My Life as an Ultra

I never thought of how much my ultra training would come in handy for life-management.

Deadlines for PhD stuff, World Trails in 4 weeks, a trip to Canada (for my PhD) - in 3 weeks, two volunteer committees, the usual running training.... I find myself repeatedly muttering phrases like "keep moving forward" and "one step at a time." I think I need a pacer. This could get ugly around mile 80 ;)

And to top it off, I got a bit of a cold last week. I cut back a bit of speed and distance in training to make sure I was not depleting myself and that I was getting lots of recovery time. And I made some adjustments to the weekend plans - the 4 hr hill session Saturday + 15k sweep duties at Kep Ultra Sunday turned into 1.5 hrs of hills + easy 30k sweep at Kep instead. Much better plan, as the guy I ran with on Saturday said it sounded like I'd smoked a pack of cigarettes the night before! And I felt like I had.

Our recon at Walyunga went well and we've got a pretty good idea of what courses we'll set for that PTS event (of course, pending approvals). I also found out that Walyunga has about the same elevation gain as our Lesmurdie and Serpentine routes. Was nice to see this place again. I've missed it. So I'll be back there later this month for a longer outing. With two functional lungs!