The Mountain Is Open

With my lead up to Western I fully intended to make May 'The Month of Quad Killing.'
What does that mean exactly? It means hills, lots and lots of hills. Hills for breakfast, hills for lunch, and hills for dinner. This is not to suggest that I don't already spend most of my time running hills, kinda hard not to do just this on 'The North Shore'. What this means is that my singular focus for the month of May is to get as much direct climbing as humanly possible. My goal for the month is to have my quads screaming at me on each and every run!

I decided to jump start the May starting date and after a 15k run before work this morning, my main training partner, Ryne Melcher, and I headed out to tackle our first Mountain Highway lap of the season.

Mtn Hwy is a 15k return run that climbs an average of 9% and over 2,000 feet in just 7.5km. It is a gravel road, which is actually perfect for mimicking much of the terrain I will face down in California at the end of June. 'The Hwy' holds snow late into the year, but towards the end of April they plow the route so that machinery can make its way to the base of the Grouse Mtn Ski Resort. 'The Hwy' officially opened last week.

Melcher and I headed out for our very typical 'easy run'...which somehow NEVER ends up being an easy run! We started slow and before I knew it Ryne was trying to make me puke. He very nearly succeeded and we topped out on the climb in 36m30s. Then it was my turn on the descent. Again we started slowly before upping the pace, and before we knew it we were dropping slightly over 3min kms, gravity assisted of course! We hit the water fountain at the base in 24m08s, for a total time of 1h00m38s. I only know of one person running a sub 1hr time on this route before, and it happened to be Melcher in Sept with a 59m and change during a Club Fat Ass event. Something tells me this 'record' might just fall in the very near future...either that, or one of us will be hunched over on the side of the trail loosing our lunch!

Lisa Polizzi is meeting me at 6am for another 30k day tomorrow...and she is NEVER late, so I'd better call it a night! Tentative plan is to run from my door to the top of Grouse Mtn and back...we'll see how the legs hold up. I'm just gonna throw it at em right from the get go and see how they handle it. Good luck quads, and I'm sorry...but not really!



P.S. Best of luck to all people heading down to the Miwok 100k this weekend in Cali. My advice for this run...keep yer head up around km 75 and try to avoid the scenic 105km route:)
Plenty of locals hitting up this race including Nicola Gildersleeve, shooting for a hopeful top three finish. Gilder's boyfriend Peter will also be running, and if I'm not mistaken it's his first attempt at the 100k distance. Surrey speedster Darin Bentley will be down the to represent, along with my first ever personal training client, Jurgen Watts. Let me just follow that up by saying that I AM NOT a personal trainer, but Jurgie didn't care about that and after asking for the third time I gladly put together a three month training program for him. He has since dropped ten pounds and is now running his first ever 100k race! I'm very excited for Jurgen. His goal is just to finish and I have no doubt that he will do this and more:) Best of luck to all, I'll be following along online!

GR