2012 Training Log – Week 18
The week started strong, but by the end I think a combination of last weekend’s long run, some long work hours, and lack of sleep all caught up to me. I’m happy with the intensity I was able to get on Tues and Weds, but I would like to get a solid week in from start to finish one of these times. Seems like it has been a while.
Monday
11 miles
Soggy. Rained all day.
Played around with shooting short range with my long lens (300mm). Really liked this one of my daughter playing the piano. She has become a very good pianist over the past couple of years and I enjoy hearing her practice. The lighting was poor, and I didn’t use a flash. Instead, I had her turn on and adjust the small lamp on top of the piano to shine on her hands. The sharpness of the extended finger is what I like best. I came up with a little free verse to describe the scene.
Then I went outside and shot some flowers in the yard. The rain had just let up and it was still heavily overcast. The colors were all very deep and rich. There was the tiniest kiss of light on this flower bud that totally made the shot. Probably my best yet in terms of lighting. My wife said it looked like a Mother’s Day card so I added a verse to it as well.
Tuesday
7 miles
Hit the roads for this one. 1 warmup, 5 medium tempo (7:11 pace, 158 avg hr), 1 cool down. Felt ok, need to keep injecting a little faster running into the week. My fitness and strength are good, but my coordination and efficiency are way behind.
Wednesday
12.6 miles
Waterton Canyon. My wife rode alongside on her bike and we had a great evening in the canyon. I had a good run, keeping it steady up to the the dam, then ramping up the effort each mile on the return to finish the last 6 miles with a 6:48 average. That felt awesome! I like how the heart rate graph shows the increasing intensity over that stretch. I ramped it up nicely and finished strong. Needed that!
Thursday
10.3 miles
Feeling a little worked from last night, but things got better as the run progressed. 7 laps @ the Boneyard.
Friday
14.1 miles
Tough day after a late night of work and getting up early again. Struggled through this one, but got it done. The weekend doesn’t look good for getting much of a long run in, so this will be it.
Loving the wildflowers this time of year.
This tree looked like some sort of anteater if you were to turn it sideways.
Saturday
5.8 miles
Worked all morning at a garage sale for our kid’s scout activities and girl’s camp fund raiser. It was cool and damp, but thankfully the rain held off and it was a big success.
Headed out for a run in the afternoon and felt terrible. Bagged it early and headed home.
Came up on a fox while it was catching a rodent. Crunch.
Next!
Had to pick up some supplies for tomorrow’s dinner, so we stopped and checked on our shopping center owls. No signs of flight yet, but they are getting big quickly.
Sunday
OFF
Happy Mother’s Day!
Took Jessica on a drive to see the ‘Oreo Cows’. They were spread out and far away when we first got there.
Never fear, she knew just what to do.
That’s more like it.
I’m calling this guy Double Stuf.
Total: 60.8 miles / 9:23
The Agile Fox Friday Foto – 05.11.2012
After a year and a half of including a ‘pic of the week’ at the end of my weekly training summary, I’ve decided to let it stand on its own. I’m also implementing a rule that the Friday Foto needs to have been taken sometime in the last week. No recycling. I am doing this to keep me engaged in building my photography skills, and to make me work harder to get fresh shots. Click here to see my previous Friday Foto posts.
You’ve probably seen more than a few Supermoon photos by now. It was a pretty cool event to try and capture. I lucked out in a few ways – the true full moon wasn’t until Saturday night, but I shot this on Friday with perfectly clear skies. Saturday turned out to be rainy and overcast in Denver. I was already camping on Lookout Mountain without even realizing the Supermoon event was taking place. Once I saw it, I bolted about halfway down the mountain and spent an hour and a half shooting photos.
This is a HDR composite of 3 exposures (3 sec, 13 sec, 30 sec). I should have taken the brightness of the moon into account, but didn’t realize it was going to flare that badly. Live and learn. I tried to fix it and insert the moon from another pic I took that night, but it ended up looking completely faked. I think next time I’m in a similar situation, I’ll take another shot with a properly exposed moon and sky, then mask that back into the final result.
What I like most about this shot are the added elements. The radio tower and maintenance shed are interesting, and during my longest exposure a car drove past on the road below. It is invisible, but the headlights painted the guardrail nicely. I like the light and detail I was able to pull out of the far hillside, and I love how the city lights turned out looking like some sort of lava flow.
Lookout Supermoon
f/8.0, 18mm @ 640 ISO
2012 Training Log – Week 17
Tough week. I’m kind of glad to see it fading in the rear view mirror.
I started out Monday with a seized-up back. An old injury from chopping out a tree stump flared up and I could barely walk. We’re talking little 4 inch steps, bent over, with my elbows flared out. Then I ended up blistering my feet worse than they’ve been in years. I think because of how awkwardly I was running with my back issue and the uneven terrain I was on. Definitely feeling like a rookie lately.
Running can be such a humbling sport. Just two weeks ago I was feeling light as a feather, fast, and strong. Now I feel fat, slow, tired, and OLD.
The week took a turn for the better when I got a very thoughtful and encouraging note from a friend on Wednesday. We are all so busy with work, family, and just living life in general. It feels good when someone takes the time to specifically reach out and give you a boost. Definitely need to pay that forward.
My back pain gradually diminished over the past few days, and I had a good time camping. All set up to have a great week ahead now!
Monday
10.4 miles
I knew from previous experience with my back issue, that even though I almost couldn’t walk at all, I could still run. That was my theory, anyway. The first half mile was ugly, but I started feeling better and could tell that it was going to work out so I continued on. I think it helped it relax a little in the process.
Went up on the hogsback last night to mess around with the camera.
Unidentified Flying Pine Cone
Tuesday
7.2 miles
Back felt about 50% better today. Ran fairly hard and didn’t think much about it after I got going. Still can’t walk very well, or stand up straight. I got sloppy with tying my shoes and ran with them pretty loose over uneven terrain. Since I was sockless and sweating a bit I ended up with some monster blisters. Now I really look dumb when I’m trying to walk.
Wednesday
13.3 miles
Pushed hard. Was looking to run a strong 13.1, but cracked bad @ 11.5. Just stopped in my tracks. The final miles were a very slow shuffle. I knew I was on borrowed time after mile 8, but kept after it thinking I could pull a mind-over-matter trick. Matter won.
My wife doesn’t check the blog as far as I know, so I think I’m safe posting these here before Sunday. I took some portraits of the kids as a surprise for Mother’s Day and sent them off to be printed and framed today. My setup was ghetto, but the final product turned out nice. We went out in the side yard on an overcast evening and one kid held up my Bighorn 100 blanket for the background, while another used the dull silver side of my car’s window shade as a reflector to even out the shadows on the faces. Then we all told really bad jokes to try and get the subject to laugh.
And I’m getting this printed as a custom notebook cover:
With Katie on the inside of the cover:
Thursday
0 miles
Too much going on to get in a run, but I did do my best TRX workout in a while. It seems like I’ve hit a plateau, or even regressed, in my strength exercises lately. It felt great to finally muscle through a good one for a change.
The Atomic Pushup:
Friday
7 miles
This was the hardest easy run I have done in a long time. I was jogging along, feeling sorry for myself and having an internal conversation about how crappy my legs felt, when someone in a wheelchair rolled across my path. Good reminder of what a selfish dingbat I am sometimes… Time to quit whining and run while I still can.
Spent the night at a scout camp on top of Lookout Mountain. The Supermoon put on a spectacular display. I was oblivious to it until I glanced over my shoulder while we were out on a mountain bike ride. When we finished, I hopped in the car and hustled to an overlook to get some shots.
Saturday
26.2 miles
A mojo-restoring run if there ever was one.
I got up at 5:15 and trotted off into the pre-dawn darkness. There was a trail that went by our campsite that I had my eye on. I ran it out to the Buffalo Bill overlook and back. Each ‘lap’ was just under 4 miles. I ran 7 total plus a little extra to hit the marathon. 3,500′ of climbing to keep things interesting, and an even mix of rocky technical stuff and smoother hardpack.
The sunrise was spectacular. It almost looked like a forest fire coming through the trees.
I paused at an overlook to admire the awesome view in the beautiful morning light.
After the rough start to the week, it was so nice to be running trails in the mountains with the forest all to myself for a while.
About halfway through my run, I started noticing strange footprints in the dirt. Hmmm, I know someone that leaves tracks like that…
Malcolm was up and out for a lap on the trail, too. The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree.
I tried to maintain a steady/even effort from start to finish, and think I succeeded pretty well. The 7th trip up the climb hurt me, but I averaged a 9:55 pace and a 151 heart rate overall. My blistered feet made things mighty uncomfortable for a spell, slowing me down a bit, but I was having too good of time to let that get me down.
Sunday
OFF
Total: 64.1 miles / 9:59
The Scene Begins 