April 30, 2011

5K and a Powder Day


Never ending winter!

This morning we ran a 5K race hosted by the Salt Lake Running Company. We've had this on our calendar for about a month, and planned to use it as a "sharpening" effort before the Provo City Half Marathon next weekend. Our training has been largely geared towards much longer races, but its always good to bust a 5K and see where you're at.

Andrea was absolutely the star of the day. Here's her recap...
Coming into this race, I hadn't run a 5K since high school, and my best times from those days were in the 19-20 minute range. This morning I ran 17:52, which I am very happy about! I'm not quite used to running that kind of pace at altitude, but clearly the increased mileage and recent addition of some track workouts and tempo runs have paid big dividends.
Her run was really impressive in my book. I can't wait to see what she does in the half-marathon, and eventually the marathon! :-)

Things went pretty well for me today as well. I took the lead after a 1/2 mile and didn't really have any competition... came through 2 miles in 9:57 and then just cruised to the finish in 15:45. I'm happy with that, considering I'm much more focused on the marathon right now. Overall, a successful morning... we both ran good times for racing at altitude, and it shows our training continues to be on the right track.

Here's a little video footage from the race:



After the race, we headed up to Solitude, because its STILL SNOWING NONSTOP! We had ANOTHER April powder day! Right now Alta and Snowbird have both surpassed 700 inches of snow for the winter (Alta currently sitting at 724") which is pretty much a record year. The skiing is great right now and will continue to be for the next 2 months. Unfortunately that also means the SLC valley is probably going to massively flood once it starts to get warm outside.

Here's some shots from the post-5K powder day. We skied several laps on the front side of Solitude, along with another dozen or so skiers... lots of fun!

Skinning up

A little relaxation time

Tomorrow is MAY? Feels more like January!

Andrea ripping

Andrea heading up for another lap

Shredding some powder... but wait for it...

Crash sequence! She tried to kill me! :-) Luckily we both came out of this unscathed!

More turns on perfect snow

Laying some tracks

Andrea and some of our work behind her. Our tracks are the ones down the center... not that mess off to the left! Who knows what those guys were doing. Probably snowboarders ruining the snow, as usual.

Clicking in for one more lap up. We skied a little over 4000 feet. A nice afternoon in the mountains.

And at the end of the afternoon, the snow started back up. Tomorrow will likely be another powder day. Kicking off the month of May the right way!

Some more pictures here.

No comments:

Post a Comment