Long Run - 3 Laps of Tunnel Hill

Long Run - 3 Laps of Tunnel Hill


Today was the first of 3 long or semi-long runs planned prior to the upcoming 50K at Steamboat. I'm still in recovery from last Saturday's race, so I did a short long run of 21 miles. With all of the rain all of a sudden, I figured it was better to do my long run in the valley as opposed to try and bag some peaks and possibly get rained on. Sometimes for training you have to sacrifice the adventure to focus on certain goals. So, I did three laps of the Tunnel Hill loop. My goal was to see if I could maintain the same pace on lap three that I set on lap one. I also wanted to try out a new fuel drink mix that I've made to see how it would taste and if it would deliver the energy I was hoping. On both fronts, today was a success. I did the first lap in 1:05, the second lap in exactly 1:05 again, and the third lap in 1:07. The new drink seemed to help, as it has 500 calories in 21oz, which I can just sip on during the 3 hours, as opposed to trying to eat something that will slow me down. After the last race, and despite my improvement in time, I still believe I can get faster and cut off more time so I am looking at how I can do that. So far, I have identified the following:

• get faster on the downhills
• be able to fuel, but not have to slow to a walk to consume that fuel
• maintain a consistent pace throughout the race (don't go out fast and slow down at the end)

If I can work on these three areas, I think I can improve my time by around 30 minutes, which would put me right around 5:10 for a trail 50K, which is a decent time for my first year of racing and training. So, today's long run was a success, as my new fuel drink seemed to work, my pace stayed consistent for all three laps, and my downhill speed was not slow, but not fast (each lap had ~1,770' of gain).