A bit of winter cross-training

I certainly admit that cross-training is excellent for fitness conditioning but I'm not a big adept, preferring to focus on running and get significant training and racing volume. As a matter of fact, the only time I switch to another exercise activity is when I'm injured. That consists mostly in stationary biking, elliptical, stairmaster, easy walking and some weight lifting.

Anyway, I'm just back from a 3-day break in Tahoe and three opportunities for winter cross-training: cross-country skiing at Royal Gorge, snowshoeing above Incline Village and alpine skiing at Mt Rose. Not surprisingly, cross-country skiing is the activity which has been the most demanding and left my legs the most sore. Since I'm racing 6 hours this Saturday, I'm glad I got that out of the way on Tuesday to get rid of the soreness.

Snowshoeing is a great aerobic exercise but is closer to hiking so it more or less activates the same muscles as in hill running.

As for downhill skiing, it all depends on the intensity. While the weather was warm and sunny, there wasn't enough snow to work hard. Besides, I passed my times of speeding up and risking breaking a leg, something which never happened so far and I'd rather avoid with my passion for running. But we had a great time on Mt Rose's slopes, especially as there wasn't any crowd at all, something surprising in the middle of the Holidays.

Unfortunately, with her recent hip replacement, Agnès couldn't be with us. Otherwise, amazing opportunity to spend these three days with the three boys, a blessing to have them all at home for 10 days. Not sure when the next time will be, let's enjoy this previous family time and present moment, and I hope you too had such great time over the Holidays.

PS: 2 paradisiac views of Lake Tahoe from our bedroom

100 km/week obsession

I have quite a few metrics on my running dashboard but this one in the top 3. And it has become quite an obsession the past years. On a daily basis, I track the distance to this average and feel bad when I'm too far behind. As a matter of fact, I should feel equally bad when I'm getting too far ahead because it's usually when my body is calling for a break or slow down. For instance I was 400 kilometers ahead after the 24-hour Nationals in September but lost all of the buffer as I had to take 6 weeks off running to let the sesamoidis heal. It's actually a tricky exercise to manage this average as I've also been trying to follow Scott Jurek's tip of resting for 3 to 4 weeks between the seasons. To meet the two goals, I need this 300-400-kilometer buffer before the break.

Here we are, getting to the end of the year, and I'm pretty close but slightly behind. To make the matter worse, it is a leap year so I need an extra 14.3 kilometers for a total of 81.84 kilometers to be run by the end of New Year's Eve. I was going to enter the 12-hour event at Coastal Trail Runs' New Year One Day but the family wasn't found at all about a repeat of the 2012 New Year's Eve, so we settled for the 6-hour format, from noon to 6 pm this Saturday (you may follow my progress, live, at http://www.coastaltrailruns.com/nyod_new_year_one_day.html#). At lest, if I don't manage to cover 51 miles in 6 hours, which is rather aggressive, I can always do a few more laps to cool down... In other words, I need to run 49 laps tomorrow at Crissy Field to satisfy my obsession. One more time, as I'm seriously thinking of dropping this weekly average goal next year as I have the feeling it has become too aggressive as a volume for my body now.

It's always hard to let go of a goal, and especially a symbolic threshold like this one, but I already feel blessed to have been reaching this 3,200 mile/year milestone for the past 6 years. I know many can't log as many miles, for various reasons like the lack of time, other priorities or constraints, health condition or fitness level.

That leaves me with 80 miles to reach the New Year, see you there in a few miles!

PS: by the way, not only did we have one additional day this leap year but did you know we were also getting one additional second to make up for some approximation in the calculation of our orbit around the sun. Read more about this rare phenomenon from National Geographic or NPR. The fact that the last minute of 2016 will be 61-second long is rather interesting from a computing standpoint...