This is meant to serve as some
resurrection of this blog. I managed to let it fall by the wayside
once I got injured a bit over a year ago. I don't know if this means
it will stay this time. But I do know that in the intervening year,
I've developed as a runner, vegetarian, and diabetic. That doesn't
necessarily make any of this more fun to read, but we'll see how it
goes.
My plan is to begin updating once a
week with summaries of my previous training week. I'm not even going
to speculate whether that will be interesting in any way. But
hopefully, it will include some photos here and there from the many
hours I spend running and maybe some other interesting items.
But I guess I should begin with where
I've been in the past year and kind of reintroduce myself.
I'm Nick. Of interest to this blog,
I've been a type 1 diabetic since the age of 10. Since that
diagnosis, I grew up. I started running distance events in track in
middle school and briefly into high school. There was a brief spell
of football in the mix, followed by several years of sedentary
laziness until I graduated high school, at which point I discovered
road cycling. I rarely raced, except for a wildly mediocre stint in
college, but did complete a coast-to-coast ride the summer after I
graduated college. After college, where I earned a physics degree, I
moved to Madison, WI, in order to obtain advanced degrees in
astronomy, where I am now as a Ph.D. candidate. While I've been
here, I've discovered bicycle commuting and the bicycle as a tool for
travel. Coincident with this, I've begun to eschew the racing
culture of bicycles I so wholeheartedly embraced in college. A
byproduct of this shift away from cycling as a sport was taking up
running as a sport again – the first sport I really cared about.
I don't run on the track anymore,
though. I tried running on roads for a while but found it
disagreeable for a variety of reasons. That's when I discovered
trail running. It fit much more easily into what I want to achieve
with my running, which isn't a whole lot specifically. But it allows
me to run in the absence of cars, on surfaces soft enough that my
body can handle heavy mileage, and to just enjoy the aesthetic nature
of the experience.
As I've done this, I've developed a set
of rules for running that work extremely well for me. But I've also
learned that much of running and what works for you is an experiment
of one. Rarely, do I expect what works for me to work for others.
But I've taken a lot of others' advice to develop the rules that work
for me. If this works like it actually should, those rules should
become evident over time.
Now, for the pressing concern of the
immediate future, I should explain that with my failed attempt to
complete a marathon a year (see every previous post), I took a month
or two off from running, traveled around the world a bit, and slowly
built my body back up which resulted in my shift to trail running.
Granted, I still run a fair amount of mileage on the road, but I try
to limit that to runs less than 8-ish miles, as I've found my body
just doesn't handle the repetitive stresses of the road well.
But as I built my body back up, it got stronger, and I like to think I did it in a smarter way than
previously. And at some I got faster. That culminated in a top 10
performance in a small (heavy emphasis on the small) 10K trail race
last fall. Then, I decided to just start running longer and longer
on the trails, just to see how far I could run. After a base
building period in the (very long) winter, I started beefing up my
mileage to where I'm all of a sudden running 40-50 miles a week with
long runs regularly coming in at the 20 mile range.
And now I've decided to skip the
marathon thing and go straight to a 50 mile ultra. This is usually
met with incredulity. But it's happening. And my immediately forthcoming training summaries will center on building for that race in the fall.
We'll see how it goes and see if I manage to develop a style. I
find it highly unlikely, but someone other than my fiancé should
probably have to put up this. At least you have the option to read
or not. I don't really expect you to though.
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