Week number 1,034,287

Or whatever week I am really on.  Doesn’t really matter, just how I train and feel.  We are finally into summer here in the high country.  I think that 3 days ago I finally felt that it was warm enough for me to consider it to be summer.  Today the high was 78 degrees.  Yipppie.

So lets start one week ago, the 24th of June.  I suckered a friend into riding mt. bikes with me.  Really it wasn’t that hard to twist his arm.  It was a short fairly easy ride, only an hour and half and my heart rate was low enough that I didn’t have any problems talking and riding the whole time.  I should mention that it is so green and there are so many flowers here that it is hard to not get distracted and just take it all in.

Then Thursday I did a fun run.  We have a whole summer series of fun runs here.  You can get a time but mostly it is a social thing.  So I ran easy, 5 miles in 47 minutes and heart rate never over 140.  I knew that since I was racing on Saturday that I didn’t need to go hard.

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Team Tecnu Extreme/Staphaseptic is normally led by captain “Earring” Doug Judson, a seasoned adventure racer who has years of experience in the sport. But Doug recently suffered a serious injury while training for Primal Quest Badlands presented by SPOT, and the team will now soldier on without him with Charlie Kharsa stepping in to the captain’s role while Judson recovers.

Sidelined until late Fall, Doug is currently rehabbing a partially torn calf muscle and Achilles tendon, as well as a broken bone in the same foot. None of those injuries compare to the sting of missing Primal Quest however, as he says “That’s [PQ] our Olympics and our chance as adventure racers to once again test the boundaries of human endurance with good friends.”

Doug also says he’s disappointed that he’ll be missing the epic course that the teams will be racing on in August. He expects the Badlands to offer incredible mountain biking legs, rope-work, and caving sections. But he also predicts “excruciating death marches” broken up by amazing sunrises and sunsets. Last year, in Montana, he was forced to withdraw after five days on the course due to near kidney failure, as a result of pre-race pneumonia, that put him into the ICU unit. A good run in South Dakota would have helped to dispel the demons of Primal Quest 2008.

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