Dances with Dirt

This weekend after labor day is the day that I look forward to most every year from a running point of view. That is the weekend that Dances with Dirt falls on every year and it is my favorite race of all time. It is a 5 person, 60 mile relay race through some of the toughest off-road trails that you've ever seen. If you read through the some of the leg descriptions you'll get a feel for what it's like. The picture above was taken after I finished one of the tougher legs of the race, affectionately called, "This Sucks." And it did suck.

That one leg pretty much summed up what DWD is all about. It is about 5 miles in length, if you stay on course. I didn't that year, so for me, it was about a 6.5 mile run. The first 3 miles of it are pretty decent trail running. Then you get into the suck part. There is about a mile stretch where you run through mud pits, streams, and just general muck until your legs are numb. At one point, I got stuck waste deep in mud and had to wait for someone else to come by to pull me out. So of course this year, I did what any sane person would do. Demanded that I get to run that leg again. You just don't get to have fun like that too often.

So with my epiphany yesterday, concerning the lack of speedwork in my training lately, I decided today was a good day to actually try and rectify the situation. I went out to Northerly Island here in Chicago and did 3 X 1.12 miles. Yeah, I know that's a bit of an odd distance, but that's what one loop around the Island is, so I went with it. My splits for each of the runs were 5:56, 6:00, and 5:59, which works out somewhere in the 5:20 area for a regular mile. I took about 2 minutes of a slow jog between the hard efforts and did 10 miles in total for the day.

This was actually a very tough workout for me. For whatever reason, I was sore going into the workout. I mentioned yesterday that I never really got sore from the race on Monday, but then it hit me today…and I still don't even think it was from the race. I think the soreness was from the strides I did yesterday. Is that sick? Getting sore from 10 strides? If that doesn't speak volumes for what I need to work on in the last few weeks before Chicago, I don't know what does. Yes, it's time to start working on the fast stuff.