Tom’s first Tri

You gotta love Nike for organizing event like these. Not only that they gave away free running T-Shirts to registered users (well, to those who were quick! BTW, I was one of those lucky guys), they also manage to gather millions of people to run for a good cause. No surprise for you guys, I [...]

Yesterday I finished my first 10k run in weeks. It wasn’t one of my best runs since I’ve started working out regularly, in fact it was one of my slowest runs ever.
But I’m going to tell you something: I really don’t care. I’m happy that I finally succeeded in running the 10k again, even when [...]

I haven’t posted any updates on my training runs for a week because other tasks kept me busy. Despite having been busy I found some time to throw in workouts. This week I reduced the training volume by another (approx.) 25% but tried to maintain the intensity by doing some speed workouts. I can’t go [...]

I need to get used to running in the morning as road races usually take place in the early hours of the day, e.g. the Wuerzburg city marathon (in my case the half-marathon) starts at 10 o’clock.

…Not too bad for a recovery run especially when considering my lack of sleep the last night My left achilles’ heel was bugging me on the final kilometers today, probably a result of not having stretched properly after my long run. … I follow advices in literature and sports podcasts that emphasize the importance of stretching only reluctantly, but I haven’t totally lost hope in myself and hope that this negative attitude of mine is going to change real soon.

When I left home today and drove to the Wehranlagen I intended to go for an easy run and not pushing my body too hard as my legs still needed to recover from the long run on Sunday.

…What surprised me was the fact that I could maintain the faster pace throughout the second half of the run although I had granted my body a rest of only 1 (ONE) day.

…Moreover, this was the moment when I was reminded of my 25k run and that I should have allowed my body to recover instead of pushing it hard on a tempo run.

The development of my HR during the recovery period proves that my body was longing for my running at a comfortable pace which is exactly what I did in the 5 minutes following the workout.

Only 4 weeks to go to my first road race ever. I’ve been busy building up a solid base for the last 2 months and now it’s time to do some speedwork before I am going to taper 2 weeks before race day Why’s speedwork important? There’re a couple of reasons why one should [...]

I purchased another pair of Nike+ Triax 11 for cheap (67€ only thanks to a 20€ Paypal voucher and a great offer at Ebay) and am now able of switching my trainers every run. Hopefully, this will do any good for my legs and of course also for my shoes.
Here’s how I performed on [...]

It’s been a couple of days since my last update but before you guys think I was lazy and didn’t work out let me summarize this week’s running workouts starting with the 10k run on Tuesday March 25th.

And yet another post I’m ramping up mileage and got in another 10k on Tuesday. I consider the run as a recovery workout. No more, no less.
Especially my recovery was very satisfying. This fills me with great confidence about the road race. Apparently, my body has fully recovered from being overtrained:

Min. 0 158 bpm
Min. [...]

For the hasty ones: I finished the 10k in 48′32” and succeeded in keeping my HR in the aerobic zone throughout 98% of the workout (of course in the early minutes of the run my HR was below 153 bpm, and for a short period my HR was above 169 due to some heavy wind that blew in my face with a MHR of 178 bpm resulting from running uphill and fighting the wind).

…It has some short hills and several surfaces (asphalt, crushed tones and (forest) trails), hence I don’t get bored when running Seriously, I need to get used to running on asphalt as the half-marathon will be a race through the city of Würzburg.

…Having said this, I don’t have a guilty-conscience when telling you folks that I’ll rest tomorrow and will go for another 10k run Thursday, followed by a long session on the cycle trainer, another day off on Saturday and the weekly long run on Sunday.