#21 - Is it 2012 yet?

Wow, time has gone by quickly. Having 3 kids at home now with the new addition in October does not help with extra time for running, sleeping or anything else. So, not sure why I signed up for Leadville but I did, so that is the cornerstone race for the year and everything else will be to prepare for that. There is a large contingent of OUSER that have signed up so it will, at the very least, be a fun outing. Not sure what other races I'm doing this year, but I'm sure I'll be travelling out of Ontario to try to do some higher altitude races or at least more elevation gain/loss. Still early so no need to hurry.

I've decided to get some coaching help this year, and I've been training with Karl Meltzer for the last 9 weeks. Training has bee very from different from last year's approach. A lot more miles during the week and less on the w/e so more of consistent, at least for now and includes some progressive runs (negative splits out and backs). Definitely based more on quality than quantity. Not sure how good I'm going to hold up for the rest of the year since I'm already up to 50-60mpw and last year at this time I was at 30mpw.

I can tell you one thing, running long in winter kinda sucks. Very hard to keep warm and then all of the sudden you are sweating buckets and once that happens you freeze. I guess whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

I've been consistently trying to get into the habit of eating gels every 30min no matter what, even if its a 10km run. I've never been able to this on long races for too long, so I want to change that this year. At high elevations solid foods will not be easy to take down so I'm thinking gels would be the only way to go when times get tough. I've also started taking a product called Recoverite from Hammer Nutrition, on a recommendation from Karl. He takes another brand that is not available in Canada but he believes it help a lot to recover muscle tissues.