Thursday 27 March 2008

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!!!!

The runs at the weekend (Easter weekend) were challenging - simply because of the awful weather we had in London. We had snow....snow in London at the end of March....ridiculous!!! Anyway, it felt good to get out of the house which just seemed a little too quiet without Lily.

Sunday's run was brought forward to Saturday (as Sunday's weather forecast was even worse). The run itself was easy...nice pace and we felt strong; I guess the weather took our mind of things. One minute the sun was shinning, then it would start snowing, then would come the rain, and then the hail, and then the sun....repeat until fed up!

Monday's run was supposed to be a regeneration run....it was anything but! Jo and I felt like stretching our legs so we picked up the pace (and our heart rates). Did our fastest 10k for a long time - which is still pretty slow by most running standards, but it was fast enough for us....and it felt good. The weather was pretty dire again.

The rest of the weekend was spent lazing about - with just a little trip to Canary Wharf (on Friday) to shop and eat. We haven't been eating too healthily lately - as hard as we try to avoid the chocolate fest that takes place around Easter we always seems to give in :( Anyway, that kind of explains why my weight loss has plateaued at around 95kg lately. Hopefully I'll get back on track soon as it's pretty important for my weight to be reduced significantly if I am to have any chance of running up and down mountains in Colorado.

Gill (Jo's sister) asked about what altitude the TransRockies will be run at and whether we had any plans for tackling the altitude. Gill and Andy are travelling around South America at the moment, and they are both pretty good trekkers, hence it's a bit disconcerting to discover that they had problems hiking above 4000 metres.

The information we have for this years TransRockies Run states that percentage of distance at various elevations will be as follows:
7,000' to 8,000' - 3%
8,000' to 9,000' - 31%
9,000' to 10,000' - 28%
10,000' to 11,000' - 27%
11,000' to 12,000' - 10%
12,000' to 13,000' - 1%

So we're pretty pleased we don't go over 4,000 metres but we've been skiing enough times at altitudes of around 2,500 metres to 3,400 metres (which is where most of the race takes place) to know how hard it is at that sort of altitude. Jo and I are, therefore, going to invest in a Mountain Air Generator from Higher Peak (http://www.higherpeak.com/equipment.html). The aim is to sleep in an oxygen depleted environment (same as David Beckham did when he broke his metatarsal ;) cool!) We will effectively be following the "sleep high, train low" philosophy recommended by most altitude training research. At least Lily wont have to endure sleeping with us "at altitude" - don't think she would have been too pleased!! ;)

It'll be a few weeks before we are up and running but I'll post an entry to let you know how we get on (that's if Jo hasn't killed me for disrupting our sleep - she likes her sleep!)

Laters
Sat

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