February in Review and some KOL

February was a great month for my training and was much stronger than January. It still was not as consistent as I would have liked but it seldom is.

Total summits of Mt. Doug = 53

Total Elevation = 22,500 feet

Total Mileage = 135 miles

I wanted to finish February with over 60 summits but it didn't happen due to some schooling conflicts, late nights, and long weekends in the books. I am definitely going to improve on this consistency this upcoming month and keep pushing. I would love to break 100 summits this month but that is over 4 a day and I don't know if my legs can handle it. With only 11 weeks until I hit Utah, and I start bagging 2-5,ooo foot prominence runs at high elevation, I am going to need way more training in these few short months. I am a bit worried about transitioning from sea level to 5-12,000 feet as well. From what I read the first few days will be alright but after a week or so at higher elevation I will breakdown a bit. Should be a good experiment to help prepare me in the event that I run a 100 miler in the mountains while I am training at sea level.

Thursday saw one of my fastest Mount Douglas Gutbuster training runs with me coming in at a smidgen over 54 minutes. The run started fast and I felt good and so I went with it and really pushed myself the whole time. I really flew on the downhills making serious tracks and shaving most of the time off the descents.

Saturday saw one of my slowest runs of the Gutbuster course. I have never ran the course in reverse, surprisingly, and decided to give it a go. Since Mount Doug is a glacier feature known as a "Roche Moutennee" it is an asymmetric mound with a gentler slope facing the north or the direction of ice advance and has a very steep south slope where the glacier plucked rocks from the lee side forming steep ledges like the image below.

The typical route summits the mountain on the North side of Doug first, then the north side of Little Doug second, and the third summit is up the steep south slope. When you run the course in reverse you summit the steep south slopes twice and the third summit is up a gnarly steep side of the mountain known as the bedrock buster. This reverse course was a real butt kicker and I saw one of my slowest course times at over 61 minutes. I did have a bad day and was running with a stomach full of less than tasty lunch that was definitely not rocket fuel. You gotta have the rough runs to appreciate the good ones. I think I will start incorporating more of the reverse runs because of the nasty steepness, it is a nice variation on an already technical course.

I had so many songs playing in my head this past week as I plugged away at my training runs that I really struggled with picking one to showcase for this post. There were three in particular that were excellent and I decided to go with some older Kings of Leon. I really like the earlier albums from KOL and find all of their stuff great. There appears to be quite a group of people who think they sold out with their new album but I don't see it. I see a band that evolved to a slightly different sound and then saw a wave of success in the states that hadn't always been there. I like their new stuff almost as much. I think this song "King of the Rodeo" is a classic. For some reason these guys kind of remind me a tad of CCR or Seven Mary Three though all three are quite different it just has the same southern feel to it. Enjoy!