Aim high

Its been an odd week so far. I came down with some sort of stomach bug on Monday afternoon. Ran my normal six on Tuesday, skipped Wednesday's eight, but went out for Thursday morning's eight. In retrospect, I probably should have skipped Thursday, too, since I ended up not feeling well enough to go to work. And I rarely use my sick days. Today I'm much better but didn't feel like getting up early for my strength training. Oh well, if there was a good week to be sick this one was it. If you had asked me yesterday I would have been 100% not interested in running a 50 mile race. But today I feel like I'm getting my drive back.

This weekend is going to be an easy one. Tomorrow morning we're heading out to Estacada so Marc can run the 15k in the Clackamas River Runoff trail race. There's also an 8k trail race, a duathlon and a triathlon, so the spectating should be fun. Then in the afternoon Sharon and I are heading out somewhere for a 10-12 mile run. I realized that Sunday is the first weekend day all summer that I don't have a long run planned nor does Marc have to work. So it will be a 100% family day. Not sure what we'll do, maybe hike or go berry picking. But there will be no running involved.

Back to the time goals for the 50 miler coming up in one week. I really appreciate all the input I received. You'll notice that I titled that post Time goals and not just Goals. Time will certainly be a major factor, but it's just one part of my experience. I don't want my other goals of enjoying the experience, the beauty of the trail and the company of my fellow runners and volunteers, to be overshadowed by my time. Certainly I want to run the sucker as fast as I can, but I don't want how I end up feeling about the race to be predicated by my time. Make sense?

That said, the best advice I've taken from your comments is to aim high. I can't sell myself short. My training hasn't been perfect, but its been pretty good. I've ran better this year than I ever imagined. So I'm going to revise my time goals a bit. I'm going to move 11:15 from being my dream goal to the realistic goal I think I can hit. Its the time I'm going for. My pie-in-the-sky goal will be sub-11, specifically 10:30. I think that's a reach but not totally out of the question.

For those who were wondering here's the elevation chart for this easy 50 miler.

This is only the first half. Once you reach Timberline (3950 ft elevation gain), you get to turn around and go back for a total of 5150 feet of elevation gain. So it really is relatively easy when compared to other west coast ultras. By comparison, the McDonald Forest 50K had 6600 feet of elevation gain this year.

With that I probably won't write much more about this race or I may make myself too nervous! Happy weekend and best of luck to all the racers out there!