Soaring Eagle 5-mile

IMG_1027Today was the spring Soaring Eagle run, much different than the winter Soaring Eagle run which was cold but not wet for once.   Today was pretty perfect with tens around 50 when the runs started and blue skies for the most part.  I was originally planning to do the 5 at this event then decided to switch to the Half Marathon and then last night decided to go back to the 5 since I had run at Chirico on Wednesday morning and I’ve got Sun Mountain 25k coming up in three weeks.

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My DNAFit report

In several recent podcasts Ben Greenfield has mentioned DNAFit as a good way to find out what, genetically, you should be doing as far as exercise goes.   It got me curious and since I already had my 23andMe data I figured it couldn’t hurt to pay a bit to see what they had to say.  The process of importing your 23andMe data couldn’t be easier and $79 later I had my first report, the Fitness Lite report.

Well, no huge surprises in the results really.  In summary I am built for endurance, recover moderately quickly and am highly prone to soft tissue injury.   I’ve pretty much found this out on my own over the last 55 years.  I’m not a power person at all but can pretty much walk or run all day with no problems.   I recover fairly quickly from workouts, usually never needing more than a day or so even for very long runs.  And yes, I am prone to soft tissue injury and my main complaint is always some form of tendonitis somewhere though since I’ve changed up my training program in the last few months I haven’t been getting plagued by that at all and have been able to drastically increase distance without any injury at all.

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Tiger Mountain 12k

That was quite a hill!

That was quite a hill!

Today was the first ever sanctioned Tiger Mountain Trail Run put on by Northwest Trail Runs.  It was run on the backside of Tiger Mountain and had distances of 5k, 12k, Half Marathon and 50k.  I had originally signed up for the half but given the nearly 3000′ of climbing and the 9:30 start time I had my doubts I could get done in time to take our new pup, Lira, to the vet by 1 p.m. so I switched to the 12k course.   As usual I arrived early to do registration and we had a rocking reg team with Suzanne and Ann both of whom I had worked with before so things went very smoothly.    The 50k started at 8:30 with about 25 runners, the half at 9:30 with about 100 and finally the 5k and 12k started at 10:00 with a total of about 115 runners and we started on a different loop than the other starts.

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Hawkeye 25k and the magic of fat burning

IMG_0885Two years ago I had planned on going back to Iowa to run the Hawkeye 25k and then SIBO hit me hard making it impossible.  Finally this year I was able to go for it and I was very interested to see if my new Primal Endurance training regime was going to pay off during the run.    I had done a half marathon last month at the Redmond Watershed and since then had been running fairly low mileage only up to a 7 mile distance on a weekend run but always kept my heart rate in the aerobic phase below 125bpm and sticking to nose breathing through my runs.  My plan was to do this keeping my breathing steady through my nose and not push my heart rate up.  I wasn’t competing like I did at the Redmond half but I sort of hoped I’d set a new 25k PR just because I was dealing with about 1100′ of elevation gain instead of 3000′.   This was going to be the longest distance I’d run since getting sick 2.5 years ago.

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