The next few weeks of my life are going to be boring. I am ready for boring. I am doing a bunch of training for a new job (outside sales for residential solar juggernaut SolarCity), and just marking time running and walking 1-5 miles a day. No eight hour slogs, no running up and down mountains, no drooling, no nausea guy, no Hunter S. Thompsonesque rants about bleeding nipples and missing toenails.
My next event is one of speed and not of endurance, so I am trying to concentrate on getting in some fast short runs weekly, but not to work too much until the few weeks before the race. Right now I am just trying to avoid losing my foundation, and stay in shape to get my 5k time down under 21 minutes.
I did a few vitally important things this week. One of them was finish the most recent season of Longmire, and the other was to get on a treadmill and knock out a run with one mile under seven minutes, and two miles under eight. This means that I am now through one third of my goal of getting all of those miles under seven minutes.
In other news, I picked up a pair of last year’s Line6 Sir Francis Bacons (190 cm) skis for a song at Basin Sports during their Columbus Day weekend sale, and picked up a new pair of technical bibs for a smoking deal at Peak Performance (I didn’t find what I was looking for at the swap; I went there first), so I’m slowly piecing my gear together for this year’s ski season. I sure hope that I can put together more than last year’s paltry 159 days.
Also, I went for a great foliage drive. Is it me, or did the true colors wait a long time to pop this year? It seems like this kind of vibrancy usually happens a couple of weeks earlier. This is the latest I remember this happening, but memory can be a funny thing (as in, memory has been clinically proven to be flat wrong much of the time).
So it seems like I did not exist at the Spartan race! I have been able to find NO pictures of me (I eventually just scrolled through them all). Interestingly though, based on my pre-nausea first lap time, I was in the top 15-25 of the Ultra Open athletes until I had to spend two hours curled up in fetal position from motion sickness). I finished among the last 25…but I finished!
What I want next is a good liquid resistance trainer for my road bike so that I can keep my legs moving while I watch movies at night. The road bike is fabulous for my hamstring and calf flexibility, and my bet is that if I spend more time in the saddle on a trainer this winter, my back and neck will adapt to the positioning, and I will be able to comfortably do rides longer than two hours next summer.
Brady Crain is a former full time stage hand, musician, engineer, stand-up comic, and musician, who grew up in Randolph, Vt. He is now a Realtor® with Killington Pico Realty. Earlier this summer he decided to run a 60-kilometer race in the Laurentians mountains of Quebec, then the Spartan Ultra at Killington Mountain, and now he is training to run a 5K Turkey Trot in under 21 minutes (under 7 minutes/mile). His prior experience consists of running a 5K once in 1999.
