Trail thoughts

1) One thing I love about running trails is the separation it gives me from everything else that is always around: mechanical noise, digital noise, cars, and so forth. I seldom hear other people; they are typically in ones or twos, rarely in large groups making all kinds of chatter. Occasionally mountainbikers will rattle by, singles or pairs or groups, but even on busy days, they are usually well-spaced. Running on paved paths in parks or at roadsides gets to be a drag, with the monotony of the same asphalt, the same scenery, the other users taking up the width of the path, the cars droning by. While I am enjoying the act of running in these places, I find myself often just wanting to get the run done so that I can get away from the other people, the cars, and get done with the tedium of those parks -- which leads me to want to run faster than I need to. The trails give me an escape from all that, and I can run actually easy and refresh my mind running through woods and hayfields that are familiar yet always changing. It's a quiet that's filled with glorious sounds of birds, small mammals scuffling through leaves and underbrush, wind in branches overhead, the millrace rushing over rocks and under footbridges. I can monitor my breathing and enjoy the sound of my feet thumping the earth. I am a small dust mote on its face, but I am here, it can feel me as I share its beauties in the middle of a busy patch of the east coast. Whenever I see people out there wearing headphones, I pity them. Why shut all that out? If you're just going to listen to music or whatever, you might as well be on the treadmill, because you're missing 90% of what makes being outside under the trees and sky so wonderful.

2) I was around mile 4.5 of my easy run on Wednesday when I came across a woman placing little blue flags at the side of the trail, and she told me about a trail race happening in Middle Run this weekend, a 5K and a 10K. I was interested, and was thinking about it about a mile later: if I did participate, would I run the 5K or the 10K? I have a pretty intense and long workout scheduled for Sunday, so maybe I should rule out the 10K, but whenever I am paying for a race that has a longer option, I usually like to get more miles for my money. $30 for a trail 5K seemed like a lot; $10 per mile? But a shorter race would be less stress on my legs. I waffled, and also wondered if I wanted to risk injury trying to run fast and hard on trails I have not run fast and hard on for a long time (trail running is my recovery running, now). I could easily see myself face-planting going breakneck down some hill or going too fast to land my feet right among roots.

And while I was considering the injury possibility, I tripped and fell. It took a couple stumbling strides for me to give up trying to recover from the trip, and I went down on the side of my lower left leg. It's exactly where I fell a few weeks ago, but this time I was not wearing long pants and mittens (yay 60F!), so instead of just bruising up, I was also quite scratched. It's been a couple days and my hands and leg still sting when hit with hot water.

I guess if I fall while I am not running hard at all, worrying about falling while running fast isn't going to be a good enough reason to not run this trail race this weekend. I'm guessing I'd actually probably be less likely to fall while racing because I would be concentrating on it, and when I'm running easy it's easier to get distracted while my brain is concentrating on thoughts instead of on making sure I pick up my feet.

In the end, I've decided not to run the trail race, either the 5K or the 10K, this weekend because I ran a tough tempo last night and I think it's better to take Saturday easy to recover ahead of the lengthy MP run I have on the docket for Sunday. I'm interested in trail racing sometime in the future, but it's just not fitting in to my schedule right now. I have the Triple Crown trail series on my maybe race card (April 30), but it turns out I'm not going to be in Delaware that weekend -- I'm going to be in Iowa City, where another (non-trail) possibility has cropped up.

Week #14 -- step down, race

Summary for week ending Sunday, April 3, 2016:

Number of workouts: 5
Total miles run: 38.24
Average miles per run: 7.65

Miles in March: 222.56
Miles in April: 19.09
Miles in 2016: 613.52

Kept the running easy and shorter so as not to 100% train through the half-marathon, mostly running on the trails. Legs were pretty fresh for the race, too bad the weather didn't cooperate a little better. The Caesar Rodney might have been a poor race, but it turned out to be a pretty solid workout -- 13+ miles averaging approximately 7:30/mi. A bit faster than expected MP while being slower than T, probably did my legs a good turn. They were a little achy the next day, but that might have been from the downhill more than anything. Won't expect it to be a problem the rest of the week.

Cold coldy cold

Because the sun was out, and I couldn't bear another run on the treadmill, I ran outside in spite of the cold. The air temperature was tolerable (20F) but it was the knife edge of the wind (20 mph with stronger gusts) that was brutal. Still, I enjoyed running on the very frozen trails and even trudging through some packed snow here and there left over from last week. I was coming up into one of the most exposed parts of the run, where a thin ribbon of trees cuts across a wide-open hayfield, when I must have disturbed a gathering of turkey vultures. They flapped their heavy wings and settled themselves on branches of a sleeping tree. Earlier in the week, I had seen this picture on Facebook:

and that is almost exactly what this looked like. I laughed, and then I got the heck out of there.

Week #6 -- a new month

Summary for week ending Sunday, February 7, 2016:

Number of workouts: 8
Total miles run: 44.60
Average miles per run: 5.58

Miles in February: 44.60
Miles in 2016: 229.02

Amid the general mileage (about half on the treadmill, half outside), I had two quality workouts involving speed or specific effort. The second, on Sunday, had 20 min of T effort which I ran at ~7:25. It felt quite comfortable and I think I may be able to push that effort a little faster next time. I did notice, in the 20 min of easy running beforehand, that occasionally running easy starts to feel worse than running harder, and it's simple to spiral into a false sense that I'm having a tough time even though I'm supposed to be running easy. Best cure for that is the T interval, which came along at just the right time to break the spell.

In addition to the quality workouts, I got to run on the trails on Saturday which went better than I expected it would after a week of melting snow and significant rain, too; it had not been above freezing for very long when I went out, and what would have been very sloppy mud was still mostly frozen. I'm not going to bother going through all my records to check, but Saturday may have been the slowest I've ever run over there (certainly right up there if not), but that was exactly my goal: I needed an easy day to be very easy. My legs were still feeling the hard intervals from Thursday and the jog did its duty, as my legs felt refreshed for the T workout on Sunday.

Mileage was about the same as last week, but with an increase in intensity. That's a good way to do it.