Mother Nature released a torrent of weather on Colorado with this week, resulting in significant accumulations of heavy, wet, slushy snow, road closures, broken trees, power outages, and race cancellations all over the place!  The moisture is much needed, and a final dumping provides a nice change of pace in training and life.

Saturday:  The first Rocky Mountain Orienteering Club meet of the season took place at Chatfield State Park outside of Denver, and I thoroughly enjoyed navigating the Orange and Green/Red courses set by a fellow area adventure racer.  I squeezed in a couple hours of mountain biking on the gorgeous Colorado Trail from Waterton Canyon before the meet.

Sunday:  90 minutes of trail running before a nice catch-up dinner with Dave Mackey, an old ‘mate from Team Spyder who is focusing again on ultra running and will soon enter Physician’s Assistant school in California.

Monday:  Caught a virulent cold/caugh from the kids at school and almost decided not to train all week but concluded that training while sick promotes mental toughness.  Ran 50 minutes.

Tuesday:  50 minutes on the mountain bike, hacking like crazy.

Wednesday: 60 minutes on the mountain bike, feeling even worse.

Thursday: 60 minutes running on the trails, still sick.

Friday:  Finally turned the corner with the illness and enjoyed 60 minutes of running through snow, now almost two feet deep!

Saturday:  Three hours of running, much of it in deep snow in a blizzard.

Sunday:  Now 60 degrees, sunny, and beautiful!  Road the mountain bike on muddy roads for three hours and went for a nice hike.
Tip of the Week:  If you are not too sick, training while ill provides good mental and physical practice for those times in races when you really feel terrible.  By monitoring your output and not putting yourself too far in the hole, you may even facilitate quicker recovery from the cough/cold.  Note: This advice clearly goes against most doctors’ recommendations.

Up Next:  My teammates will take on the final randonee ski race of the year next Saturday at Arapahoe  Basin while I go for another orienteering meet in the Denver area.

Be Well,
Travis Macy

Photo by Andres Vargas

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 11:31 am and is filed under Primal Quest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.