2009 In Review

Another year, another decade gone (that is two complete decades for me, for those of you counting). 2009 was a great year for me. I had success in old and new passions and made wonderful memories.

Every December, my dad writes a Christmas letter about our family. He began doing this in 1981 and we have all the letters, 1981-2009, in a binder. This binder is placed on our coffee table around the holidays and it gives a chance for us to read about what was going on in our past lives. Family and friends that receive this letter often tell my dad that they look forward to it every year. While I do not have my own family to write about, yet, I will use this blog for my own reflection in the spirit of recording the past year’s events.

To be honest, the year started out rather unnoteworthy. Indoor track I set no new PRs and for the first time failed to score at a Big Sky track championship, placing 9th in the 5000 and something like 13th in the 3000. I then decided to red shirt the outdoor season, for various reasons. I came up short in the steeplechase as well with a 9:14.94, not being able to best my time set in 2008 of 9:09. In the 5000, I improved my time by the same margin Usain Bolt improved his world record in the 100m, 0.11 seconds.

Agassiz peak

After my short outdoor season, I enjoyed doing some other activities in addition to running. I began swimming, began biking and hiked most of Mt. Humphreys. I then turned my focus to triathlons and put in some really high volume days including a run/swim/bike day with 3 hours and 50 minutes of exercise.

I was my brother’s best man at his wedding on May 30th and spent a few days in Napa Valley wine country. At the end of June I competed in my first Olympic distance triathlon and the Breath of Life triathlon in Ventura. I placed 8th overall and 2nd in my age group and had a lot of fun doing it.

Gina, Andrew, Me, and the rest of the groomsmen

For the first time in a while I feel like I have a huge upside in a sport, something I haven’t felt since I was probably a frehsman in high school. No doubt there are more triathlons in my future.

For the 4th of July my parents, my girlfriend Tina and I met Gina and Andrew, the newlyweds, in Lake Tahoe. The fireworks show was spectacular. Shortly after arriving back home, the fun and games were over and I got an internship at ITT Aerospace Controls in Valencia. I got my first taste of working 9 hour days, 4-5 days/week. Somewhere in there I managed to get in some serious running volume, including my first ever 100-mile week in singles. The hard work I put in during July and August laid a solid foundation for me to build a great cross country season.

2009 Northern Arizona Cross Country, Fourth Place

And a great cross country season it was. I led my first cross country race since 2002, earned All-Conference honors at the Big Sky Championships, was the 3rd best 5th man in the country and joined my teammates on the podium — reaching my goal of placing top 100.

Each race I wrote a detailed race report (some are linked above), all of which I have reread countless times. I am very glad I decided to start this blog this year because I now have an archive of my race experiences. Every time I read about one of those races, I am taken back to that day and I can relive the race. As the years go by, I think this archive will become more and more valuable to me. You can read everything about my 2009 cross country season here.

For the second year in a row, I feel like I have raised the bar in my running and have experienced great success. I now have only one season of cross country and two seasons of indoor and outdoor track left. After finishing those seasons, I may never compete for a team, or even individually, at such a high level again. With this in mind, I plan to continue to enjoy my remaining eligibility and work hard to reach my full potential in running.

I hope you all enjoyed 2009 as much as I did. I plan to have a goal-setting post about 2010 within a few days. Until then, Have a Happy New Year!

Making the Best of a Bum Knee

About a week and a half ago, my left knee started bothering me. I thought it was nothing, so I continued running through it. The pain never got too bad, but it persisted, so I have decided to take some time off of running to let it heal. I have been seeing a physical therapist/chiropractor, Brett Darrington, that helped me recover from many an injury in high school. Here are some pictures my teammates and I sent to Brett for his help in high school: Thanks from Jason, 2005 Royal Cross Country team, 2004 State Champions.

While I wait for Brett’s magic to kick in and let the knee heal, I have been swimming a lot. This month I have swam almost 23 miles. I am really working on improving my stroke as opposed to increasing my swim fitness. I want to be quick and efficient through the water and swimming hard intervals with poor form won’t get me there. With this in mind, I stopped by Big 5 Sporting Goods a couple days ago to pick up a Nike pull buoy and Speedo paddles. After three days of using these new toys I am already feeling a difference. Today, I set a PR in the 50y by two seconds — 30 seconds. Now I need to focus on hitting 50y splits in 30 seconds on my way to 200, 400, 800 yards and beyond.

Merry Christmas

I hope everyone has a great Christmas. Hopefully Santa brought you just what you wanted. He brought me a bicycle trainer so I can ride in the Flagstaff winter. Hopefully I will see the benefits of the winter riding come summer.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Lasse Viren 20k

Good bye Flagstaff. . .

After watching and celebrating my girlfriend’s graduation on Friday, my parents and I headed West back home to Simi Valley. The snow was nice for a few days, but training in it all Winter is just too much for me. Consistency and enjoying training are so much more important than any benefits training at altitude provides.

Upon arriving in Simi on Saturday, I went out for a 10 miler in the rain. Bad news is you get a lot wetter running in the rain than you ever do running in snow. Good news, however, is it was 57°F which means no ice!

. . . Hello California!

Yesterday I decided to run the Lasse Viren 20k in Malibu, Ca. Before the race I started chatting with a guy that looked to be a pretty decent runner (and probably my main competition). He told me he had trained in Flagstaff in 2008. We began talking about triathlons and then he told me he won Ironman Arizona a few weeks ago. Then it clicked in my head that I was talking with Jordan Rapp!

From the gun Jordan, myself and another guy took off. About 400m later, Mr. Anonymous dropped back and I took the lead. I came through 1 mile in 5:35 with Jordan a few seconds back. I continued pulling away with 5:43, 5:41, 6:07 and 6:44 miles (last two were hilly). I reached a flatter, asphault section and dropped back below 6:00 pace with a 5:53 and came through the 10k in 36:46. I ran 72:20 here in 2006, and was debating whether I wanted to take it easy-enough to just win or go for a PR. I thought about my dilemma while cruising a downhill 5:15 mile. These trails were the setting for many tough long runs this summer, including my first-and-only 20 milers. As I reminisced of the many times I have run Sycamore Canyon with friends, the choice disappeared and it was obvious that I would keep pressing on for a PR.

The next miles were 5:36, 5:44, 5:36, 5:43 and 5:23. I opened it up just a bit the last mile and finished in 1:10:35. I am definitely happy with that performance: taking the win, running sub 5:45 pace for 20k at the end of my “first week back,” a ~1:45 PR. . . while being slightly under the weather. I probably shouldn’t be running so hard this early in my training, but I had fun. Assuming I didn’t injure anything yesterday, I am sure the effort will not have any adverse affects to my upcoming seasons.

After the race I spoke with Jordan and his wife Jill for a while. Very nice people. I told them of my triathlon aspirations and they encouraged me to seek out some folks at USA Triathlon (USAT). They are currently living in the area and I tried to explain a few locations for great trail runs and hopefully I will see them around during the rest of my Winter break.

Shout out to my mom. She also competed yesterday and won her 48-52 age group! Winning is in the family . Great job Mom and thanks for driving!

Results

Finals, Snow & Training

At most universities across the nation it is finals week, including at Northern Arizona University. The only difference with NAU is that some finals have been canceled. That’s right, CANCELED, due to snowfall. From about 4am Monday morning till early this morning, the snow never let up over Flagstaff. There is now about 2 feet of accumulation. In fact, last night saw blizzard conditions with wind gusts up to 40 mph, leaving some wicked snow drifts this morning.

Because conditions were/are so poor, NAU decided it would not be safe to require students to come to campus for finals after 12pm yesterday and all day today. Lucky me, I had a final yesterday at 10am (before the school shut down) and none today. My next and last final is tomorrow at 7:30am, and it looks like conditions will be better today so I will be studying like I will be taking the exam.

My balcony. Hopefully we don't need those bikes anytime soon.

For people that missed their final, they have been given two options: either accept the grade they had before the final or reschedule the final exam for the first week of next semester (in January). If you aren’t happy with your grade, it is a crappy situation. Moral of the story: don’t bank on the final boosting your grade in the future — especially at the end of Fall semester.

Training

Yesterday, Andrew Belus, Will Porter, Eric Lynch and I went running around downtown Flagstaff in the snow. We had a great time throwing snowballs at people and cars. Of course this was fresh powder, so the snowballs were plenty soft enough to not do any damage. That didn’t stop one guy from turning his car around and questioning Will with a wrench in his hand. Dude needed to chill out.

Needless to say, it was a great way to officially start my 2010 track campaign.

My van was completely covered in the morning.

Today I decided not to be so brave and opted for the treadmill at my apartment’s clubhouse. I put 10 miles in at around 7:00 pace. Probably a little too fast for this time of year, but I quickly realized that the faster I ran the less time I had to spend on the treadmill staring at a wall. I did bring some tunes with me so that helped ease the monotony.

I noticed that my heart rate seemed like it was higher than it should have been, 166 bpm, for that pace and incline (2%). I have done some reading recently about riding on bicycle trainers (basically using your normal bike as a stationary bike indoors) and there seems to be a consensus that your power output while riding a trainer is limited compared to riding outdoors by how well you can cool your self off, among other things. Obviously there is no wind, unless you have a fan in front of you, to increase the convection coefficient (had to throw in some heat transfer terms as that is what my final is on tomorrow) to help cool you off. I wonder if this was the main contributing factor to my unusually high heart rate. If I have to get on the treadmill more this winter, I will be sure to play closer attention to it and see if I can come up with some good conclusions.

2009 Cross Country

The 2009 NCAA cross country season finished a week and a half ago now. Going home for the Thanksgiving holiday allowed some time for me to think about the season, go over what went well and what needs some improving, and to start thinking about the next season.

I officially started the 2009 cross country season on July 6th, a week after my triathlon. I jumped into a 70 mile week and followed with 80 and 90 mile weeks. It may seem a bit aggressive, but I wanted to get in as many 100 mile weeks as I could. The following week was 77 miles in 6 days (My only day off during the season. Just happened to be the only day all season that I couldn’t make any time to go for a run.) and then I started my first 100 mile week of seven.

This season was a huge success for me. I accomplished both of the goals I set in the Summer: make the top-7 and place in the top 100 at NCAAs. As some of my teammates had some struggles this season, I was actually the only person on the team to score at all seven meets (George Kyte, Aztec, Cowboy Jamboree, Pre-Nationals, Conference, Regionals and NCAAs). When all was said and done, I logged 1,806 miles this season. I have never been as diligent about logging mileage as I was this season, so I do not have a reference to compare with, but I believe that this season far surpassed the mileage I have run in the past. Since high school, I have had a steady increase in mileage and I attribute a lot of the improvements I am making now to that.

In Jack Daniel’s Running Formula, he says something along the lines that the benefits of high mileage are long lasting. My old teammate Marten Bostrom, who was known to run upwards of 120 mile weeks while running collegiality, talked about the benefits he gained from running such high mileage. Now, about seven months after joining the century club, I am convinced.

With this in mind, I had a meeting with Coach Heins yesterday talking about goals for the upcoming indoor and outdoor track seasons. I told him that my ultimate goal in collegiate running was to leave NAU as an All-American — no easy task, but that is why it would mean so much. My best opportunity to reach this goal will be next year’s cross country season and everything I do until November 2010 will hopefully be preparing me. We agreed that a year of high mileage is the obvious route to take. Over the next 12 months, I will try to build my aerobic system more and more with a plethora of 100+ mile weeks.

This is not to say that I am not looking forward to competing on the track this Winter and Spring. For indoors, I will focus on running a good conference meet and contributing to another Big Sky Conference title. If training is going well, and depending on how some of my teammates are running, I may get the opportunity to run a 5,000 at the University of Washington in Seattle. For outdoors, the main goal is to qualify for the first round of the NCAA Championships (aka “Super Regionals”). In the steeplechase, a sub-9 minute performance should get me in. If I am running well enough in the 5,000, a time in the low 14 minute range may be good enough.

Then there is the 10,000. As of now, I do not have plans to make my 25 lap debut this Spring. If the high mileage is feeling good, and Coach thinks I am ready for a good effort, then I will suck it up and give it my best. 25 laps just seems so brutal.

As for now, I am running easy a few days a week and doing some swimming. Since I want to give triathlons a serious try post college, I will try to get into the pool regularly all season. If I can swim once a week up until Summer, I should be way ahead of where I was when I started swimming a lot last May. Next week I will start running more, probably around 70 miles, and should be running 100 miles again shortly after the new year.

Looking forward to may miles of trials, trials of miles ahead…