It's a day at the beach

This weekend we started a taper…

I'm not a big taper fan but…. Well you see Judi has a coach

This race that we have signed up for http://geminiadventures.com/new/?page_id=130 is long…  basically a weeklong journey of Ultramarathons… Judi has had never even run an ultramarathon

I am not very scientific in my approach to training. 

My philosophy is:

1.      Trash your legs

2.      Go easy to recover

3.      Repeat

While I can live with wearing myself down to a nub…  doing that to the one I love is not recommended

So we got her a coach…  and well..  like all good coaches she interviewed Judi and asked about her race schedule.  We had the Ironhorse 50 miler down on 19 February…  well…  sickness and injury in December stole our confidence and well..  we never got around to signing up… the race is now full and we are not in..  the training schedule Judi has is busy preparing her for the 50 miler.

We have had a very good January…  and are in pretty good shape…  and now Judi finds herself in Taper mode for a 50 miler we are not going to do.

I have a plan for how to handle this situation…  more on that at a later date.

Back to this weekend.

Taper = 3ish hours.  As both of my blog readers knows…  I like to run in different and interesting places.  A quick check of the Weather…  another to the tide table…  a measurement from gmaps and we had a plan.

Straight down the beach from the public parking at 16^th Ave South in Jax beach to Mickler's landing in Ponte Vedra was a 16 mile round trip. 

Low tide was at 1118 so we got started around 9.

It's funny… that although I did not think of this at the time I planned the route this was the exact spot where we started our first ever run together almost two years ago.

About mile 2 I got a call about the bike I had listed on craigslist…  it would sell in the afternoon.

It was a beautiful sunny February day on the beach… 

When I would fall too far behind Judi would slow down and encourage me to catch back up.

It was hot tho… and while we negative split the run by a good bit I was feeling kinda wiped out at the end.   I did not really expect to need to worry about electrolyte replacement on a 16 mile run in February.  I was pretty well overheated by the time we finished.

I even got out in the water for a bit.

We got in a quick stretch

Sunday was a 90 minute run…  9.3 miles for me… another negative split run with 10s on the way out and 8:45s on the way back.

We had our own little Super Bowl party…  for our dessert we made chocolate covered peanut butter chocolate chip cookie dough footballs

Touchdown!