An Abrupt End

Last weekend was supposed to be the final ski race of the season, the Slush Rush, but things got too slushy too quickly and there wasn't enough snow to hold the race. I got one good day of skiing in on Wednesday, Hyland was just barely holding a course together then. I don't think I have ever skied on such dirty looking snow, there was mud and tree debris everywhere, including copious amounts of sawdust on some parts of the trail where they had started doing branch removal already. The skiing was still surprisingly decent though, and it was fun getting one last low key ski in with some of the Vakava crew.

Some Vakava team skiing - Photo: Kevin Corrigan

With skiing out of the picture and temperatures in the 60's I had no more excuses to avoid jumping into running training. So I did, with a gusto. I ended up with 87 miles last week and got two good tempo days in. Perhaps a bit much of a jump, but my hours were actually lower than the week before when I was still skiing a lot, and muscle soreness and therefore adaptation are the goal anyway. Now I'm feeling a bit more confident about Boston, which is now less than 5 weeks away. The next 3 weeks will be pretty tough with high mileage and lots of fast stuff, then I'll start scaling things back. I'm going to try a shorter taper before Boston hoping to carry more of the fitness forward to Big Sur the next weekend, we'll see how that goes. I'm kind of using my Grandma's marathon training from last spring as a template, but with no steady training partners I'm kind of winging it. While some part of me definitely fears the hard work coming up in the next few weeks more and more I'm accepting that race season is coming up quick and I better be ready. Today was a bit chillier, so I got to bust out the pink arm warmers for my workout today.

Pink arm warmers!

In other news my brother found a house and his closing date is the 19th. It will need some work before he can move in, but I may not have a roommate for much longer. I've still been lazy about taking pictures, so I threw in some old ones just to give the post some color.