SB9T Week 1

The last couple of weeks have been fairly light. I carried a twingy knee pain into the Bandit 50k and that meant that the week prior was kept to a minimum. Not so much a taper but more of a full stop. The race took more out of me than I thought so I took and very easy week the week after the race and really only started to get back in the game the following weekend.

So with that in mind it was very light with one run on the Sunday for 7.5 miles and a 17 mile bike ride on the Saturday.

My plan is to get back in the saddle next week and start to ramp up for Santa Barbara Nine Trails which is 5 weeks away!

Bringing my A game to Plan B!

So way back when…well last year! Coming off of Vineman in the Summer the rest of the year plans slowly crystalized into a running, then trail running and then ultra running plan.

As I have already written about I forgot to sign up for Sean O’Brien 50k! Duh! I was waitlisted but then I heard this week that officially the race was sold out and I was out of luck! I was bummed…I kicked my trash can, twice I think, but really I had no one to blame but myself so then I kicked myself! I was bummed out. As I posted on Facebook

So with that confirmed,I  headed off to Ultrasignup.com.This was my first stop…

I had scoped out the Bandit Race as a back up, it’s local but for one reason or another I have never run the trails there. It’s going to be a challenge, there is something to be said about being familiar with the course and I was certainly familiar with the SOB course. ultrasignup has a forecast feature and I am predicted to finish in 6:36. Given all the training I hope I can do better than that but it going to depend on the course and on the heat!

A day later I was signed up for this beast!

Again there was a predicted finish time. Mine was 10:24! WTF! Then I looked at the website and actually read the description;

Oh well, I like a good challenge!

This is followed three weeks later by the originally planned Leona Divide 50 miler, so as you can see it’s a nice ramp up over the three months...at least in distance! As for elevation its more of a pyramid!

Here are the elevation profiles;

Bandit 50k, 6464’ gain

Nine Trails, 12,015’ gain

Leona Divide 50m, 8796’ gain

Just to put these races in perspective, that’s 27,000’ of gain over three days, over half of what I have covered in the last three months!

As the rest of the year shapes up you can follow the plans here.