Deer Scare Me!

I like to run, been running semi consistantly for 6 years now. I wasn't very good with maintaining my running through the winters or 07/08 and 08/09, but this winter I've been doing good and haven't added forty pounds of weight like the last two winters. In the last six years I slowly built up my distance and reduced my pace, only to lose much of that progress when I was too lazy to keep running through the winter semesters of school. Throughout all this I've managed to do a bunch of half marathons, a couple marathons and done a whole bunch of running on my own. But this year, after running real hard throughout the summer and continuing through the winter I've decided to pursue some rather extensive running goals for the coming summer.

My schedule for the coming year is tentatively like this. March: Campus to Campus Half Marathon, April: Peachland Half Marathon, May: Vancouver Marathon and Penticton Half Maraton, June: SCORCHED SOLE 50 MILE ULTRA!!!!, August: 125 km CANADIAN DEATH RACE!!!, September: Kamloops Walk in the Park (54 km), October: Kelowna Marathon.

Main goal is the Canadian Death Race. It will be EPIC! 125 km of trails up and down mountains in the rockies in Grande Cache, Alberta. To get ready the plain is to run, run, run , run, do lots of stairs, so lots of trail running, run more, run longer, run trails at night, and repeat. The training plan I'm going to follow will have me slowly building up my running base up to about at least 75 miles run per week. I don't know about the taper concept though, I'll have to figure that out later.

One of the things I need to get used to that I've never done before is learning to run with the equipment that the Death Race requires you to have. Things such as a headlamp for the inevitable night time run and poles. I bought a headlamp, and the closest thing I can for mountain like trails until the KVR trails melt in March/April is the trails on Knox Mountain. The trails on Knox are still a bit like loose mud, but it's still fun.

I don't know which is prefereable; running with a headlamp and being able to see the ground and have good footing or running without a headlamp and feeling like you are a part of nature. With a headlamp you can see all the deer and any other possible animals that are out there, and the deer's eyes look so weird with the LED light shining into them. And when you see the eyes of a wild animal in the dark you have that half second of hesitation when you try and figure out what animal it is; is it a deer? Or perhaps a bear? Or a coyote? If I were running without a headlamp I would just run right into the animal, and I would run like a scared little pre-schooler no matter what it was. But with headlamp, I get to know if I see a bear about to kill me. I think I would rather not know. And those deer sure sleep in funny places, they all seem to like to sleep resting on the steepest slopes of the mountainside, it's very strange.

Last week one of my runs was a 22 km run. Well actually I ran until 21.1 km and then walked the rest of the way home. I ran my fastest 5 k, and 10 k times I can remember timing. (24 minutes and 48:30) and I ran my fastest half marathon time in the last three years (1:49:30). So stoked! I probably won't try and run faster than that for awhile, instead just focusing on slowly increasing the distance that I can run comfortably, and you know... lots of stairs and hill climbs.

Nazzer