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Full Steam Ahead

After a few fits and starts, Badwater 135 training is officially “full steam ahead”. And that’s a really good thing, since the race starts just 17 weeks (119 days) from today!

We got back from our trip to Southeast Asia three weeks ago and I needed nearly all of that time to recover and find the motivation to get back into training. For the first ten days, I was really just going through the motions, dragging my ass out for a run even though it hurt all over and it was pretty much the last thing I wanted to do. Each day since then, I’ve felt better and better. I’ve been steadily (and slowly) increasing my mileage, adding a few miles here and there during the week and to my back-to-backs on the weekend. I didn’t have much “speed” to begin with but the little bit I do have is taking a while to come back. I need to focus a little more on that in the coming months.

Each of the last three weekends, I’ve spent a day exploring the San Gabriel mountains around Echo Mountain and Mt. Lowe. We have some pretty incredible places to run around LA and I’m lucky to have good friends to explore it with.

I went on a fun night run with the gang up to Eagle Rock. I’m usually a morning runner and don’t do night runs too often, but every time I get out there, I remember just how fun they are.

And the other day, I took Dan, a friend in town from the East Coast, on a 28 mile tour of the Santa Monicas.

That was a bit of a big jump in mileage, but we didn’t push the pace and took a couple nice breaks and it felt great.

For the last few weeks I’ve been wrestling with whether or not I would try to do some kind of tune-up race between now and Badwater. I finally decided that I won’t. I’m going to spend the next four months concentrating solely on training for Badwater (and for Wasatch too… but we’ll discuss that at another time). I don’t want to spend time tapering or recovering from a race and would rather put my time and money into one or two big training weekends in Lone Pine. I’ve also been spending time thinking about how to structure these 17 weeks, but I’ll leave that for another post.