A quick post today, not a real post but what I might call a ‘mini-post.’  Always a great source for material, Jake Rosen tweeted today about Amy Palmiero-Winters, who made history recently by becoming the first ever amputee to qualify for a U.S. national track and field team.

I owe everyone an update on my injured knee, and I will provide an in-depth one soon.  But in short, it has improved significantly in the last 3-4 weeks.  Perhaps not so coincidentally, in the last 3-4 weeks I also began looking for stories like Amy’s, for viewpoints into how much a person is able to overcome to accomplish his or her dreams.

Placed into perspective, my little knee/hamstring issue, though it has sidelined me for essentially one year, seems like nothing compared to what Amy has overcome.

On Friday, I went for my first run in six months.  It was only five minutes long, on a treadmill, but it’s progress and I know there’s more to come.  If Amy Palmiero-Winters, at 37, can raise two kids on her own, compete in 100-mile races and make the U.S. national team, surely I can overcome this little injury.

Now, it’s back to work, back on the road to recovery.  In the meantime, check out Amy’s story.  If you need a kick in the pants today, her story will give you one.

NFEC Runner with GGB in the background

Well, honestly, I don’t know yet.  But Edie over at the Trail Run Times has a great recap of last week’s 50-mile race during the North Face Endurance Challenge, which I wrote about earlier last week.

She has her date wrong (hey, if you had just run 50 miles you’d get your weeks mixed up as well), but does an amazing job of giving you the feeling of what it’s like to be running for more than 13 hours straight.

To give you an idea of how long that is, in the middle of December in San Francisco, that means you both start and finish while it’s dark outside. So far my longest run is the San Francisco Marathon coming in at a relatively brief 26.2 miles.  My next ultramarathon will be 50K (or 31 miles).   But someday I will run 50 miles!

Click the link at the bottom to read the whole story.

Is it easier to run 50 miles the second time? Maybe. But it’s still hard to run 50 miles. On Saturday, December [5] I lined up with my boyfriend Greg at the start of the North Face Endurable Challenge 50 Mile, more confident than I’d felt the prior two years. In 2007 we’d run the 50K, and in 2008 we’d ran the 50 Mile. This year my goals were to improve my time to between twelve and thirteen hours, and to be gracious to the volunteers and other runners. I’d joined The Endurables running club in 2008, and running with such fast runners (winners of races!) had been both humbling (wow, they are MUCH faster than me) and eye-opening. Eye-opening in that “the fast people” were so gracious to volunteers and their fellow runners. No one ever teased me about being slower (or if they did, they were way out of earshot when they did), and Brett especially seems to view a faster runner on the course not as a rival but as a potential training partner to recruit.

Our plan (analyzed to the nth degree) was simple. Walk the uphills, run the downhills and flats. The NFEC course is frontloaded with hills of the 8 “major” climbs, 5 of them were in the first 23 miles (Bobcat, Pirates Cove, Pan Toll and Matt Davis). If I could keep a good pace (but spare my legs), I hoped to cruise through the last parts of the course, picking off runners and making up time. This had worked well for us last year—we’d passed people starting at the Ridgecrest Blvd (mile 26) turnaround. I would eat a PowerBar GelBlast every 10 minutes and an S-Cap every half hour.

The weather all week had predicted a ~36 degree start, I felt very lucky it was a balmy 49. My coach, Jim Vernon and I had been talking about the revised course elevation. He found me at the start and strapped on his altimeter so he could get an accurate reading. He was rushing as he put it on at 4:58 AM—he hadn’t heard the announcement that the race was starting 15 minutes late. And then…we were off!

Click here to read the rest at Trail Run Times.com.

Runners climb a Marin Headlands trail, December 5

Trail Heads, the trail running blog over at Runner’s World, has a post today about the North Face Endurance Challenge Championships, held this past Saturday in the Headlands.

This past weekend saw over 1,000 trail runners pushing their limits in championship races, and a small handful of those runners winning large paychecks for their efforts.

The North Face Endurance Challenge Championships took place on the trails of Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco, with a 10K, a half-marathon, a 50K and a 50-miler. All four races sold out, with almost 900 runners hitting the starting line on Saturday morning.

The 50-miler was the premier event, with a whopping $10,000 prize on the line for the winning male and female, with a total of $30,000 cash purse. This is big money in trail running, and a competitive field assembled to chase it down.

After reading I had to let out a big <sigh>.  Last year in December, I ran the Endurance Challenge Half-Marathon, finishing my first trail running 13.1-miler in a middle-of-the-pack 2 hours and 18 minutes.  While I would likely not have been anywhere near contending for the five-figure prize money this past weekend (perhaps someday though!), from the beginning of this year it was my goal to run the 50K (31-mile) race at the 2009 NFEC.

So I assert, with enthusiasm (yes, with enthusiasm), that one of my goals for 2010 will be to run the 50K race at next year’s Endurance Challenge. I’m adding it to the list of goals that will be going up on this site soon.  And with that, I’ll head off to do my stretching and icing for my knee, taking one more step on the road to recovery that leads back to Rodeo Beach in the Headlands the first weekend in December, 2010.

Photo by The North Face.