A Good Week, Altitude Increase Ahead!

In the end, sleety weather (not my sudden fear of mountain lions on trails) put an end to my plans to run Sanitas Wednesday morning. This would have been the second of my four planned Boulder Classic runs. I still have three to do, with Magnolia Road at 8,000 feet on tap for tomorrow. Thanks to Running With the Buffaloes, I'm now both eager and fearful of Old Mags, as the guys in the book refer to it. I'm hoping to eke out eight slow miles up there. We'll see how it goes.

Magnolia Road in the fall; hope there's shade up there tomorrow

Despite all the packing, with Moving Day on Monday, it's been a good week for running and exercise. I used my last pass at Flatiron Athletic Club Wednesday morning when it was clear that Sanitas wouldn't be happening. The crowd early on a normal weekday was much smaller, and much less intimidating than the New Year's Day crowd was. Or maybe I just wasn't noticing as much, because I didn't feel like running at all.

I needed to do 8 miles, 6 of them at a mid-range tempo pace. The first two miles (yes, the warm-up mile was included in this) I really really wanted to quit, or at least slow down significantly or cut the distance. And in the past, even the recent past, I probably would have. But I'm tired of feeling like I'm on a plateau. So while I allowed myself to notch the treadmill down one-tenth-of-a-mile-per-hour, I forced myself to stick to that. And you know what? It worked. It took a while, but by the fourth tempo mile, I realized I was feeling stronger. I inched the speed back up, and then up again. And in the end, I knocked that sucker out!

That set the stage for awesome cross-training workouts yesterday and today. Yesterday I warmed up on a stationary bike, did a lap around the rec center building, did twenty minutes of weights and then swam for 30 minutes, alternating kicking with breast stroke. A triathlete dude who works the front desk told me that if I want to make kicking harder, I should hold the kickboard at a right angle ahead of me, so it's sticking up out of the water like a tombstone. And boy did that ever work! I huffed and puffed those laps, so it was a relief to put the board down and just swim.

Then today I went to a spin class at 24 Hour Fitness. Tammy had told me I could drop in as her guest. Her classes are always awesome. Today's featured a CD that was a mix of Prince and John Mellencamp. Nothing like cooling down to "Purple Rain"....

Bolder Boulder mania is heating up here. To show you (again) what kind of freaky talented place this is, I'm attaching a recent "challenge" issued by the guys who write the RunColo blog. Remember that to get into one of the first few waves of this race you have to qualify. And one of the ways to do that is to run 2 miles on a treadmill. Any 5-something-minute milers out there who want to land some good schwag? Read here (and read it even if you're not a 5-something miler; the comments are particularly funny...and scary...if only this could be such a lark for me).

Wish me luck on Magnolia Rd....and the move. I wonder which will suck more oxygen out of me.....