Memorial Training Weekend trilogy: part 3, to the Baylands

35 hilly miles on Saturday, 31 miles to Lexington Reservoir on Sunday, I just had to run 34 miles on Memorial Day, Monday. For that I picked the easiest option, running from home to the Palo Alto Baylands and around the Palo Alto golf and airport. Such a familiar course that I didn't take any picture for a change.

The whole purpose of these training weekends is to run on tired legs, spend hours on your feet and, for me on the mental preparation side, run the distance of the next upcoming 100-mile race which will be Cool Moon this year.

This third run crossed one of the most recent Mid Pen parks, thanks to an arrangement with POST (Peninsula Open Space Trust), a non-profit which I love and support, acting as a buffer between the high value of land in the Bay Area and the need to preserve natural habitat for future generations.

Mid Pen just released a wonderful guide of its 25 parks, available on paper at its headquarters in Los Altos, or in pdf format downloadable here.

During this trilogy, I now realize I visited 4 of these parks (at the top of the list below), plus 6 others at recent races and training runs these past weeks:

• Fremont Older Open Space Preserve (OSP)
• Montebello OSP
• St. Joseph's Hill OSP
• Stevens Creek Shoreline Nature Area OSP
• Skyline Ridge OSP
• Picchetti Ranch OSP
• Rancho San Antonio OSP
• Ravenswood OSP
• Russian Ridge OSP
• Sierra Azul OSP

Plus other local parks, mostly County-managed:

• Upper Stevens Creek
• Almaden Quicksilver
• Lexington Reservoir
• Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve
• Don Edwards (National) Wildlife Preserve
• Rancho San Antonio
• McClellan Ranch Preserve

Mere competition with my friend Chuck Wilson who has been averaging 2 different parks a day since the beginning of the year, yet a list which attests how blessed we are with the number of easily accessible parks all around us in the Bay Area and the Midpeninsula in particular.

These 100 miles haven't been easy, averaging a 8:40 min/mile pace, NOT counting numerous breaks, but I'm glad I reached my initial lofty goal on the road of rebuilding both physically and mentally. And, depleting my body with low carb input, I retrained and rewired key basics for racing, including lowering my weight to what used to be my optimal, a few years ago. Collecting these wraps to send to Terracycle through the GU Energy recycling program.

With that, and following with another 100-mile week, as I write this post a week later, it's time to enjoy some tapering since Coros has been yelling my running was excessive for the past 2 weeks now... Granted, out of 10 ultra runs so far this year, 6 in May! While it feels good to ramp back up I still need to find the right balance not to break again... As we say in ultra running, we are all an experiment of n=1 so good luck to you too!