SHORT

This week I did not manage to complete any of my trainings. I fell short of my target three times in a row. Not by much, but enough to be ever so slightly discouraging.

Dress rehearsals are like that, or so I remember from doing high school drama. A good final rehearsal meant a bad opening performance, and vice versa. Can I trick my brain into thinking it's the same with my final trainings?

No more long runs to go before M-day, in a week from now. On Tuesday (early morn, considering my work schedule) I do 40 minutes. Then on Thursday 3 tempo runs of 5 minutes only, preceded and followed by 15 minutes at a leasurely pace. And on Saturday a 30 minutes jog, to prevent pre-match stiffness.

Here's my other worry: my shoes are pretty well worn to bits. It's too late to start running with a new pair, so I have no option but to use my current shoes for the marathon...

But maybe I'm just getting nervous. Receiving the confirmation letter in the mail a couple of days ago, with a poster-size map of the marathon track, certainly made it all very real...

Ready or not: Amsterdam, here I come!

STRONGER, LONGER, FASTER

The last rehearsal for the marathon went pretty well, though it was not much fun. The night before the 3pm start of the jogging in Dilbeek, I was still on a beach in northern Denmark drinking red wine with colleagues around a bonfire. Had to get up indecently early to make it in time to the airport. Slept on the plane and was home by 11:andabit thanks to Chui Hsia and Sanna who came to pick me up.

It was raining. In fact, in Dilbeek it was pouring so hard that the sheet with my number (what's the english term for that? chest number?) ripped from the safety pins less than a minute after the start. The rain never stopped and I felt increasingly sorry for the officials, volunteers who stand around for hours just pointing the runners in the right direction. The circuit - three rounds of 7 kilometers - included some nasty climbing and several kilometers of mud paths.

But I finished, and I finished well. In the first round, several runners overtook me at a speed marginally higher than mine. Three or four of them I kept in sight, only to find in the second round that I was approaching then, overtaking them in turn. Pretty soon, I was at the head of a group of five or six who were trying to keep up with me. Strange, I never ran in such a position before.

I completed the race in three rounds of 37 minutes each: very consistent. My final time, of 1:51 at some seconds, meant I ran at a pace of 5 minutes 19 seconds per kilometer. I'm real pleased with that. It means that in Amsterdam I should consider joining the pacemakers that aim for finishing in four hours flat, and trying to stick with them at least until kilometer 30.

That's less than two weeks away...

PROGRESS, PROGRESS...

In spite of what I wrote in my previous post, I ran well over three hours on Sunday. I woke up pain-free, and feeling all fueled up thanks to Chui Hsia's magic pasta. Fell just short of the planned 33k (three times my regular 11k loop), but at 32k in 192 minutes there was little to complain about bar maybe the feeling of total and utter death towards the end.

Then on Tuesday, I followed colleague Fabienne (who does triathlons) over the office running circuit. Much to my surprise I completed the 6.5k in 29 minutes only, with an average speed of about 14k per hour. It's the pace one needs for finishing a marathon in three hours.

The rest of the working week was not very good for running. But I picked it up again on Friday (6.5) and Saturday (11, with Chui Hsia cycling along). And then, this morning I completed the 33k in 195 minutes, still feeling like I had something left. I guess I'm getting close to where I should be in three weeks from now.

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.