A Life in a Day, Redux

Speed, strength & mental time travel

Hello again! Last Wednesday, for the first time since launching this newsletter in September of 2021, I took a vacation break and did not publish that day (although I wrote a bonus post for paid subscribers). It feels good to return here. Today, I’ll offer a bit of practical advice and then share a personal essay—a journal entry—as a way of introducing some of my background to this audience.

Heading out for a run in Mammoth during our vacation, walled in by snow.

One day a little over a week ago, I ran next to a story-high snow wall above the town of Mammoth Lakes, California, during our family vacation to the Eastern Sierra. Where the road ended, ladder-like steps cut into the snow to ascend the record-level snow base, leading to a hard-packed path groomed for Nordic skiers and snowshoers ringing the high-alpine lakes. At this trailhead, I spotted another set of snow steps that descended to a dug-out front door of a fully buried Forest Service office.

I couldn’t get over this incredible snow, more impressive even than what we’ve seen in Colorado.

The Forest Service office buried, with snow steps going down to the front door.

Glorious hard-packed paths to run near the lakes above Mammoth.

Then, two days later, I ran along sun-soaked Venice Beach in short sleeves on a perfect 68-degree spring day (my appreciation enhanced by the forecast calling for another rain deluge). I mostly stuck to the paved bike path but periodically hopped onto the sand to experience the challenge of sand-running, a skill honed by desert races.

A perfect spring beach day at the Santa Monica Pier, where I ran the bike path.

I relish this diversity of running climates and terrain—from high-altitude snowscapes with traction devices strapped to my shoes, to sea-level coastlines with flat, fast segments and kaleidoscopic people-watching. While I should never complain about living and running in the San Juan Mountains (and in fact, I’m drinking from a coffee mug whose printed saying is a good reminder: “If you’re lucky enough to live in Colorado, you’re lucky enough”), I do miss the contrasts and color in California.

California is so screwed up in so many ways, and yet, it always will hold a piece of my heart. I know I’m feeling a bit homesick for my other home state because this is the shoulder season in southwest Colorado when the longer days and strong winds melt and shape the landscape into a pallid palette of grays and browns mixed with white. The snow develops a crust hard and sharp enough to scratch and draw blood if you make the mistake of optimistically running in shorts and then accidentally post-hole in a snow drift.

A shot from my run yesterday above Telluride, showing the ski slopes in the distance, the normally colorful landscape in muted tones.

My favorite ladder workout

On the beach bike path, I felt zippy and motivated enough to do a speed workout using timed intervals.

Running timed intervals, as opposed to precise 400-meter intervals at a track, can help you run more by feel than by precision. It’s good for someone like me who used to run track weekly and consequently had a very precise, to-the-second notion of what I “should” run for time (e.g. 3:03 for 800 meters). Now, I’m so much slower due to age and normalizing a slower pace in the rugged mountains, I’d feel overly discouraged by my times on a track.

By contrast, off the track, I can run by perceived exertion for a set amount of time and think less about how the pace or distance measure. Timed intervals also are easy to adapt to a treadmill.

Ladder workouts—so called because the intervals’ distance (or time) step up or down—are great for variety. I like descending ladders because you get the longest interval done first, so the workout feels progressively more manageable even as the pace gets more intense. This is a 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 ladder and adds up to 30 minutes of quality running, with effort ranging from tempo level (“comfortably hard”) to V02 max (as close to max effort as you can sustain).

• Warm up with easy running for 10 minutes.

• Do a set of 6 x 30-second strides with 30 seconds easy-jog recovery between them (strides are short, fast accelerations, not all-out sprints but strong surges; they warm you up for faster running and quicker turnover while promoting good running form); then run easy to fully recover from those strides until you’re 20 minutes into your run.

• Then, do the ladder workout of 10 minutes, 8 minutes, etc., down to a final 2-minute interval. Jog very easy for 2 minutes in between each interval. It’s OK to walk a bit following the interval if you need to in order to catch your breath, then jog super easy the remainder of the 2 minutes.

• The first 10-minute interval should be at what feels like tempo level—focused, flowing, and hard enough that it becomes difficult to talk in full sentences; but, it should feel manageable enough that you could maintain this pace and effort for the better part of an hour if you had to. On a rate of perceived exertion, with 5 - 6 being easy running and 10 being max effort, it should be around an 8.

• With each shorter interval, increase your speed and effort, so that you progress from what feels like a 5K race pace at the 8- and 6-minute intervals, to closer to all-out effort approaching 10 on the perceived exertion scale for the 4- and 2-minute intervals. Give it your all on that final 2-minute effort, and finish sprinting in the final 30 seconds.

• Cool down with at least 10 minutes of very easy running.

Phew. Right on! (If you want to read more on speedwork, check out this earlier post.)

Stay strong

Now that I have recovered from the recent 50-miler, I’m back to a higher-intensity run once a week with some form of speedwork, plus strength training a couple of times a week. I listened to a recent podcast with coach Mario Fraioli, who interviewed a strength coach who’s also a physical therapist, and I recommend the episode (listen here) for a shot of motivation to make time for strength and mobility work. It doesn’t have to be a ton of time; try starting with a 20-minute block tacked onto the end of a run. See my post on conditioning for guidance on why and how to start.

On the last day of our vacation, as we spent the night in Flagstaff on the drive back from LA, I went to the hotel gym with some trepidation because I felt gross from the daylong drive and from a week of eating heavy restaurant food accompanied by beer. I could tell without stepping on a scale that my weight was up several pounds, which is not a big deal—thanks to high-altitude living and running, my weight, thankfully, stabilizes at a fit level without me thinking about it too much—but on that day, I felt puffy and stiff. Gross.

Then, in a nicely designed hotel gym that I had all to myself, I surprisingly felt supercharged and strong. My improvised workout went like this:

• cardio & plyo warmup (a couple sets of jumping jacks, jump squats; then high knees, butt kickers, fast feet while running in place)

• squat & lung variations weighted with 10lb dumbbells (reps to fatigue for this & all movements)

• single-leg Romanian dead lift weighted

• bicep curl to overhead press while balanced on one leg

• heavier bicep curls plus lateral raises and chest press with heavier dumbbells

• hamstring curl and glute bridging with feet elevated on a big ball

• more glute work in tabletop: bird-dog, knee rotations, mule kicks, fire hydrants

• V-ups transferring the big ball between legs and hands, then reverse crunches and supermans

• stretch, especially hip openers and hamstring stretch

• warrior 3 and dancer's pose for balance

I felt so good, I took a selfie while moving into a less-than-perfect dancer’s pose and wrote the following in my training log. I’m sharing it here as inspiration to move your body in ways other than running and to lift heavy things—and mostly, to give yourself kudos and love.

I realized, looking in those mirrors, that I feel amazed and grateful and proud of my almost-54-year-old-mother-of-2 body and all it can do, and how far it has run, over the past 30 years. It feels downright good to feel good about my strength and size, in spite of sagging skin on my thighs and abdomen. Gravity is taking hold of my skin—every part of my surface has tiny and not-so-tiny wrinkles and is hanging loose—but my muscles and bones, and lungs & heart, are staying strong. Amen!

A day in a life becomes a life in a day

I’m taking part in a 30-day journaling project hosted by one of my favorite newsletters,

The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad

. It's succeeding in making me write daily, and that writing takes me to places I didn't anticipate.

On one of the first days, I followed a prompt: Recall the last 24 hours, and observe the moments, mental pictures, scenes, or objects that pop up. Choose 10 and write them down.

I described scenes and thoughts from last Saturday, when I drove 45 minutes to Norwood to run three hours with my friend Suzanna and then spent time exercising our horses. I’ll share two of the scenes from this journal entry, because it mentally took me to different decades from my past:

I pumped gas at the Sawpit station and smelled barbecue smoke coming from the grill, so I went inside to look at the menu. They had pulled pork for sale, but I didn’t buy any because I already had dinner planned. I just wanted to be back in the store, to look at the shelves stocked with mini-market snacks and close my eyes and try to recall how it looked a half-century ago when I was the little tag-along with older sibs, and our family stopped there on the way to Woods Lake for picnic supplies—hot dogs, buns, Hershey’s bars—and bait.

The man at the counter asked, “Have you been here before?” and I said, “Off and on my whole life. I have a fantastic photo from my parents, from the early ‘70s, of this store.” I should print a copy and give it to him to display. It shows the store without its current wood façade, when it was a boxy building painted white with bold red letters and a Coors sign. Those Coors signs were everywhere back then.

Our family photo of the Sawpit Store along Highway 145 fifty years ago. My parents owned a tiny summer cabin across the road for a few years back then, when I was a toddler, seen below. They called it “the tar paper shack.”

I like going into the Sawpit Store’s bathroom because Telluride newspapers from the late 1800s adorn the wall, and I can find advertisements in the newsprint for my great-great-grandfather’s insurance business. I feel my family and the passage of time there, and I miss my parents.

After getting gas, I drove the windy highway between Sawpit and Norwood, rimmed by the San Miguel River and red-rock canyon walls. The Jesus Jones one-hit-wonder song “Right Here Right Now” from 1991 came on the Sirius station. The song is about the pro-democracy revolution from the late ‘80s. “It seemed the world could change in the blink of an eye.”

My eyes followed the highway as I drove, but my mind took me back to the first time I heard that song on MTV while standing in the bedroom of our first rental in Sacramento when we were newlyweds, having gotten married two weeks after our UC Santa Cruz graduation in 1990. I was only 21. We rented a midtown “carriage house” that was a tiny historical cottage behind a bigger house; it was so small, it had a “1/2” in its address, 1810 ½ T Street. The TV was on our dresser (the Ethan Allen dresser from Morgan’s boyhood), and the bed was a king-size futon in a thick wooden frame Morgan built and stained himself, back when he was into wood projects. The forest green “dog sheet” covered the bed, which we put over the comforter so our 90-pound yellow lab Sadie could sleep with us, and in the morning we’d take the sheet outside and shake out all the dog hair.

The lyrics about the revolution and the world changing gave me goosebumps of awe, and I mentally traveled back to senior year in college—yes, a flashback nested within a flashback—when I was in a writing seminar with Roz as the professor and with friends I made while working on the campus newspaper, including Rachel. I hang onto this and other memories of smiling dark-haired Rachel who always wore stylish hats, because some 20 years later she would commit suicide by hanging herself in her closet, leaving two toddlers and a husband behind, apparently driven by shame and despair after losing all her savings to Bernie Madoff.

Our seminar met at Roz’s house on campus that afternoon, and she rushed into the living room from another room where a TV was playing and said, “The Berlin Wall is falling!” Instead of talking about our thesis projects, we gathered around the TV and talked about the wall and how it related to Tiananmen Square. We had been raised during the Cold War with two superpowers, and the world as we knew it was changing in ways we couldn’t fathom. We were still shaken from Loma Prieta earthquake the month prior and all the aftershocks that leveled the downtown and made us student journalists work overtime to help cover the news.

The Jesus Jones song ended, then AWOLNation’s “Sail” from a little more than a decade ago played next as I neared the Norwood Hill, where I was meeting Suzanna to run. Mentally I was jolted back to my old Subaru driving Colly, during her 8th grade in 2012, and her friend to their circus arts class in West Oakland. I navigated the freeway curve connecting the 580 to the 880 and looked at the twin towers of the Oakland federal building, where I briefly covered U.S. District Court for a legal-affairs newspaper and had a mental breakdown that ended in tears when I couldn’t understand a patent case involving the biotech firm Chiron. I shudder now at the memory within the memory.

My daughter told me to turn up the “Sail” song because she and her circus partner were developing an aerial silks act to it, part of a steam-punk-themed show that March. She had found her thing and her tribe—the circus. She had the talent to pursue Cirque du Soleil, but thankfully, she didn’t go that route, because she watched a YouTube documentary about Cirque du Soleil stars being underpaid and injury prone.

My kids in 2012, ages 13 and almost 10, when my daughter was in costume for a circus performance.

At the time, I wasn’t aware of that band AWOLNation. I asked her, “You know what it means?” She looked at me blankly in the rearview mirror, so I explained how “AWOL” means “absent without leave” in the military. “Maybe it has something to do with one of the band members?” (Turned out, I was right.)

“I didn’t know that,” Colly said, sounding genuinely interested, and I felt satisfied for that brief connection and tone of respect. Then I went back to being quiet in the driver’s seat so I could listen to her and her friend talk.

Driving my kids and their peers provided the best insight into their young lives. Driving my kids provided some of the best moments of my life.

They are grown up now. So am I.

Two final recommendations & note about this post’s title

I really enjoyed this Singletrack podcast episode with guest Brian Metzler talking about the sport’s media and the evolution and professionalization of trail/ultra running. Since I used to write regularly for Trail Runner magazine (which Metzler founded) a decade ago, I’ve always followed the sport’s growth and media with curiosity. This episode relates to a conversation I had last year and wrote about here with Meghan Hicks of iRunFar.

This post’s title, “A Life in a Day,” comes from a quote by legendary ultrarunner Ann Trason, who likened the highs and lows of a 100-mile run to a life in a day. Billy Yang made an excellent film with that title about four female ultrarunners in the 2016 Western States 100; watch it here (and see if you can spot yours truly in a brief cameo 49 minutes in high-fiving Anna Mae).