Bandera Trail Run 50k

Since I can only post one photo at a time from my iPhone here is the
one I chose. It best summarizes the Bandera experience.

Quick Post About Bandera

This is from an email I sent earlier to Ganda Man (Whom I paced for the last 50k of Bandera). I will post pictures and more info later, but here you go for now.

"I never thought I would finish up a 50k in the dark, in cold weather, with insane wind, with rocks sliding out from under my feet, on steep inclines and declines and yet still feel like a pansy because I was finishing with all of the 100k runners who looked like they had been mugged and beaten after having done the whole damn thing twice."

Energy Fitness Athletes

During my workout today I ran into a few regulars at the gym Trip Littleton and Patrick Martin. I see these guys in the gym all the time so no news there. Well I get back to my office and find my monthly Energy Fitness info email. It turns out that Trip recently finished the Ford Ironman in an amazing 10:43:38 and Patrick smoked the marathon course at White Rock this past weekend to finish in 3:14 which qualifies him for Boston. Amazing performances from both of these guys.

It seems I am surrounded by good athletes which is a great motivator to always try and improve so I can compete.

I am pacing Gandaman for the last 50k of Bandera so hopefully that goes well and afterwards I can start training to take some time off of my marathon pace.

El Scorcho Dos Lights

I was thinking back today to El Scorcho Dos and what a crazy day we had. Running a night race brings a whole new set of challenges on top of the normal things required for daytime runs. One item in particular that tends to be a recurring issue is the lighting situation in Trinity Park. No other event in the park has the light requirements of El Scorcho so it is tough to get the city electricians that when we say that we need "All" the lights on in the park we are not over exaggerating. 

This year Gandaman and myself did an inspection run the night before the race to check on the course and found that 90% of the lights in the main area were not on. I quickly hopped on the phone to Mike, the supervisor in charge of Trinity Park who told me the electrician had already been out and turned on all the lights that he could.  Mike assured me he would look into more and get back to me if there was anything he could do. 

To make a long story short Mike ended up trying to contact the electrician with no luck so he drove all the way in from Burleson to check on the situation on his day off. After being unable to get into the electrical box due to a recent key change Mike and Jim from the Parks Department literally took a blowtorch to the lock. The lock gave up the ghost real quick with that kind of effort and lo and behold the lights were never turned on. 

Those of you at El Scorcho know that some of the more strategic lights never came on, but without the last minute efforts of Mike and Jim we would not gotten we would have had only a couple of lights at the Gazebo area. 

So what does this mean for next year? Well looks like Ganda and I get to spend the Friday before El Scorcorcho showing the course to the electrician and fielding the inevitable questions of what would possess anyone to come out and run an 25k/50k in the middle of the night. Should be fun! 

El Scorcho Report

It has been about a month since El Scorcho and looking back it seems that the race was a big success in the eyes of the participants who have written reviews and given us verbal feedback. It is always great to hear that people enjoyed the race and are looking forward to next year. It takes a lot of hard work and hours and hours of meeting to put this race together and usually a lot of last minute details to be worked out.

I won't go into details about the race since my fellow race director Ryan Valdez has already done a great job at that in a blog post last month. Ryan is a great writer which serves him well in his profession and also allows him to a great job writing most of the information that you read on the website.

Instead I am going to write to thank and highlight some of the people who made the race possible and let you guys in on some of the crazy last days before El Scorcho Dos. On second thought I think I will stretch this over several blog posts since this is already turning into a lengthy one.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks and you can get an insiders look at how this year's El Scorcho came together and some of the more "risky" moments that made us sweat a little.

El Scorcho Finally

After 400 runners, 500 spectators, 200 burritos, over 100 pounds of pasta, 80 degree weather, 12 hours in the park preparing the course, 1000's of gallons of water, hundreds of Nuun caplets, oppressive humidity, a hike from the parking lot to the race start, tons of incredible volunteers, gallons of coffee, some great off duty police officers, great medical staff, and the parks department going above and beyond...........El Scorcho Dos is done!! I will write a more detailed summary once I recover from being up and running around Trinity Park for the past 36 hours. Let's just say El Scorcho Dos was a great time!

El Scorcho approaching

So only 13 days until El Scorcho. This is going to be a crazy few weeks. We are as prepared as we can be, but there are always a ton of little things that have to get done.

Anyone know of a good place to find some glow in the dark spray paint? I figure it would be fun to have the course marked that way.

Garage Cleanup

So today I finally had the opportunity to tackle the mess that my garage is. When we moved in to the house I found that the garage was pretty much untouched from the past few owners of the house. They guy we bought it from said he didn't really touch it other than to park the lawnmower in there and I told him to leave it alone in case there was anything useful in there.

Six hours later and I am almost done. I just have to go through and finish cleaning up after the mice who were obviously previous tenants of the garage. Here is a short list of some of the items I found.

• About 40 cans of different color paints. No joke this house must be like a rainbow underneath the paint coat that is currently showing.
  
• A computer racing wheel from 1995
• Several Marilyn Monroe Books
• A set of Law Directories for all 50 states from 1994
• About 8 paint roller and 15 paint brushes
• An old typewriter
• 14 bags of assorted fertilizer, grass seed, mulch, and dirt

I kept a lot of the stuff that is useful, but had to toss out a ton of junk. Now I just have to figure out how I am going to get a truck to haul all of this stuff away.

The Roof is on Fire!!

Today is the last day I will have to get things done around the house for awhile. D's Dad and his family of six are coming in from Louisiana to pay us a visit for about three days. Should be a tiring and fun three days.

On another note, we had a few hours of downtime at work today when the computer room fire alarm went haywire. I took the time to go and workout with GandaMan after which we had lunch at his house. A pretty relaxing and enjoyable afternoon. Food and working out, two of my favorite things!

Blackberry Pearl

Back in April I switched from the Palm Treo 650 to the Blackberry Pearl. My main reason for this was comfort while I am running. The Treo felt like a brick in my belt pack so oftentimes I would switch the SIM card to an old Motorola Razr anytime I was doing serious mileage (16+ miles).

After seeing a great deal for the Pearl (I actually got $100 out of the deal) on Amazon.com I made the change and ordered the phone online.

So far the phone is awesome for my running. I fit it into my pocket and hardly even notice it is there. The call quality is great and I like the easy to use Standby button which helps to keep the phone from getting turned on accidentally when I am running. It can also be set loud enough for me to hear under pretty much any conditions.

The only drawbacks are that it doesn't display PDF's as well as my Palm did. In fact I have yet to find a free program that offers this functionality. Secondly I wish it had a better built in Media Device so I could do away with my separate MP3 player altogether. I guess that is what the i phone does, but how many people do you see running with that thing. While the Iphone is amazingly small for everything it does, it is still almost double the size of the Pearl.

If you are looking for a smartphone to easily carry with you on long runs then the Blackberry Pearl is a good option. They have even upgraded the model line since I purchased and now offer GPS in a lot of the models. Maybe that will allow some people to leave the Garmin 405 at home.

Attack!?

Wow, it looks like Ganda Man is smarting off about my running regime. Apparently I don't have as much free time to go out and run as many official ultras as he does. Oh well, I got nothing to prove to him. I know I can go out and run an ultra right now if I wanted to. You up still Ganda Man? You want to go crank out a quick 31 miles before work tomorrow? Call me.

Snow???

I forgot to mention what happened on my way back to the Airport from Farmington. We were about 15 minutes into our 3 hour trip when suddenly the temperature started dropping about 5 degrees a minute. We ended up dropping from 67 degrees to 33 degrees in a matter of minutes. Kinda of interesting, but to top it off I see some dense fog up ahead, but when I get to it I see it is actually some super heavy snowfall.

I pulled over and grabbed a quick picture on my phone:

Farmington, NM

So I spent the good part of last week in Farmington, NM on a work trip. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but it turns out Farmington is a pretty cool town. It is only 45 minutes from Durango, CO and a 3 hour drive from Albuquerque.

The best part of the trip was finding some great hiking and running trails directly behind my hotel along the San Juan River. What these trails lacked in distance (only about 6 miles) they made up for in quality. Wish I would have taken some pictures on the blackberry, but I was to into the moment to think about that.

I managed to get 14 miles in on Tuesday by doing a couple of loops on the trails and then following an old back road for a few miles. Altogether I ended up with 23 miles for the three days I was there. I did a 18 mile run on Saturday to finish up the week with 49 miles.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I was one of the lucky passengers to get stranded on American Airlines. Luckily Southwest Airlines has a big presence in Albuquerque and was able to me and all my fellow American Airlines customers.

Office Move

Well it finally happened. Ever since I joined Company X I knew my office space was temporary. My office was located on a floor that was due to be demolished and renovated just like all the floors below it had been. Every day I could hear and feel the hammers and drills getting closer and closer. It was getting so bad that the constructions crew was having to come up to our office and drill holes in the floor in order to be able to finish out the spaces below.

This past Monday our group moved into our new offices a few floors below the old space. I can still hear the drills and hammers, but they are headed up away from me instead of coming for me. The view is not quite as nice as the old office, but the office itself is a lot nicer. I have way to much empty wall space now so I think I will bring all of my old marathon medals up here and decorate the wall. Right now they are just hanging on a clothes hanger in my closet so this is probably a good place to store them.

Cowtown Casualty

You might be wondering why I haven't updated the blog with any word about the Cowtown Ultramarathon. Well that is because I didn't get to run it. The night before the big race I gouged my hell while playing around with my little brother. I instantly knew I was in trouble, but was hoping that it would heal enough over night to allow me to run.

Well when I woke up Saturday morning and tried to put some pressure on the heel it instantly started to bleed. Yes, Curt Schilling had a legendary performance in the World Series where his foot bled through his sock and shoe. The thing is I don't get paid to run (quite the opposite actually) and Curt didn't have to run 31 miles with his jacked up foot.

So I spent the day watching the marathon as a spectator and running some errands around town. I took a picture of the injury, but for the sake of taste I will leave it off the blog. I am afraid some of my readers may have queasy stomachs.

Cowtown Coming Up

The Cowtown Ultra is in a couple of days. I haven't trained much at all since White Rock so the 1/2 marathon would probably be a better idea for me. The problem is I would regret not doing the Ultra.

On top of the running the race I think I will add some distance by running to and from the start instead of driving. Hopefully no one who reads this blog will actually know the distance from my house to the race start.

Crossfit Workouts

I am currently in the process of totally revamping my gym workouts by adopting the Crossfit workout strategy. If you haven't heard about Crossfit then you should really research it. I first came across it in an old Men's Journal from 2006. The workouts intrigued me because it promised great results in a short period of time. I thought yeah right every magazine makes these outrageous claims for every article which ultimately turns out to be quite gimmicky.

The reason Crossfit can actual follow through on these claims can be summed up in one word.....Intense!! If you do this workout at the tempo and effort it is intended then you will get the workout of your life. Check out this Youtube video and also this direct link to a video.

I did a really hard Crossfit workout the other day before heading to the office and almost threw up my protein shake. It was awesome. It was the normal after workout high times 10!! I felt great all day and I was sore all over the next day.

You will quickly notice how you stand out from all of the other people at the gym who are worried about looking pretty while they workout. You will get an endless number of incredulous looks and stares as you quickly rotate between your exercises. Most people just can't handle this level of intensity.

The thing I have to be careful about is balancing Crossfit with my long distance running because this workout can really wipe you out. I have to be sure that I give my body enough time to build back up between all of these challenges I am throwing at it.

Running Goal

A few weeks ago I finished up what is so far my craziest running streak. I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, DC the last Sunday in October, followed it up with the Ultracentric 6 hr race in middle of November, and then completed White Rock Marathon in Dallas in early December.

Now I am left with the decision of how to proceed from here. Do I go for distance or do I go for speed. Going for distance would mean training for a 50 miler sometime later this year while going for speed would mean shooting for a 3 1/2 hr marathon or faster.

In the meantime I have the Austin Marathon and Cowtown Ultra on my running calendar. These are on back to back weekends in February. The only problem I have is the entry fee for Austin which is $110. This is pretty steep compared to most of the local marathons in Texas. Considering I can and sometimes will run almost an entire marathon during a training run, it makes it hard to fork over $110 for the privilege of doing it in Austin. I can do the Cowtown Ultra for just $85. What a deal.

It is funny how when marathons were a new thing for me I really wouldn't pay attention to the price. I was too caught up in wondering whether I could finish, or about the aid stations, or how course conditions would affect me. Now I can just grab a hydration pack or fuel belt and go knock out 26 miles in pretty much any type of weather conditions on any day.

Currently I am leaning toward a focus on speed since I am still young and realize that as I age my speed will probably slow down while my endurance will pick up. If I could run like Scott Jurek or David Goggins it would take care of my problems since those guys run a 100+ miles at my 10k my pace.

Solo Night

As I type this the dog and I are chilling in bed. My WW (Wonderful Wife) is in Houston tonight shooting a wedding. Unfortunately military drill today prevented me from joining her. Bedtime is relatively early tonight because of a scheduled run with Ganda at 6:30am in the morning. I am hoping to get in around 15 miles, but we will see what happens.

Burrito Run

My morning run began and ended with a stop at the Tres Jose's Breakfast Burrito Express. If you haven't tried these things then you don't know what you are missing. The breakfast burritos are awesome and only $1 each. I am sure they are extremely unhealthy, but a lot of the reason I work out is so that I can eat and not feel guilty.

The reason I began my run at the Burrito Express was the fact that they usually sell out early. So I ran up to the guy, handed over my $3 (the wife wanted one), and told him to hold them until I got done with my run. Three miles later I finish my run at the burrito stand, retrieve my workout reward, and head home to enjoy my breakfast. All mornings should be that good.