Summer Redux

 It's been a challenging three months since my last entry. The monsoon teased briefly in the third week of July, not providing much rain here on the Eastside, but quenching the Bighorn Fire. The story has been more of the unrelenting heat—breaking all kinds of records, including the two hottest months in the recorded weather history of Tucson—without the typical break provided by the big storms, downpours, or even (at the very least) any overcast days. Just brutal, unending heat.

On the plus side, the road to Mt Lemmon opened, and some of the trails a few weeks later. So I was able to get up to Summerhaven a few times to run on the steep roads, then later to Mt Bigelow (which is completely unscathed). There was a little bit of weather around Labor Day, so I rode around The Loop trying to average 18mph, and getting pretty close—missed a few turns and had to backtrack on one short section. Moving time was 3hrs 28min, elapsed time was right around 3hr45min (I got stuck behind an immensely long train at the tracks in Rita Ranch); I think in November I'll shoot for a 3 hour goal.

I was signed up for the Texas Canyon trail race (postponed from the Spring), but didn't feel like going (maybe still a bit tired from the first long ride in a while).

Sabino re-opened on the last day of summer; I did a mixed trail/road run and felt pretty strong on the steep part of the road (I could hear someone on an e-bike behind me, so pushed the pace to stay ahead). But overall, my mileage stayed low, and when I tried to add a little speed on the trails, I ended up with some knee and hip/groin soreness.

A newer event, the Dirty Du Duathlon came up a few weeks later, and that went well. I've never done a triathlon or duathlon or, in fact, any competition that wasn't strictly running. But I was familiar with the course (McKenzie Ranch and the Hohokam Trail). I estimated a time of 1hr55min, about an equal amount of time spent running and riding, hoping for closer to 1hr45min if I really crushed the bike segment. In the opening 2-mile run portion, I kept it fairly easy and averaged 7:40pace. Since I stuck with flat pedals, I didn't need to change shoes, so the transition was really simple. I wasn't particularly fast on the bike portion (9.5 miles, 55 minutes, slightly above 10mph). There's a lot of up-and-down on this course, and my MTB is heavy, really heavy—my HR was getting fairly high on the climbs. But the changes to my bike setup worked well (rear suspension locked out, 20psi in the front, 30 in the rear) and it was really fun on the descents. I eased into the concluding 4-mile run segment, not feeling as bad as I thought I might but still feeling like I just needed to stick to an easy pace to finish things out. So that was like 9:40 pace, but that segment seemed to go by as quickly as the first one. I was 18th out of 45 starters. It would be fun to do this event again next year with a light XC bike and my running fitness much higher.

It is actually cooling down now (mid-October), very very gradually. I've got my sights on three things in the not-too-distant future: a) running the Saguaro Loop fifty times (approximately once a week) going into the Labor Day race in 2021, which will be the fiftieth edition b) training for a 50K in the winter, most likely this would be the Copper Corridor race in Superior and c) doing the El Tour de Tucson century ride in April 2021 and hopefully going under 6 hrs.