12/13-14/14. Saturday-Sunday. Long road run, 1 hr trail run.

The plan has me running both weekend days.  typically a long run saturday, followed by a medium effort 1 hour run on sunday.  i have decided that as much as possible, i will do the long run on the road and the 1 hr run on the trail.  trail is quite a bit slower (due to elevation, trail conditions, etc).  I don't have the time to spare to do my long runs on trail, but this seems like a good compromise.  i feel that when training for a specific run (like trail), some of your time should be spent running on those conditions.  if i trained flat and level running for 16 weeks (like on a track) and then went to do my ultra, it would seriously kick my ass.  not that it won't kick my ass anyways, but hopefully less so if i run some trails as much as possible. 

saturday was 10 miles.  doesn't sound like much in the grand scheme of things, but 10 miles is still 10 miles.  nothing to brush off.  this is the first week of the plan, and starting with 10 on a saturday feels reasonable.  felt pretty good doing it.  ran the same looping route i ran last saturday.  i really ought to try and branch out and find some more variety to my local runs.  try something new. 

sunday was 1 hour on trail, ended up with just over 5 miles.  this was a good run.  the sun came out, and it was cold and clear (maybe 37 degrees).  just beautiful on the trail.  this might be the last week I can get away with running without pants (well, the second week in december is a pretty good hold out for shorts).  thanks to last weeks wind and rain storms, the trails were a mess.  really really muddy, and lots of trees/branches down across the trail.  i did my share of clearing the trail, and climbed over anything that was too big to move.  I felt good on the trail, and actually saw a lot of people (maybe 4-6 over the course of the hour).  I'm glad i could take the time to run on the trail.  I wish every run felt this good, and gave me such a sense of accomplishment.  although i have friends that say they want to try running some trails, when it comes time to give it a go it just doesn't seem to work out.  oh well, their loss - i'm going out no matter what.

so in retrospect, this was a 34 mile week.  in comparison, it took me until week 19 of my berlin plan before I hit 34 miles in week.  so if i call week 1 of this plan roughly comparable to week 19 of the berlin plan, i may have my hands full this time.