Trail Running

A fork in the road

In our brief time on this earth, we are presented with many choices. When approaching a fork the road, you can take the left fork or the right. Or, you can just sit on your ass and whine about having too many choices. I’m starting to think a good chunk of my fellow citizens on this planet belong to the latter group.

Yesterday was close to being one of those days. With Mt. Taylor looming on my horizon, I don’t have much time for sitting on my ass. I have a lot of work to do.

While taking my old bike to the shop to figure out why it was ghost shifting (shifting by itself and not wanting to stay in one gear for more than one second), I saw this little series of trails heading into the Black Mountains. “Hmmmm,” I said to myself. “This looks promising.”

Which way to go? The easy way or the hard way?

When I went back the next day to pick up my bike (twisted chain link was the source of the issue), I made sure to bring my running gear with me so I could sneak in a quick exploratory trail run between my day of pre-holiday errands. Earlier in the day, I was fired up and ready to run. As the day progressed, however, my energy was waning and I was running way behind schedule. I was starting to turn into one of those folks who saw the fork in the road, and just said, “Awww, to hell with it. I’ll come back later.”

Alas, that is not my fate in this life so I parked the truck at the base, donned my gear and started running. And that’s when I was presented with another fork:

I’m still working with a very tender right knee (methinks Chondromalacia), and had a choice to make. Take the left, more level fork, or take the right fork which is quite a bit steeper.

Well, since I’m a Wholistic Fitness kind of dude, I had no choice but to take the steeper path. After all, that is simply what we do.

The view from the top was pretty sweet. You can see downtown
Las Vegas in the distance and all of Sin City’s casino glory.

This route, although short, gained 460 feet in elevation in about 3/4 of a mile. Ooof. A great calf-burner and my heart rate shot to 90% of max within minutes. Naturally, I wasn’t able to keep that pace up for long and had to walk a good chunk of the route…which still kept me around 80% of my max HR.

I was able to run about one half of the descent until the right knee began screaming at me like it was going to be shredded. So, I walked again. If you look closely in the photo, you’ll notice the terrain is just a tad rocky. Sharp rocks with big pointy corners. Fun stuff to navigate.

And here, you can see my ugly mug after adding my own little
rock to the cairn on top of this particular peak’s summit.

Seems like every race has its own physiologic challenges for me. For my first tri in April, it was a torn soleus. For my second in July, it was a fat belly. For my last tri in September and into my trail run in October, it was ITB in the hips.

I guess Mt. Taylor will be defined by my ability to resolve this knee issue. It’s not like I have a choice, is it? After all, I’ve already chosen my fork in the road and there is no turning back.

hak