Grand Masters Running

Earlier this year when it was time to plan a vacation for the summer, my wife, Becky, and I decided to do something different.

It’s something we do all the time – trail running – yet never in this format.  We decided to sign up for a multi-day trail running trip down the Rogue River trail in Oregon.   The concept is that all we do is run about 15 miles per day for 3 days while all of our gear, tents and food is taken down the river in a raft where it meets us at appropriate locations each day.  In addition, the running and river guides setup the tents and cook the food.  For a trail runner this sounds like heaven!  We booked our trip with Momentum River Expeditions  based mostly on reviews and the trip guide.  The guide for our trip is Jenn Shelton of the book “Born to Run” fame in addition to having the record for fastest female time for 100 miles in the U.S.  To enhance the experience we managed to convince a couple of our friends from Colorado to join us.

Being that both Becky and I are in the 50+ age range, we’re attempting to train such that we are in good enough shape to complete the 40 or so mile run comfortably without training so much that we get burned out or injured.  We’ve both started out with a decent base of being able to run 10-15 miles easily.  The trick is to be able to do it for 3 days in a row.  In general, our plan is to slowly increase our weekly mileage with weekend back to back runs increasing to 12-15 miles each with weekly totals of approximately 35 miles.  We’re also doing a mid-week longer run.   So far so good.  We’re about 6 weeks into the training plan and feeling good!

More updates to come.