down and up and up and up, including climbing up Temescal to Mt. Lee, climbing Rivas Ridge, climbing the stairs out of the old abandoned Nazi camp and the  final hands-on-knees climb up Luna back to Westridge.

In addition to all the climbing, it was a killer hot day and lots of the course was totally exposed, which made just surviving it a challenge.  (24.7 miles/6,965 feet of elevation gain/7:30).

Angeles National Forest – Islip Saddle to Chilao

My final big day was spent with Dom and Katie in the Angeles National Forest.  We started at Islip Saddle (mile 25.9 of the AC100 course) and ran to Chilao (mile 52.8).  The run starts with a climb up Mt. Williamson, goes through Cooper Canyon (which was just as brutal as I remembered from race day), up the road to Mt. Hilyer and finally down the Silver Moccasin trail to Chilao. Except for a dramatic fall with less than a mile to go that bloodied both knees pretty nicely, the run went really well and was a good way to close out my training.

Finally, I closed out my training with a nice 12 mile run on Westridge and dirt Mulholland with Mike and Brooklin.

And with that, I was ready to taper!

Now, since I haven’t posted any photos of them in a while, here are some gratuitous photos of Charlie and Gus enjoying a recent afternoon in the park: