Lafayette ridge

The day after the Mt. Washington race, I'd scheduled an adventure run with some of the CSU junior ladies, and two other coaches, Sue and Kathy.  We ran over the Lafayette ridge, up the skookumchuk trail and down falling waters, and it was a perfect mountain day.  This put me back into a happy spot, I love running in the mountains.  We ended the run with some ice cream, the proper reaction to running in mountains.

Looking toward Garfield.

A fine lookin' group of ladies atop Lafayette

My favorite ridge.

Lafayette, from Lincoln.

Sue and Kathy.  We've all three determined that we need to stop hanging out with each other, because clearly, we just encourage each other's craziness!

Sonya taking in the view.

Shining rock!

Tempted to slide, if it didn't end in a waterfall...

How many photos do I have of myself over the years in this same spot?

Kathy, post head-dunking.  this is why we get along.

From there, I headed southwest, and landed in Peekskill NY, for a low-key week of orienteering training based out of my friend Neil's house.  The first two days I was joined by a Finnish couple, on holiday to NYC, who really wanted to run at Harriman.  They were crazy fast.  After they left I stayed on for another few days, finally leaving on Thursday, having racked up something like 19 hours of orienteering.  It is so great to have such awesome technical terrain within driving distance!  Or in Neil's case, within walking distance - he lives ON the Blue Mountain map!  This did make it a lot easier to get in a solid couple hours of work in between trainings, which was a prerequisite of going down there.  

Blue Mountain is a pretty technical place... take away all the features except contours, and it gets nigh on impossible.  Yikes!

Some more technical training on Polebrook, in Harriman.  A control pick, followed by a line, that eventually I bailed on because I got sick of the rocks.  Then more controls.  

Longer route-choice-y training on Hoegencamp map, this one with the Finns.  Saw lots of snakes on this map!  I was convinced they were all poisonous and definitely hungry for some human flesh.  They were THIIIIIIIIIIS big!

And some speedwork - O'tervals!  Definitely managed to outrun my brain - check out the wanderings around #7.  Oops.

The final exercise, on Rockhouse Mountain.  All the white woods were super thick with high blueberries, which made it tough to run through.  This was also the first day where it got stupid hot, so that lake was a welcome sight on my jog back to the car!

Back in Boston-land now, attempting to not melt in the heat as I futz with model variables.  At least when you're running you get a slight breeze... 

Mt. Washington road race

I don't know if I've ever picked an "A" race to train for.  Usually, I have a "season", and I'm trying to hold my form through the entire thing.  When you're peaking for an entire season, when you have bad races, you just sort of forget about them and wait for a good race, which inevitably comes.  That said, I tend to be fairly scientific about recording what affects my good races, and what I've done to cause my bad races, and at this point I have a good handle on what my body needs prior to a race to make it a good race, from training sessions months ahead of time to what I eat for breakfast.  So, signing up for a race and choosing to make it an "A" race - one that you train specifically for, that you care about a whole bunch - that didn't seem like that big a deal.  I'm good at this stuff.

Mount Washington is high, and while I've been up it a few times before, I've never raced up it.  Rob's done this race 29 times, and I figured if he's done it that many times, it's either totally awesome or he's a total nutcase.  I entered the lottery, my name got pulled, and I started training for this beast.  Maybe I was TOO mentally prepared - I had input from a bunch of different people about what it would be like, how much you suffer, or how much you can't let yourself suffer because there's no coming back.  Everyone has their own theories.  The best was the guy I met in the porta-potty line who makes his own shoes for this race, by adding an extra sole to his existing shoes in order to raise his heel, to put less pressure on his calves.  Wacko, but not totally implausible.  Anyway, after doing a good bit of hill-running this spring, I felt like I had a good idea of how hard I could go up the big hill, and how fast I would do it.  I was a little nervous, but pretty excited to see what I could do.

The day dawned sunny and warmer than I'd anticipated.  Hopefully it would be cooler above treeline, but unfortunately it wasn't.  I was most scared of starting too fast, since that is typically what I do, so I lined up somewhere in the middle of the 1200 runners.  The gun went off, and it took 14 seconds to get to the start line - that's a new experience for me!  There wasn't room to run, just jogging, and it was hard not to get too excited passing people.  Once we hit the hill things spaced out a bit.  Within a few minutes I had room to run my own race, so I did.  No different than my training runs, heartrate hovering in level 2, this was comfortable.  Now it's time to just hurry up and wait, legs ticking over and over and over and eventually I'll get to the top.

The sun was hot, though.  By the second water stop, just before mile 3, I already had heat shivers.  Took two glasses of water and walked through until I'd drunk both of them, poured a third on my head.  Things kind of started to get bad around there, though.  My legs started to burn, despite a relatively low HR.  I started to do some walking, and people started to pass me.  My mile splits were getting more and more pathetic, way outside the range of what I'd expected for time.  This was pretty disappointing.  Mile 5, where you're just chugging along the dirt bit on the eastern side of the mountain, and it just goes straight forward and straight up forever - that part sucked.  Who am I kidding, pretty much everything from mile 2 onward sucked.  It was down to a mental game of counting steps, forcing my plodding self onward.  Because not only do I not drop out of races when I've got nothing worse than a blister, there was nowhere to drop out TO in this race.  The only salvation would be at the top.

I got there eventually.  Three minutes later than any of my predicted times, which spanned a 12-minute range.  I really hate it when I don't meet my own expectations, and it's taken a few days of self-loathing to decide that yes, I am still an athlete.  I don't know why I did so poorly in this race, but stewing about it isn't helping anything.  I'll probably be back some day, because I feel like I have something to prove, but I sucked enough at it that I'm not jumping into saying I'll enter the lottery next year.

It's always so weird to get to the top of Mt. Washington and find all this civilization.  At least this time it was less weird, since I did go up a road.

Jess was there with her team, and she did great.  So speedy!

After running up, Jess and Graham and a friend of Jess's coach decided to hike down.  We went down the Tuckerman ravine trail, and that hike went a long way toward restoring my sanity.  

Clouds moving in on the headwall.

 Moonscape!

Cool waterfalls.  I skied down that shit??

Snow!!

One last remaining snow bridge.  So cool!

Hi tucks!

Jess and Graham

me and Jess

Then we sat around a campfire drinking home-made apple wine, and life got even better.

More Hurricane Irene damage - all sorts of braided rivers where we used to have channels.  

A haircut

This may be the most girly thing I ever write about on here.  I gave myself a haircut today.  Occasionally I chop off bits of hair around my face, but I've never gone for a full-bore haircut before... that's scary.  But, I read a bunch of things on the web, and since the internet never lies, I decided to give it a try.  The method people were suggesting was basically to make a ponytail on top of your head and lop off the end.  Hmmm.  You could also just flip your head upside down and cut a straight line in front of your face.  Well, I can cut a straight line.  Let's do this.

Too long. Too scraggly.  

Yarrr!  Attack hair with scissors!

  

Well... at least there's a lot less of it.

Dry.  Yup, definitely layers, definitely bouncier.  I think that'll do!

Western MA 5-Day

A while back, the idea was floated that we should have a 5-day event, but we'd actually only take two days.  Being crazy, all five of us in the western Mass. renegade O' club agreed that this was a great idea, and went about putting on the meet, as a fundraiser for the US ski-o team.  Peter, our fearless leader, handled most of the stress of meet directing, and put a nice write-up here from the meet.  Overall, things went great, and we earned a bunch of money to help Ali and me get to Kazakhstan next winter, along with our ski-o teammates.

The first two "days" were both OUSA-sanctioned A-meets, at Peter's new map at Earl's Trails, which also happens to be an amazing place to ride mountain bikes.  And now it's mapped.  Worlds colliding!  Those two events went off great, and then it was my turn, hosting a sprint at the UMass campus.  That went off pretty great too, and then many of the competitors ended up at Bub's barbecue, which was also great.  So far, so good!


Ed did his usual awesome displays, which people seem to enjoy.  He and Valerie, pictured below, are awesome people to have on your side when you're putting on a meet.

Map from UMass.

 Presto was pretty done with this whole running thing after his second race.

 
I particularly like this one - Brendan is all set to go do another race, and Presto was NOT interested in moving forward.  Eventually they came to some sort of agreement and started out.

Pretty nice arena for the UMass sprint.  stadium seating!

Andrew working on winning the finish split.  

Sunday we had two more days of racing, the first a sprint at Cemetery Hill, in Northampton.  I actually got to race in this one, and I had a really good time, although my legs were pretty pooped.  I was the first lady, but a bunch of guys beat me, and I ended up 10th (of ~50).  From there, we all relocated to Mount Tom, for the last, and hardest, day of racing.  It was basically a one-man relay, with a lot of hills and rocks and mosquitoes to deal with, and by the end I was ready to lie on the grass and never move again.  I tried that for a while, but eventually I had to actually move and do useful stuff.  It was pretty nice to have a three day weekend, if only because we could spend Monday doing nothing at all useful.

Finishing up the Cemetery Hill sprint in front of two of the cutest spectators, who had been charged to cheer loudly.  

They got more animated when their dad came down the finish chute.

Giacomo and Carl sprinting for the finish; I didn't get Giacomo (he won), but I did beat Carl!  Pays to go in the right direction!

  

Results.

This ends the last of my big training weeks - now it's time to sharpen and taper, and then I get to run up a big hill with a number pinned to my chest.  Wahoo!