preparation - Tell Me About Running

For my work I’m staying abroad at a hotel this week.
It’s not all that far away from home (2.5h drive without traffic), but just far enough to not go back-and-forth every day.

This isn’t a lot of fun, seeing as this means leaving The Girlfriend and The Daughter behind, but preparation is everything, so off course they will be fine.

Preparation is also everything if you’re suddenly running on unknown terrain. I wasn’t able to go running until it was dark, so I’m glad I made a map beforehand.

Running with a map in your hand isn’t always easy, so I made a lot of extra notes with street names, landmarks etc. Basically this meant I had to look a lot less at my map than I expected, because I had studied it quite often the days before…

If you look at the pictures of the plan vs the actual route I’d dare to say I did very well. My heart rate suffered sometimes as looking around all the time and searching for street names, … can be distracting. But it was a very good run.

My preparation map

My Strava map

As long as I’m here (this week Monday until Wednesday, next week Monday until Friday) I’d like to make the best of the situation and go running as much as I can. Really max out my mileage for once, training my body to become really fatigued and recover… That is, if work won’t intervene off course…

If you go running on unknown terrain, do you print a map as well? Or use your phone? Or just go for some local laps so you can’t get lost?

I’ve already talked about my decision to run a marathon and about my first training months afterwards. I now want to talk about the follow-up training after summer and the final training towards the race. Last post in the series will be race recap of M-Day.

After a pretty decent 396km (246 miles) in the summer months, fall approached and with it my last weeks towards the marathon. Having read up on tapering I knew I only had 6-7 weeks left of serious training.

Since training without a real plan seemed to work for me, I decided to continue with the same principles of my first training months and adding some intervals to gain my wanted speed. Setting my marathon pace at 5:00m/km (8:00 m/mile – 12km/h) this was needed, because many people said this was too fast for my limited amount of training.

Determined as I was, I pulled through with my desired pace and geared up.
Having always trained with my phone and the Endomondo app, I thought it was time for a GPS watch, especially handy for running intervals on heart rates. I won’t bother you with the details about the search for it, but in the end I went for the Garmin 310xt. A Multisport watch (handy for cycling) at a decent price and earned it’s stripes with a lot of honorable athletes.

I cannot say this enough to everyone running longer than the “intro” phase: buy a GPS watch, it was my best buy ever as a runner. Having constant control over pace, heart rate, speed, … without twisting my arm (smartphone arm holder) or being afraid to drop my phone was bliss. Necessary sidenote: I’m a number/statistics freak :-p

Besides a GPS watch it was time to slowly tossing my Brooks Adrenaline GTS 12 aside and getting a new pair. Not knowing a lot at this point about shoes, I decided to stick with what I knew and bought the GTS 13.

The 7 remaining weeks flew by as did I (in my interval trainings) and before I knew it, it was tapering time.
Not entirely knowing what this was (long live Google) I just ate an awful lot of pasta and went running 2 times for a short distance and a slow pace.

In September and October (before M-Day) joined I ended up with 496km (~308mi) which gave me a very decent base to go marathoning for my first time.

Race report coming up later, thanks for reading 🙂

Tell Me About Running

Tag: preparation

Running abroad

Road To Marathon Brabant 2013 – Final Training