Odds and Ends

Recent training - terrible to good



12/12. 4 in 38. Worst run in 10 years. I have three excuses, but who cares?

12/13. 4 in 33.5 Misjudged the storm front and got surprised by 40 mph winds, froze and quit.

12/14. About 5.5 in 49. Ran with Barb, who thinks no one respects her running. She hasn't missed a day in more than 20 years, has run at least 10 miles per day each day (I believe) for the past 10 years - she ran 80 miles in the weather that I complained about in the past week. She's done 23 or 24 marathons, all between 3:20 and 3:45. Nuff said.

12/15. 7 in 58 with 2 in 13:27. HRav=134, peak=169. Okay.

12/16. 4 in 35 Sluggish.

12/17. 11 in 95 At last a break in the weather.

12/18. 24 in 3:24 HR av=131, pk=154. First 20+ in a month and it felt good. Could've run twice as far. Got motivated by seeing Jim Ramacier ran 50K at 8 min./mile last Saturday.



Corrections

The ultra trail race is the Fab 5 Fifties. Variations occurred, but Fab 5 stuck.

I tracked down sources for the soltice weight gain; somewhere down the line, someone mistook a 1 for a 7. The average person gains a pound over the holidays.

I didn't have time to type out the second thought experiment, but everyone seems to see what it'll be already. Yes, one does deplete glycogen in about 75 minutes under the conditions I stated. Wolves will run for hours, but you couldn't outrun them for even a minute; that's where tree climbing comes in. Thanks for answering a rhetorical question - don't ya love rhetorical questions? As for water and electrolytes: I ran 19 hours in Leadville and drank one quart of Gatorade, two cups of coffee and ate one small bowl of chicken noodle soup in that time - it's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it (I also ran the Voyageur 50 without water, but that was just stupid).

Reading List

I was recently interviewed about my reading habits. The hardest question was: How many books do you read in a year? I read a one volume collection of Aristotle's works - one book or 12? I read Winston Churchill's 6 volume history of WW II - one book, or 6? I read all of Chekhov's plays and stories, scattered throughout 80-100 books. I read 12 translations of the Tao te Ching. I read Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude" twice.

If a book is 250-300 pages of type, then I read 60-70 books a year.