This week saw the transition from summer to fall and the end of my training for the Big Sur Trail Half Marathon. All that’s left to do is keep things moving, do a lot of deep recovery, and prep for the big race on Saturday. Earlier this week, I wrote about how this time of year catches me bracing for something to go wrong with my health. In the 11 years since I was diagnosed, pretty much every hospitalization and surgery happened during the fall. I’ve been meditating on letting go of all the other “shoes to drop” in my mind and my goal for the race on Saturday is to celebrate and revel in my good health and fitness (and to finish near 3 hours.)

Training this week was a bit disrupted due to bad air quality from smoke blowing in from fires in Northern California midweek. Our Fleet Feet track day got moved to Thursday, and the air was too bad to really run outside. I did manage to get four days of running in and kept each workout over an hour to keep my fitness high and the miles up. I had one strides session, race pace super loops on the track, the long run, and finished with a 10k where I typically do something shorter. 

This week — despite being all road miles — I incorporated more hills as the Big Sur race has 2835 feet of climbing. The Saturday Fleet Feet long run and 10k from my on Sunday combined for about 1000 feet of climbing over roughly the same distance. 

On the strength side, Coach Menachem had two workouts intended to reload to get back on track from the flu recovery. My metric win of the week goes to intensity distribution which nailed the 80%/20% I’m looking for, where nearly all of my efforts are easy. While the remaining 20% weren’t hard (which would be ideal), I’m still building back so Medium intensity workouts are often still pretty hard.

Lastly, I retired my ON Cloudflyers this week for a new-to-me shoe, the CRAFT CTM Ultra 2. I was starting to have a lot of joint pain, and even though it seemed like I hadn’t had the ONs long enough to wear out, it became clear that new shoes were in order. The CRAFT shoe has a much higher stack height and drop than I’m used to, but I needed something for the higher mileage I’m working toward on the road, and I hate squishy feeling cushion, which knocks out most of the shoes in this category that I’ve tried. After the first run in these shoes I pretty much fell in love with them – the midsole is firm but has a lot of bounce thanks to the PEBA midsole — and the joint hotspots smoothed out.