Unbelievable Things

Eleven months ago I thought it would be a great idea to register for the inaugural Ironman St. George. At the time I was kind of burnt out on Ironman but it was an inaugural event in a nice location that I have always wanted to visit and I figured that I would get back into the groove at some point during the intervening year. Well, Ironman St. George is still going to be an inaugural event in 2010 and it is still in a nice location that I still want to visit but the requisite motivation to train has not made an appearance.

Fortunately though my motivation to train for ultras has remained as high as ever and that has kept up my leg strength and endurance. This past weekend I finally got off my butt and joined some friends for what will probably be their biggest Ironman workout in the run up to St. George. I ended up with 92.5 pretty hard miles on the bike followed by a 5.3 mile run. I was able to finish the workout about as well as I normally would had I been training all along though I think I paid a bit bigger price the next day. I know that I definitely won't PR at the race but that was unlikely anyhow. What is more important to me is that I will be able to finish and be able to call it a nice hard training day.

Training for what? Leadville. That's right. I finally bit the bullet and registered for the Leadville 100 mile trail run. This is a race that I have wanted to do since the very beginning of my foray into ultrarunning. I have looked at it year after year and every year concluded that I wasn't ready yet. However, I recently had a conversation with Johnny Tri and we were talking about Leadville and during that conversation I realized that I would probably never feel READY for Leadville, the course will never get easier or shorter and the cutoff will not be extended beyond 30 hours. The only thing that would change for sure is that I would get older.

I have looked at many Leadville finishers in past race results and their performances at other races and have reached the conclusion that I can finish Leadville. The hitch is that I have to have a close to perfect race and need to drop as much weight as possible. I don't know how my race will unfold but I have dropped 22 pounds so far and am about 15 pounds down from my race weight at the Javelina 100.

So, it looks like everything I do between now and August 21st will be in support of my Leadville attempt.