Creeping up to the magical 40 miles / week running right now. There are always those things you wish you could tell your younger self – I’ve been thinking a lot about that this summer as I close in on another decade. I’ve rediscovered the joy of long, slow runs. My training has historically been spotty except when training for a race, where I’ll get more disciplined about periodized training and making sure the build is coming on slow and I’m “generally” prepared (physically) for a hard effort.

I wish I had run more slow miles in the past 20 years.

It’s a really hard concept to grasp, when you train hard, you get results, no pain no gain. It’s true to some extent, but there is another way.

In May I started running just base miles. Keeping an eye on heart rate only, not pace. At all. I’ve changed my primary routes to be relatively flat. It’s boring. It’s painfully slow. But then things started to click.

My Heart Rate Variability jumped and has been consistently balanced. I started sleeping better. My overall “productive” indicator of fitness load (according to Garmin) stayed in the Maintaining state. I haven’t had any fatigue after 7 – 10 miles runs. I’ve been following up a 10 mile run with a 5 miler the next day.

On the long, slow runs I would think about building the aerobic base. Building a big engine. And musculoskeletal adaptation. Most of May I ran in the MAF zone (maximum aerobic function), for me about 131 bpm. I could read a book out loud at that pace. It’s slow.

In the past 5 weeks I started to mix it up by climbing up to aerobic threshold (Zone 2). If the terrain was a little hilly, I would allow my system to jump up to threshold, north of 155, then on the descent, pump the brakes and bring the system back down to 130 bpm.

Over the next few weeks I’ll start to mix in some anaerobic threshold work – probably hill repeats, and continue to increase the long runs. The long term goal is to polarize the training, 80% slow Zone 1 engine building. 20% hammering VO2 Max expanding. Nothing in between.

Last Sunday I set out on an empty stomach from my house to the top of Council Crest – 14 miles round trip. I carried with me a collapsible water bottle and 2 gels. Around 6 miles at the start of the long climb up to the park, I filled my bottle up and ate one gel. The volcanoes were socked in at the top, so I didn’t get any views. A quick turnaround back to downtown and then I filled by bottle again near PSU and ate another gel (caffeinated this time). It was like rocket fuel. I felt great climbing back out of the valley to home. It was the chillest 14 miler I’ve ever run. I thought about taking a lap around Mt. Tabor, but I needed to get home. Heart rate was in Zone 2 most of the run, until I started to open it up a few miles from home on the hills.

I’m not sure what to do with this fitness. Maybe a Fall marathon, maybe something bigger. I feel the pull of another 100 miler. I know I can PR my second one. There is some wisdom coming to bear. We’ll see.

I didn’t even know Tool released a new album (2019?). I’m a sucker for prog rock. This song makes me think of warfighters in Ukraine. Or maybe old rock stars, or old adventurers.

Hey you! You should do that thing you’ve been putting off – start tomorrow when you wake up. Slava Ukraini! Memento mori.

Croissants with strawberry jam, strong coffee, dinosaurs from Japan, and endless corn snow. We camped out Sunday night and got to the mountain early. Great day to be on the mountain and always a treat when the Palmer lift is running.

I snuck away for a quick overnighter to Hood on Friday, but had to get back to my weekend work Saturday morning. For the past 4 weekends I’ve been remodeling a bathroom in our house.

One thing I’ve noticed in how I work is that I tend to be too precise. And it *always* bites me in the ass. For example, the 4x post with the tape measure sitting on it is the end of a half wall enclosing a walk-in shower. As it’s a half wall that will be tiled, it can’t flex…at all. So the post is bolted through joist into the basement and then blocked and nailed on each side with 2×6 framing. It’s solid. I drilled out 3 holes in the post: 1 at the bottom (to rotate it plumb) and 2 above (to fix the location), an upside down triangle pattern. I used the drill press to make sure the 3/8ths holes were perfectly straight through the post – I find it impossible to hand drill in a straight line. Then I clamped the post to the joist, used the level to make sure it was level and plumb, then penciled the corresponding drill holes on the joist.

Sounds good, right? So the bolts are also 3/8ths. Precision. Perfect fit. I drilled the joist and then bolted the post through. it was off by nearly 20 degrees. Totally not plumb. I had to take everything off and check the holes through the joist. It was as if some gremlin moved the post when I was drilling. I have no idea how that happened. Lesson: if you have a 3/8ths bolt, drill the hole to 1/2 inch to give yourself some wiggle room. There was no way it was all going to line up with precision. Not with rough framing.

The plan is to have a curbless walk-in shower (72×36), so the subfloor has to be at the level of the joists to allow the slope from the highest floor grade to the drain. I’m almost finished lowering the subfloor and blocking under the shower to support the weight of the tile.

Next is to build the back shower wall (8 feet 4 inches to the ceiling), finish the half-wall. Then plumbing (toilet is moving), electrical, insulation and rock on the walls, finally tile, sink, toilet install. It’s slow going working alone but the most difficult parts are finished. Demo’ing anything in an old house is like digging up dirt – it expands at least 50% when it comes off the walls.

Should be a nice guest bathroom when finished.

I spent last week working in Prague. It was a week of long days, nights and early mornings. I made the most of the early morning hours to run through the city and take some photos. I brought my Fujifilm XH-1 with a Viltrox 23mm lens. I’ve been enjoying shooting that this focal length (35mm equivalent on a full frame sensor). Most of these are either with the Fujifilm or an iPhone 8 plus (on it’s deathbed … the home button is working intermittently). For this type of trip I would have loved to have a Ricoh GRiii or something high quality but more portable. I ran once with the XH-1 on a Peak Designs capture clip on shoulder strap, but it was a bit too heavy – I had to hold it steady with one hand while I ran.

It was nice to have a non-tourist view of living and working in CZ from my work colleagues, but also to experience the history of the city. I’m reading Prague: In Black and Gold by Peter Demetz – and having some background on the construction of the city and the history of Bohemia in general put the visit in perspective.