oxygen deprivation part deux

So I headed back up to the summit bright and early on Saturday morning. Josh had to work or something on Saturday morning so I went solo again.

I made it up to the summit about 7:40 and continued my experiment at the Enviromental Research station. :-X I strapped my water pack on and headed down the trail. The weather was a little bit warmer than the previous week and I quickly got comfortable as I moved down. The rocks seemed a little bit more slick than last week. I took extra care going down the first mile. After passing the Cirque, it's safe to open up for a while and run a little faster. I hit A-Frame in 40 minutes.

As soon as I turned around, I felt a cramp in the muscles between my lower calf and my achilles tendon on my left leg. It wasn't terribly painful, but annoying enough every time I tried to push off with that foot. I took it pretty slow during the first mile. It slowly started working itself out and I got through the second mile in 26 minutes. Once again, the last mile was a bear with all the steps up and just being plain miserable. I made it up to the top in 1:28 and was pretty pleased with that. I did feel better with respect to breathing and acclimation to the lack of oxygen than the previous week.

I'm going to hit it once more this weekend and probably take it easy most of next week in preparation for the race.

Probably going to get the bike out tonight and take a nice little ride.