April Training Update

The big news is that I'm not sick anymore--woo hoo! Man, whatever I had was crazy. Apparently, I'm not the only one. A bunch of people I know had some never-ending flu this winter/spring. I'm also not injured so my main training goal for the year is still on track.

To give an example of how often I'm uninjured, at least when it comes to climbing, Bob and I were climbing in St. George at the end of my illness and, I guess, something seemed off to him (probably me not complaining about something hurting) prompting this statement out of the blue, "Hey, you're not injured anywhere, are you?" as if it were a condition he'd rarely seen--and we've been climbing together for 10 years.

One of my personal problems living in SoCal was lack of new things for me to do. I have an explorer's mind and have trouble doing the same things over and over. Therefore, when I'd climb--which was only during parts of the year, usually the off-season for racing--I'd try and rush back into climbing shape because I'd already done almost every "easy" route in SoCal so that the only thing that held in real interest was harder stuff. This would generally lead to a quick improvement in my climbing level, to overexuberance on a certain project, to injury. This may sound stupid and, well, it is. But it's also the path that most (no exaggeration) climbers go down. Hang around a group of climbers and, if the conversation is on climbing, the chances of injury being a subject is pretty high.

In Utah, there's so much new for me to do I really don't have this problem. I'm happy climbing any grade, provided it's something new. So here I'm a lot more likely to slowly build into shape instead of focusing too much on one thing.

With that in mind, I did do this in Cali this month (see my last blog). This did cause a bit of finger strain so I'm taking a climbing recovery week (big holds). But that's par for the course and it was time for a recovery week anyway.

I had a pretty good running month, with a few runs longer than 3 hours. I plan to up that this month. I have a couple big runs planned, including a some night stuff (and, oh, I guess I need a new 50 miler on the schedule, too).

Biking sucked but the month ended with my longest ride of the year (60 miles over 4 climbs, approx 6,000' of gain), which felt fantastic. This month I'll probably ride a lot more. There are weekly races now and many of our trails have cleared up.

Evaluating my year end goals I'm now pretty far behind. The only thing I've really ticked off are some 5.12s. It's not too bad, however, since my base is building up. If this month goes as planned, I'll be back on track for the summer. And as long as I'm not injured, those goals are really unimportant. It's always about the journey and, uninjured, it will continue.

In other news, Sandee's birthday challenge was off the charts, Phil is attempting one even crazier, bike racing season has begun with plenty of doping news, and my hair is longer than it's been since I was 14.

Catch ya on the trails....