2011 running plans

2011 will be starting much differently than 2010.  Mountains full of snow have convinced me to consider an early spring marathon as a good excuse to start off the season with some good footspeed on the shorter road roads.  For training runs I’ll be circumnavigating Lake Geneva in stages.  Carless, most of my weekend runs either start and end at train stations anyways, so the Swiss Footprint Project (SFP) is fairly natural extension of my thru-hiking background an my propensity towards one-way runs.  Over the course of the year I hope to connect my footprints around a significant chunk of the country.

Once the summer mountain running season opens I will shift my focus to getting some significant vertical.  Since there are no convenient hills to run near Lausanne this will be a significant challenge.  Initially I’ll be focusing on the crest of the Juras and the French Pre Alps facing Lausanne across Lake Geneva, and a return to Corvallis for the Mac 50km.  My hope is to connect footsteps from Le Chasseral near Biel/Bienne all the way down to Geneva.  It's an admittedly overambitious venture, but I like to dream big.  As the snow in the high country continues to melt I’ll be heading to the Swiss Alps more and more.  The main lead up to UTMB, which has over 10000m of vertical will be with the Verbier-St Bernard 100km with 6900m of vertical on 7/2, and Swiss Alpine Davis 78 km on 7/30, which has much less vertical but should still be a good tuneup.  There will probably be another 50km thrown in sometime in June or July for good measure, but my intention is to focus more on vertical and less on racing.

            As the mountain running season shuts down for the fall I will probably return to the lower elevation peaks and perhaps back to shorter road races, depending on how Zurich goes in April.  Looks this year will have a significant degree of seasonality to it.