And For My Next Trick...

Attempting to roll out during Pine To Palm 100 miler
So despite the fact that I have unfiltered tendencies to overshare, I have not included the Radical Honesty Movement in my life's grand experiment. I'm not totally comfortable with violent contact of fists to my face and prefer to keep my friendships in tact. I would venture to say that I'm more likely to adopt the Radical Nudity Movement instead, especially when the temps start hitting the triple digits here in NorCal.

But since everything I do in life right now is for science, I've decided to take on another experiment.

Surprise.

Ladies and gentlemen, for my next trick, I will attempt to run a 50 miler with about 10,000ft. of elevation gain with NO RUN TRAINING.


Mt. Rose Summit
(Photo Courtesy Kelly Maggie Akyüz)
That's 0 trail mileage per week and I quit that shit about 3 months ago. Well, I've had a few lapses where I ran the Blood, Sweat, and Beers 11 miler back in July, and may have ran a teensy bit on my "hike" to the top of Mt. Rose with the girls, but other than that the only training I'm doing for this race is done in the gym.

I will be attempting to finish the Headlands 50 miler on September 12. I'll admit this was a last minute decision, but I've been wanting to run a 50 miler for some time now. I've also been wanting to test my training in its purest form which consists mostly of strength training with some conditioning. Basically I lift heavy weights, push a prowler, do lots of squats, glute ham raises, pull-ups, push-ups, farmer's carries, mountain climbers, hollow rocks, and okay... I might run 400 meters. But that's all the run training I will be doing for this race.

That being said, I am fully prepared to DNF this race, but I doubt that will be the result of little conditioning. I feel that my endurance base has already been established and maintained enough in the gym and my strength is there to get me through 50 miles of hills. The question for me at this point is whether my mobility and joints will survive 50 miles. That's my catch 22. The more I run the less mobility I feel I have, and if I'm running as part of my training my mobility is never at 100%.

But what if I started a race with no aches, no tenderness, and my mobility at 100%? Will I be able to last for 50 miles before my hips and knees lock up or start to hurt? Yeah. I'll be sore afterwards, but I'm sore after almost every gym workout so what's the difference?

I'm a firm believer in the anti-one-size-fits-all training approach. I think there are folks out there like myself who need a radically different type of training just to be capable of completing the long distances. I recognize I won't be winning any medals, but that's never been my goal anyway. My only goal will be to finish within the time cut-off of 16 hours.

So I declare this to be my 2015 Anti-Running Experiment 50 Miler, rather than my Minimal-Running Experiment 100 Miler which I tested back in 2013 at Pine To Palm.

The only thing I have to say about this race right now is... We'll see.

Regardless of how it will all go... I know for a fact that this race will end like this...
Tailgate Whiskey Break (Photo courtesy Charito Bartlett)

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Comments

  1. Can't wait to read about this one! It wouldn't wouldn't work for me because I hate the gym and love to run... Until this past weekend, coincidentally at Headlands 50k. Looks good on you though!

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