Up To Here (PhotoBlog) — Gary Robbins

The last six weeks have gone really well. Though I've wanted to blog a bunch and I have numerous postings written in my head, the untold story of being a race director (especially of multiple events now) is that you just generally spend a lot of time working on your computer. Given that I've never held a desk job or anything remotely close to a job that forced me to sit down for any extended period of time, it's been quite the adjustment. I have found that spending so many additional hours working online has effectively quelled my blogging and other 'online for pleasure' ways...ummm, that can be read many, many different ways...being online now for five, six or seven hours a day is effectively three, four, or five hours longer than I'm used to. The motivation to then sit in front of a screen afterwards is lacking to say the least.

March was a great month of training. With a late push of 123 miles in the final week I ended up with a 402 mile month.

I raced the Chuckanut 50k to a 10 minute PR in the middle of this. Though I was pretty happy with my 4h02m run time, as I was shooting for sub 4hr, I just didn't have my climbing legs with me on the day. My leg turnover held up throughout the race on the faster stuff, my descents were solid as always, but my climbing legs evaporated within the first mile of the first climb and I just had to slog it out and stick with it. I found myself with a pack of runners with about ten miles to go and in the end I finished 14-15 minutes ahead of this group, as the climbing was effectively behind us. It was rewarding to have felt terrible very early on and yet to have stuck with things and plodded through to a respectable result. A result that I can actually celebrate, especially when DNF thoughts nearly overwhelmed me from miles 7-15. I wasn't having my absolute best day but to fight it out and still be satisfied with my overall result made it very rewarding.

Last weekend, the week following my 123 mile effort, I managed to shave five full minutes off of my Diez Vista 50k course record from 2010. A race report is imminent...I hope.

From my last blog posting up to here, in pictures;