Zero to Two Miles

Tomorrow, eight weeks before the LT100, my brother Tim and I will drive up to Leadville to get in some high elevation running at the LT100 Training Camp.  The plan for Saturday is a 26-mile run from May Queen to Twin Lakes, apparently with some ice climbing near the top of Sugarloaf (or so the trail reports suggest).  Sunday's run was supposed to be a Hope Pass double crossing, but the glaciers on the Twin Lakes side of the pass have not receded enough to allow us to run that side of the mountain yet.  So, we'll get a reroute for Sunday, but at least we'll get to climb and descend the steeper Winfield side of the pass and log probably 20 or so miles.

Now, I casually describe this upcoming 46-mile weekend (above 10,000' with several thousand feet of elevation gain) as if it were a normal, no-big-deal thing for me.   And frankly, in the last several months, it's almost become that.  But what I need to remind myself -- in fact, my main goal in writing these things down here -- is that ten months ago a 50-mile weekend was unthinkable.  I truly started at zero-mile weekends (hell, I was logging zero-mile years), like this blog's title says, zero to one hundred.  Now, I'm not "there" yet -- I haven't gone one hundred miles, yet -- but I've made modest progress in the right direction.  And though it is against my nature (usually) to look backwards or to pat my own back, in this situation, I think it's worthwhile to remind myself of that progress and that my training is working (mostly) -- especially when I feel like I'm way out of my league, like my ignorance has colluded with my arrogance to allow me to bite off way more than I can chew.  Sometimes, when such thoughts try to creep into my head, a quiet reminder of where I was ten months ago, and where I am today, gives me confidence (hopefully, not false confidence) that I'll be where I need to be in eight weeks.

So, with that purpose in mind, over the next few blog entries, I'm going to recap for posterity the last ten months of this adventure as best my waning memory will allow.  I've kept a haphazard training log on my refrigerator, and I began using a Garmin early on, so I should be able to recount at least some of the training details with reasonable accuracy. 

2010 LT100: me & Tim

As you know, my experience last August pacing my brother at the 2010 LT100 inspired me to run the race in 2011.  However, registration for the 2011 LT100 didn't open until sometime in November.  So, between August and November, I merely considered running the race, without actually committing (mentally, financially, spiritually) to it.  I knew I wanted to run the race, that it was exactly the kind of goal I could get into, but I'm not as impulsive as I might seem.  So, in that three-month period before I'd fully committed, I kind of tested the trail running waters.  




Horsetooth Reservoir

  For my first training run, in August 2010, I drove to the east side of Horsetooth Reservoir in Fort Collins to run on the trails that I assumed would snake around the reservoir because that seemed to be where a real trail runner would run, and I didn't know where else to go. 


Note:  the main photo at the very top of the blog is another view from the top of Horsetooth Rock, which months later became one of my bread and butter training grounds.  But back in August 2010, I had no idea where any of the trails were.  So, I just parked my car at one of the car pullouts on the side of the road, put on my six-year-old Brooks road shoes and ran through the knee-high grass near the side of the road for about 20 minutes, covering about two miles and never finding an actual trail.  I didn't realize that I had parked at about the only car pullout along the reservoir that didn't have a trail right next to it.  So, for my first trail run I never ran on an actual trail at all -- an inauspicious start.

I wasn't exhausted by the end of that run, but I was tired, hot and thirsty.  Twenty minutes was definitely enough for me that day, I recall.  I was also a bit frustrated because I knew there were actual trails all around the Reservoir, but I just didn't find any of them.  Still, I remember feeling a small confidence boost after that first 20-minute run and thinking that, despite the objective audacious absurdity of the thought, I just might be able to pull off this Zero-to-100-thing after all. 

Most memorably, I felt a tiny bit of that primal and free feeling of running in the wild, and I liked it.