21 Days to Go: A week of sky high running
What? 3 weeks to go you say? Christ, I better get my focus on!
Last Saturday I travelled to Denver for work. I was there Saturday and Sunday and then headed over to Salt Lake City until I got home until Saturday [yesterday] morning. That meant a full week of training and living at pretty high altitude. I was taking that as a bonus.
The problem is when travelling for work to the States the days are pretty long, there’s jet lag involved and the big change in time zones, going and coming back.
Firstly, when it came to sleeping I planned on getting up around 4am most days. This is 11am UK time. This means I am not too far off my incumbent timezone but also means I can get training in the morning before 7am taxis to work.
There’s also the small matter of the altitude.
Denver is over 5,300ft above sea level and Salt Lake City is 4,400ft+ above too. And you can feel it.
By Monday morning I was feeling acclimated and had a tempo session to do before heading across the Rockies to SLC from Denver. The session was a dozy. In the end I did 10 miles in under an hour as part of it, and that is always a pleasing performance!
Monday afternoon I ran in SLC. It was 30 degrees and the city was warmer still. Just an easy 6 miles. An honest day of training!
The run I was looking forward to most was the long run into work from the city centre. Google maps had it at 22 miles. I was going to forward what is known as the Jordan River Trail and expected it to be a mile or two longer. It was to turn out to be exactly a marathon door to door. Except it wasn’t really.
The Jordan River Trail. Needs an FKT I think :)
You see I got lost a tonne of times on the way down and at one point added a full mile detour.
What was pleasing is that I ran 3:01 for the marathon (some tempo bits in there) and wasn’t too bad at the altitude all things considered. Folks in work were a bit taken aback that a) someone would run that distance before work and b) I would run down the Jordan River Trail in the pitch black having started at 4:45am.
The day before I’d run to the start of the trail to suss out the way there. At one point I ran under a bridge where The Rolling Stones’s classic song You Can’t Always Get Want You Want was blaring out and a street worker was offering her services. I said hello, smiled and ran on. When I came back 15 mins later, no music and no one there. Salt Lake City’s outer regions are very different at 4:30am from what they are like at 4:30pm!
Despite being away with work I managed to run 83 miles and put in a few honest sessions. That’s all you can ask. Would I have liked to have done more stretching and strength work? Yes, for sure, but I have come out of the week fitter than I entered it. That’s a good week of training I’d say!
Thanks for reading!
(Written by James Stewart)
