THE GOOD AND THE BAD

Four weeks of training left before I start my marathon in Amsterdam, and the news is mixed. I am not confident at all that I will be ready in time, but I know I have made great progress.

Running three hours non-stop meant a major milestone, two weeks ago. It coincided with a family outing festival called De Gordel, for which occasion many streets had been shut for motorised traffic, and a 25 kilometers cycling route, set up for the day, passed right in front of our house. I ran that route and then some, adding up to around 30 kilometers. It was terribly long, boring at times, and hell for the last twenty minutes, but I did not stop. I guess that's the essential preparation for a marathon.

Last week I joined an 8 kilometers race in Molenbeek, close to our old house, where a djembe band cheered up the participants and spectators at the finish line in spite of the rain. The race consisted of three loops, meaning I passed the band four times. I finished with an average speed of 4:55 per kilometer, faster than any race I had done before. Another milestone.

But it's not all good news. Today was supposed to bring the longest session of my training, a 200 minutes run. But a fierce pain in my left lower back keeps me grounded. I rubbed it with tiger balm last night and it feels slightly better but still is incapacitating. With more long runs scheduled for the coming weekends, I have now decided to skip this one. Instead, next week's 180 minutes will be turned into the 200 of today. Hopefully this decision will help ease the pressure on  my body enough to keep going again.

It is a serious setback though. The coming two weeks should be the most intense in my carefully constructed training regime, and starting them with a back pain and cancelation of a key effort is not encouraging.

We shall see. I will try a short run again tomorrow (35 minutes, or 6 kilometers) and then take it from there.

NOT BAD, NOT BAD AT ALL

Halfway into my second week of my twelve-weeks intensive marathon training, things are going pretty well. Last week saw one hick-up: on Thursday my legs would not move at all and the 90 minutes I was supposed to run shrank into a 24-minutes warming-up. But then, I'd just began a course of anti-inflammatory medicine (suspected bursitis in my left shoulder, a bit painful if I run more than an hour). So maybe that explained my yoghurt-filled legs.

I'm doing a total of over 50 kilometers weekly. The big challenge is to find enough variation in terms of where I run. The 11k loop that I've been doing for a while has become so familiar that I expect to be surprised if I find a specific branch from a specific tree has snatched off. There's also the area towards the airport - which accidentally leads me to a village with the gorgeous name of Erps-Kwerps - which is much flatter than if I head the other way and therefore more suitable for longer distances. But that gets boring after a while, too.

Apart from seeking variation, there are three main challnges:
1. Finding time: I am already resorting to getting up at 5:30 (AM, yes) once a week. Football practice has fallen by the roadside completely.
2. Staying motivated: As the demands of the training schedule go up, I will at times have difficulty getting up too, abandoning a comfy seat, putting on them shoes. The coming three weeks should be fine, with the Olympics on telly. Because sports is a bit like yawning: if you see someone do it you start feeling the urge, too. (Well... I do.)
3. Not overtrain: I am, after all, at an age at which in other cultures I would be a respected village elder and have a broad selection of grandchildren. True, in my mind's eye I'm still in my late twenties. But equally true, my body has different ideas. So if I push it too much I may well find myself untrainable for a week or so.

NOT PRETTY

The last three races were all very hard. In Bruges I took three minutes longer than last year. In Gent, I took more than an hour for 10 kilometers. And the Brussels 20k was disastrous, with a time more than 10 minutes over last year's.

Explanations? All three were run on very hot days, and as it stayed cold for a long time this year I was not really prepared for that. But the main thing is that I have trained less long distances than last year.

So here's the drill for the coming two months: run 30-40 minutes twice a week, over one hour once every week, and build up to two-and-a-half hour runs in the weekends, alternated with races every three-four weeks. Then, from the last week of July onward, I will have tom rigidly follow a twelve-weeks preparation course for the marathon.

I have the ambition, I have the schedules. Now I need the determination and stamina.

GAME ON

Tomorrow is the Bruges 15k. I'll be running it for the fourth time, I think. Last year I finished in 1h16, a really good time for me. Would like to better it this year, but I doubt I will.

I have this race scoring system, to establish how well I have done in a particular race. It works like this. I take the time of the race winner, multiply it by tow, take off my time, divide what is left by the winner's time, and multiply this by 100. With this system, my score in the Tervuren 16k was 35. In a formula:

(2w-m) / w x 10

with w being the winner's time and m being mine. Theoretically, this formula gives me a score of 100 is I finish in the same time as the winner (meaning, if I am the winner). It also gives me a zero score if I take twice as long as the winner, and a negative score if I take even longer.

Let's see if I can beat that 35 tomorrow...

GOOD PROGRESS

The day after my previous post, I ran my 11k hilly training loop in under one hour and took over three minutes off my previous best time on that track. That was seriously encouraging, especially as it came only two days after attempting to run 14k.

Training continued at a slightly lower rate than normal, as Sanna and I were driving from relative to relative and friend to friend in Holland, on our own Thelma and Louise road trip. I did get to go for a jog with Sebas though, in Deventer where he lives.

On Sunday, I went to Tervuren hoping to run the 9k race there, advertised on some websites as the altenative distance to their 16k. Once there, I found that the choice was between 6.7 and 16k, and even though I was not trained yet for the longer distance I registered for it, feeling that a run under 7k was not worth the trouble.

My target for the upcoming 20k of Brussels translates into a pace of 11k/h, or 5:30 per kilometer. The Tervuren race was through hilly forests (indeed, there was not a kilometer that was more or less flat), so I did not think that pace was feasible yet. Therefore, my thinking was, in an ideal world I would finish this race in 1h28 (target pace), but I will settle for a time under 1h36 (6 minutes per kilometer).

The first kilometer, slightly uphill, I did in 5:10. Too fast, I had to slow down. But I felt great so I decided to stay around 5:30 for a while, allowing the kilometer times to ondulate with the landscape. They stayed between 5:10 and 5:40, and I passed the 11k mark in exactly one hour. The rest of the race I managed to keep my pace, and I finished in an unexpectedly fast time: 1:27:07.

That is seriously good news for the Brussels 20k. But I'll have to keep training hard, especially at getting through the point where my body will switch from burning sugars to burning fats, a point that typically comes after an hour and a half and which reveals itself as hitting a brick wall.

So, for today I have drawn a 18k track on Google maps. If I manage to keep running all the way, however slowly, I'll be well on my way for achieving my pre-summer goals. They are: the Bruges 15k in under 1:20 (in two weeks) and the grand Brussels 20k in under 1:50 (in five weeks).