Great to be back on Black Mountain: albeit wet and slow

I've seen more than a dozen salamanders on my climb to the top of Black Mountain this morning, great to see you guys! I don't know what your predators are but you are blending so well with brown dead leaves that you are even hard to spot when we run slowly so I hope you don't get killed by mountain bikers.

And it was also great to see you guys and gals from my Stevens Creek Striders club, including a few new and younger faces. A good contingent in spite of the rain.

As you can see, I'm back on the trails and it really feels great after this 16-day intermission. I did post an update on my injury last Monday night and it got the lowest traffic of all the 375 articles of my blog, so it seems like you'd rather me talk about actual running than injuries. Well, me too anyway... ;-)

We always say how important it is to ramp-up back slowly after an injury and I'm not sure I'm really following the adage here but at least I did a progression: 6.2 miles on Wednesday at 7:47, 9.3 at 7:38 on Thursday, 11.3 @ 7:21 on Friday and a jump to 28.3 hilly miles at 8:53 this Saturday.

Looking at my log I realize that I "summited" Black Mountain more than 100 hundred times already, and it's always the same pleasure to get such a hill training opportunity and run in this quiet area, yet so close to the busy Silicon Valley.

A few good news:

• I'm running again, phew!
• It has been raining several times this week, at last!
• No major pain along my right tibialis anterior, even after this long run;
• Great opportunity to have a social run with the Striders.

Any bad news?

• Despite some hard cross training, my body had forgotten how difficult it was to run 55 miles over 4 days. Yet, I'll have to run 50 miles in less than 1/3 of day next Saturday...
• With that, I have all sorts of strange sensations in the legs and it wasn't easy not to "over listen" to my body in this week's runs, and refrain from speeding up and using my tendon and muscle more. Patience...

So, overall, very positive progress over the past 4 weeks, I'll go for a few more runs these next few days then it will time to taper again before next Saturday's American River 50-miles. Today's long run was good enough as a confidence builder and slow enough as a confidence "breaker" so I'm not tempted to start too fast next Saturday. With 1,071 entrants, Julie Fingar and her NorCal Ultras team is preparing another ultra feast on a brand new course which will have more trails than these past 34 editions. And the field has 65 entrants in the M50-59 age group, including Tim Twietmeyer for his 34th participation! The fun is definitely not decreasing with the years! ;-)

PS: more pictures from the run...

Running and chatting make for a good social run, including a club meeting in the rain, brrr....

In the wind and rain at the top of black mountain: no Ocean view today, not even views of the nearby hills...

Some water finally making the Stevens Creek stronger, healthier and flowing:

Rain is timely to make these new packs of concrete (Quickrete) stick (several places along Montebello Road):

The Stevens Creek Reservoir is slowly filling up but, at this rate, it's going to be years before it returns to the usual level: