The sun is up, the air is fresh, the stone is old

10 mile Tempo early morning at just below 6 min pace.  Picked up the kids from school and went straight to the lake.  Awesome evening!  Went out for a 5.5 mile easy run after they were in bed.

Amazing trail run up the Logan River trail past third dam and up little cottenwood. 

5.5 miles with the two girls in a SINGLE stroller up Stewart pass, Wellsville range in the early morning.  Killer trail, thank goodness one of the girls could get out and run a lot of it.  2,700 vertical feet.  This kicked my trash.

22 mile distance run tonight at 7:03 pace.  As hard to finish as any marathon I can remember.

This week has hurt every day, but a great week of training after a half marathon.  I've decided to use TOU as a training run for Twin Cities Oct 2nd.  I need a decent long run at a faster pace than I have been getting them done.  With the Alta Peruvian next weekend, I think my training is done and now time to taper a bit.

Spent the day hanging out with family in Idaho.

Easy run with the kids through Logan

Traveled to New York to relocate a broken plane to LA.  Dawn to dusk affair.

Slow depressing run on a hotel treadmill in DC since it's raining all day.

New York through the World's Fair Marina and weaving my way through the park.  Super busy day with the US Open going on.  Pretty sluggish feeling today to the point of overall fatigue so I just put in the miles and enjoyed the first sunshine in a few days of work.

I got home about 1am from a long day of work and just couldn't sleep.  Too much going on right now and really spread out.  I just got approved for a loan to expand our little family business in the spring and trying to decide how busy I want life to be.  My son is starting his preparation to get ready for his LDS mission and it's a challenge to keep him focused.  Add to that a host of the normal things life throws at you on a daily basis.

I gave up about 4:30am and woke up Jessie and headed up the trails for a night run.  It was a beautiful morning and inspite of totally wore out legs and a super slow pace, I had a great time and feel much more settled.  Don't know what I'd do without the ability to get out sometimes.

My kids look forward to this race every year since it is up at the Alta Lodge and there is a barbeque afterwards.  For at least a month ahead each fall they ask me how much longer until we go up for it.  As for me, I have doubts every year about running it since it's borderline suicidal.  It really is a race that can mean the end of your season running if you are not careful with it.  This year although I have been burntout pretty good with running in general and have been slowing down in the last few races, I have had some good downhill training with two runs at the Malan's Peak Challenge and some hard trail running, so I probably felt a little stronger with the downhill parts.  I checked out the last two years of times I had run on this course and my average was a 4:42 mile so if I felt good at mile one I was going to aim at a 4:30 pace.

We met at Rob's house and drove up together to the Lodge.  It started to rain a bit and I ran two miles for a warmup with a hoodie in drizzle.  I was kind of curious to see if the course was getting wet which would make things a bit more fun.  My kids had by now dissappeared with the Murphy's exploring the hills around the lodge.  It always make things more relaxed if I know they are having a good time.  Thanks to Rob's mom for watching them!  At the start I could see that some of the fast guys were missing, which was dissappointing because this is a fun race to try and keep up with them.  I generally run a fast downhill race comparitively for some reason.  (fat)  At the start the pace felt a bit slow so I passed Ken R and Riley C at about 1/4 mile and tucked in behind Teren since the wind was coming up the canyon.  The first mile came by pretty quick and the time person yelled to us that it was 4:15.  In another few minutes Ken passed me again just hauling and I didn't even make a twitch since he was going so fast.  I was trying to focus on relaxing and getting some kind of rythm in.  The rest of the splits were 4:24, 4:30, 4:39 and 4:28.  The 5k was 13:46, definetely the fastest I've gone through 3.1.  I passed Ken again and coming through the fourth mile it really hit me.  My legs were just jello and my heels were just burning.  Man did I ever want to stop.  Now Ken blew by me again and I was just holding on begging for the finish line to appear.  I backed off a lot and was surprised to see my Garmin showed a 4:28 for mile 5.

Great band and a fun post race evening.  We stayed the night at the lodge and got little sleep..

Hung out at Alta with the Murphy clan, went to the best damn breakfast place there is, then picked up some kayaks for our rental company and spent the afternoon teaching the kids how to kayak. Awesome day. The second Sunday that Rob has been an evil influence upon me to skip church. Since I am spending the time converting him, I think forgiveness is in the works..

Interesting to note the advantage I pull on the downhill courses.  According to Sashas calculator using my Alta time of 22:23, I should be able to run the Utah marathons at 2:30 or below right now and about a 1:08 to 1:10 half.  Not doing that right now.   

Most miserable run experience in a while.  Taped up my feet to get in a run and the blisters just tore all over the place.  What a mess.  I gave up on it and figured they would heal anyway like blisters normally do, except these are on my heels, basically are my heels.  After 1 mile I got a splitting headache right behind my eye.  It would stop when I stopped running but immediately start up again when I started back up.  So I had to run with it for an hour.  When I got back and stopped it dissappeared.  Weirdest headache ever.  Add all that together with the sore legs from Saturday and it was a good time.

Huntington Beach, CA tonight for a sweet run.  I borrowed some tape from the plane today for my feet.  It appears to be some kind of medical duct tape.  I covered the bottoms of my feet and wow, what a difference.  When I got back to the hotel it had not even budged.  It was even hard to tear off of my soles.  I think I can plan on running a marathon with this stuff.  I'm pretty encouraged about a quick recovery from Saturday.  I had my doubts for the last few days. 

So after some wavering, I'm going to hit the TOU Marathon as my only 26 mile training run before Twin Cities Marathon October 2nd.

Easy relaxed day flying three coast to coast legs.  Not much time to get in a run and not worrying about it.  Sweet to have internet access all day while moving 600 miles an hor across the country.  I wish all of our planes had this.  It literally does not feel like a job at all.

I've made it halfway through a training book on Lydiard's methods and it's neat to see what has worked in my training and what I have done wrong.  The most interesting are the parts that have taken me a while to come up with on my own and then read them already put down years ago by this coach.

At the start of this year several family members begged me to run the TOU marathon with them next week and paid the sign up fees.  They were joined by 4 other friends and they all started "training".  This week the last of them called to say they were dropping out.  Out of 7 people, not one would train through to run a marathon.  One friend told me that she just couldn't believe the effort it took.  She wasn't going to run the thing simply because of the work to get ready for it.  My own son, after getting up to 8 mile runs, just flat out stopped two months ago.  It was like he just couldn't understand that you had to stay with something for so long and he really wanted this.  (His girlfriend is running it).  The effort in life to do something physical was just too much.  It's curious to me because I think it reflects a huge general trend in society right now.  We should be given things, or recognition; we just deserve them.  For the first time in 17 years flying that I can remember, I will have teenagers come up to the cockpit for a tour and ask how to get a job like this, and when I explain that it's no big deal, you just have to stay in school, get a college degree and spend two years getting your ratings, the excitement just fades.  They literally lose interest in a few minutes.  And it's so damn easy to do.  Almost anything in life worth getting at all takes weeks, months and years of work.  Check out the marathon scene.  Marathoning and half marathoning are more popular than ever, some sell out in a few days.  So you'd think we are faster and more dedicated to what it takes to run, but the average time to finish one is steadily increasing.  Maybe it's just my experience, but none of these friends and family that have dropped out had any injuries, they just didn't want to train.  They just wanted to go run one.  My son asked yesterday how to get ready race morning, he was still planning on running the marathon in four days.  I told him no way he was going to run it unless he trained for it.  It was basically trying to show him that you don't do something that you won't work for.  It was an hour long discussion, but I think he understands a little more about it. 

This spring I had a hard time explaining to my neighbor why my daughter would not be on the soccer team this year.  They just changed to a "no scoring" status since it's better for the kids.  I didn't do a very good job of explaining why sports and competition are so critical to education and to life so it's been on my mind a few times this summer.   

Easy jog in Nashville this morning along the river trail.  I had a few minutes this morning to review some race numbers for the year which I have been meaning to do for a while.  I've had a lot going on this year so running has had a "hobby" place instead of part of my life as it would be nice to have.  Also I've been running at 160 lbs all year which is a good 10 lbs higher than last year and that has surely had a negative effect.  I just havn't felt in gear for the season.  So I was surprised looking at Athlinks stat profiles that I've set PRs in the 5k, 8k, 10k, 15k and Half Marathon this year.  Every distance except the marathon.  Now I've only been running again really for three years, but that's a lot for one year.  I've also been without a single significant injury so what's the difference?

The main change I've made this year was late December last year coming off an Achilles tendon injury by increasing slow long runs consistently in an effort to get through it.  I spent several months on aerobic base and just let races fall in if they did.  If I felt something flare up from a race, instead of rest I put in the miles, but at a slower pace.  Seems to work for me.  I've also put in some real hill training.  There has not been a whole lot of interval training at all.  It looks like the aerobic base has been the difference and some of the information I'm getting from some new (at least to me) Lydiard training methods is the importance of a solid aerobic base for ANY distance.  I'm going to spend some time this week looking at some adjustments to my future training plans. 

Easy, beautiful run along the Grand River in Grand Rapids this morning.  Pretty sore from that Alta race still and wondering what that means for tomorrow.  At least it seems like simply soreness and not fatigue.

I ran the TOU this morning even though my legs still felt pretty iffy from Saturday.  I had decided to not push it if I felt it would destroy any chances I have of running a decent marathon at Twin in two weeks.  Instead of finishing at any cost, my plan was to hold marathon pace for as long as I could and call it a day.  I could tell by mile three that I had to make a decision and it was hard.  It took me until mile 11 to decide to drop out, 5:47 average pace.  My legs hurt like crazy, but I wasn't winded at all, so hopefully I can get some rest and gear up again.  It was really neat to cheer everybody on, I havn't done that for a while.  I need to get out and do some volunteering.

10.3 easy miles with Jessie on the trail before church.  So nice to have church at 11!  Feeling no real soreness after yesterday and that's such good news.  Of course I was running pretty slow today.  Jessie has now fully warmed up to trail running.  She tears off ahead until she is out of sight, then a few minutes later comes tearing back for a pat on the head, and runs off again.  This goes on for the entire run, so I have no idea how many miles she actually gets in anymore.  All  I have to do to get her to run by my side is a stay command, but it doesn't seem as fun to her. 

Just plodded this one out, so stinking tired.

Another easy day of just mileage.  Still trying to shake out the leg soreness and not being successful.

10 miles of trail running in the morning

3 miles evening

10 outside of Denver airport through the cornfields.  Great place to run and just fit in between my flights.  Very stiff legs today so turning in about 8:30 pace

Easy run in Seattle

Trail run nice and slow!

Shoreline trail

River trail.  Leg fatigue is finally gone and just a little soreness now!

Blacksmith Fork trail today after a day at the lake..

Headed out along Nashville's River Trail.  Just another beautiful morning spent on sore legs..

Out again westbound on Nashville's River Trail.  Just enjoying the day

Must have been the most incredible September day ever.  Flew out of Knoxville early and picked up the kids and headed for the lake.  82 degrees and they played all afternoon on the beach rope swing and in the boat.  I even taught my son how to waterski, finally.

Got in a quick mile swim at the gym after the kids were in bed.  Today is the start of a nine week training program I've put together.  The first part is a week off of running and today was day one.  Good pace on the swim tonight.

Finished work at 9pm in Knoxville and caught a FedEx freighter to Memphis.  The captain wanted some excersize too, so we hit the raquetball court at the OQC for an hour and then flew into Salt Lake.  I got to sleep in the back while they worked.  Really fun evening!