Last year didn’t go as planned. Between an end of April surgery, slow recovery, and a December kidney stone, I’m amazed I got in over 1,200 miles. Andrew has also carried the newsletter for much of that time, as I let struggles to run turn into struggles to write about running.

Sometimes it’s important to take the advice of Ted Lasso and “be a goldfish”. It’s time to look ahead.

So what’s next?

For years I’ve talked about doing some real mountain races and significant trail races, and I’m not getting any younger. So last week I signed up for the Leadville Trail Marathon, 26.2 miles all above 10,200 feet of altitude with 6,000 feet of vertical gain.

As of this week, I have under 5 months to get into the best shape of my life. Tuesday marked both 5 months to race day and the beginning of a new semester.

I am always curious how running and training fits into the lives of people in other professions. In academia, I’m conditioned to think of work in 16 week increments, periodized into smaller sections. A semester runs parallel to a training plan in a lot of ways.

For both a semester (as a professor but also for a student) and a training plan, I find it’s essential to get off to a good start. Discipline and focus early makes later success possible. In the first week of the semester, I’m carving out time to write this newsletter and to start to think about making sure I write an issue every other week. It takes that kind of focus to carve out the time for training, too, because a semester can feel all-encompassing (especially during the pandemic) and training, too, can feel that way. In teaching multiple literature courses, I try to stay a week ahead of the students (but to re-read texts, even stories and novels I know extremely well). For training, there is no way to get ahead, but it is easy to fall behind.

As both my training and semester progress, I’ll use this space both to get into specifics about my approach and to reflect.

About the Altitude

Approaching a race at altitude when all or little no training will be altitude requires some adjustments:

  1. First, for the race, I will arrive in Leadville less than 24 hours before the race starts for packet pickup, because it’s either that or arrive 2 weeks in advance, which is neither plausible nor affordable for me. After 24 hours, some of the effects of being at altitude worsen, particularly sleep disturbances and dehydration. There’s no putting off increased heart rate and shortness of breath, though. And that’s why everything from now until race day is important.

  2. Training has to emphasize fitness. VO2 max workouts are essential to try to increase fitness and maximize efficiency because there’s less VO2 max decreases at altitude by an estimated 8% per 1,000 meters above sea level. This means for a race that is between 10,200 and 13,185 feet (3,010 and 4,020 meters) in altitude, there’s a risk of losing 24-32% in VO2 max. The higher VO2 max is going in, the more a runner can afford to lose. These estimates go back to a 1982 study conducted by Squires and Buskirk that remains commonly cited. What does this mean for training, in the simplest terms? As Jason Koop explained on the Billy Yang Podcast last week, in addressing a question about training at low altitude and racing at high altitude, “The number one thing that you can do, the number one thing by far without a shadow of a doubt, is to get as fit as possible before the race. Train your ass off. Do all the right things in training. Get your cardiovascular system super tuned. Don’t take any shortcuts. Be really smart with it because your fitness is going to carry you 95% of the way there.”

So that’s where I am at. I’m feeling pretty good and increasing mileage and quality of training, but with just under five months to go, I also know this is a challenge. But that’s the point, right? Running might bring all of us a lot of joy, socialization, general health improvements, and more, but I think all of us like to do hard things, or we wouldn’t put ourselves through this.

In two weeks, I’ll let you know how the semester is going and how much I’m succeeding at training my ass off.

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Newsletter 17: “Head In The Clouds: Setting Lofty Goals and Doing the Work”