Monday, January 6, 2014

Happy 2014

Happy 2014 everyone.  This is a mixing of mostly unrelated topics; I’m not very organized this time of the year.

St. Croix Valley Runners
We’re a group of runners who meet at Brown’s Creek parking lot every Saturday morning at 8:00 am for a gentle 5 mile run.  Rain or snow, hot or cold, someone always shows up.  Except that one time Dave had to run the route by himself.  Don’t expect a super fast pace, we run mainly for the social aspect.  And we’re on Facebook evidently.

5k Race Series
The New Richmond Centre hosts a 5k race series with one race per month October through April.  The cost is $20 for the whole series, so you can’t go wrong.  Plus, 50 or so runners show up, so the turnout isn’t bad either.  I’ve run the November and December races and find this series a great way to keep my fitness throughout the winter.   I wrote about the December race here, and I won the January race!  Yea Old Guys!

Lapham Peak Trail Runners
There is a group of trail runners that get together in the Southern Kettle Moraine called the Lapham Peak Trail Runners.  Great group of people; my sister is a member. I did get the opportunity to run with a few of them on 12/28, on the Funk Road segment of the Ice Age Trail.  The run was on snow-covered trails along the beautiful Oconomowoc River.  Thanks for taking me along guys!

Kettle 100
It is time for me to make another attempt at the 100 mile distance this spring at the Kettle 100.  My last attempt went very well, except for the fact that I did not finish (blog post).  My lessons learned will be put to good use:
  1. Running 100 miles is nuts; I had no clue.  The mental aspect of racing this distance is one for which I was not prepared.  I will be doing a bit of visualization.
  2. Beware the chair at mile 63.  I am doing a U-turn at the start-finish.
  3. Running 100 miles on hill and trail was hard on my whole body.  My core and upper body weakness became very evident later in the race.  I’m starting core work now!
  4. Screw the goal time, just finish my first 100 miler.  Well, I need to set a pace, so I will need a goal time for that, plus know I can do a 20 hr 100-miler.  So maybe I just need to be prepared to throw the schedule out the window and just finish the darned thing.

I am planning on the following races later this year:

I haven’t run Superior before; in fact this should be my first trip north of Duluth.  Should be fun!

2 comments:

martykc said...

Hey Dave, Are you still on for Kettle? I am in rehab (ankle) so I won't be running. I am just about healed up, so I will be pacing some friends. Hope all is well with you, let's talk about Superior too. It's a challenging race!

Unknown said...

I'll see you out at Superior this year! Good luck on your races!