Long Weekend Bliss

This weekend past was a long weekend here in Alberta - it was family day weekend, wahoo! I intended to get a good block of running in and really beat up my legs. And that I did :) My quads are pretty trashed this morning and I like that feeling. They've got to get used to this for the epic summer ahead. I was reading about the course for the Yakima 50km race I have coming up in Washington on April 20. So yeah it may only be 50km...but there's 10,000 ft of climbing involved in this race! Eek! There's a reason why the fastest women's time is 6 hours. Crap. It's never taken me that long to run a 50km trail race...usually it's under 5 hours. So you can see why I welcome the trashed feeling in my quads...they really really really need to get used to this in the 2 months I have left before this race!!

Anyway, I wanted to get a longer run done in the City on Saturday so left my house and ran up to Nose Hill for some trail running and to get some hills in. I finished with 29km and about 1400ft of climbing. Yup, not much climbing but still better than running on the roads around Calgary. Just dang icy up at Nose Hill right now is the only problem.

Sunday I headed to Kananaskis to tackle Prairie Mountain. Every year, I forget what Prairie Mountain is like and how hard it is. I thought yeah, maybe i'll do 2 or even 3 repeats of it. Nope, I did one. I was sucking wind like nothing else, it hurt, it was steep...did I mention it hurt? A couple of of trailrunners i know did the Prairie Mountain quad on Friday...4 freakin times. I did one. Yeah, I was not pleased with myself....

 It was a beautiful and fairly warm day but windy as hell. As soon as I could see the top and the fewer and fewer trees ahead...I could hear the wind just howling. I hadn't anticipated quite how windy and cold it would be up there and I was throwing curses. But I made it. Phew. It was only 7km but included almost 2300 ft of climb so I was happy with that....even if I only did it once :( So yeah, I should have sucked it up and gone up again.

I woke up Monday with fairly sore legs from the past 2 days but I really wanted to beat them down again :) It was supposed to be snowing in the mountains and I didn't want to drive out there if that was the case so I stuck around town and decided to do stair repeats next to the curling club. Again, being overly optimistic I thought maybe I could do this for a couple of hours lol. Then I quickly realized after a couple of trips up that since I never do stairs, I should reduce my goal and try for 10 loops - so run up the stairs, along the ridge at the top and then bomb down the path to really hammer the quads :)

10 loops was plenty for my first time out! I was completely beat after that workout! The whole run ended up being 14km and only about 800ft of total climbing. It felt like about 5000ft after the whole thing was done. I have to try and do this at least once a week. It's a good one! :)

So yeah, I'm not moving around too good today but I'm back at work anyway. I'm trying to decide if I should take the whole day off or just get in a sloooow easy run after work. We'll see how I feel. I'm pleased with the weekend of running but definitely need to get more more more elevation in these legs damn it!

Until next weekend....
Deb