More Teaching, Less Running

Well, I returned home after TRT to a different ultra event of sorts. This one will last a year and have one of the best finisher's awards ever, a masters and a teaching credential :)

All corniness aside,my teaching program is going to be intense. We have a few hundred pages of reading a week, two papers a week, plus group projects and curriculum planning. And this is the easiest quarter, since we won't have student teaching until the end of August. Nothing seems that difficult in terms of content, but it will certainly be time intensive.

As a result of this, the stress of lots of changes, and well, exhaustion from the race, I didn't do much running at all this week. I did some cross training and weights monday and thursday, and ran thursday and today, for a paltry 9 mile total. I'll hopefully do a medium sized run tomorrow as I'm checking out the Santa Cruz Track Club for the first time for their weekend trail run at Nisene Marks. That's part of why I did such a short run today (just 3) since I want to be relatively fresh for tomorrow and not embarass myself in front of a whole group of new runners :P I am excited to meet the running group up here and hopefully will make some new friends.

However, what this past week has shown me is that I really need to be on top of everything in order to get in the kind of running I want to accomplish. I'm all signed up for the 50 miler in October, so there's no going back now :) But I do need to make sure I'm properly trained, and that means getting back to strong consistent running. The last time I took so much time off from running was after my January marathon, when I took almost a week off, so it has been a while, but I definitely was less happy and felt less productive with the off time. I'm going to do some research this weekend and try to find some training programs to loosely base my schedule on, to make sure I'm getting in the proper training for it. Any suggestions would be welcome :)

In other exciting news, my Dad is now open to the idea of doing a 50k!!!!! He did 10 miles today, which is super awesome and shows that he's getting back into longer distance running shape . I'm eyeing the Helen Klein 50k for him this November, as I think he'd have enough time to train for it, and it's flatness might make things a bit easier (as well as the fairly lax time requirement of 10 hours, just under a 20 minute mile pace). My master plan is working of introducing him and getting him running with people who do these things normally (I.e. OCTR peoples and people at TRT) so that ultras, especially to 50k distance, don't seem so crazy any more. It'd be so awesome if we could do a 50k together :D.

Photo courtesy of Scott Dunlap from last year's Helen Klein. Dad, if you're reading, proof that there is some trail to run on on the side!

If anyone else has any good recommendations for a first time 50ker sometime in late fall, let me know!

For now, time to be more student than runner and get some reading done :P

*edit* I'll admit I'm a bit nervous about the group run tomorrow. What if they're all super fast and leave me behind? What if no one likes me? (haha...I feel like a 3rd grader on her first day of school) I have found, without question, that most all trail runners are nice. However, they're often fast too. I just don't want to get left behind. Think if I'm super slow they'll buy my 50k excuse? It has been over a week, but really...my legs could still be tired, right? I have looked at pictures of the park, though, and I think it'll be a gorgeous run regardless. Alarm is set for 6am so that I can go play with the other kids. Wish me luck!