Run, Koper, run

All righty, all right, only two days until the biggie ... You hear all those stories that part of the ultra-running charm are the communities that those folks create and I'm sure I haven't seen any yet but the Lakeland Facebook page and the massive amount of activity there gave me some idea; trust me, those guys are breathing running. In fact it was there that I saw a fellow runner, John Kynaston , setting bronze, silver and gold goals for himself. I liked the idea so much that I decided to borrow it :). So here are my three goals for this Saturday. Bronze: finish within the 24h limit On the face of it, this may sound like a not very ambitious goal; I mean, how hard can it be to do just over 3K per hour? I don't want to be disrespectful for the course, but I suspect I could do that. Thing is: I won't be going for 24h hours; more likely half of that (I won't even mention that before the 24h time limit is over, I'll need to be well on my way to the Manchester...

Last training week before Lakeland 50... My last running week, as next week tapering and then the big day - Lakeland 50! 50 miles through mountains, duh, did I really sign up for that?? The timing was quite unfortunate as the 2 weeks that I should be working really hard on my running I went for a bike trip . I was hoping to do some running there, but that was naive; just wouldn't work (btw. I'm aware that I'm missing weekly summaries for those two weeks, but I did almost exclusively cycling and still have to figure out how to fit 500km of cycling into my weekly exercise diary interface ;). Now it's two weeks when I have all the time in the world for running... but I should be tapering instead. Oh well. Anyway, this week I decided to still train pretty much regularly and only start proper tapering next week. First an easy run on Monday and then a long run on Wednesday. I was planning this run for some days; I initially wanted to make it ~60km long but the longer I wa...

Biking trips are one my favorite ways of spending holidays. Given nice area, nothing better than to explore it on a bike. And after a full day of pedaling dinner in the evening is just divine. I did it twice so far. First in 2004 biking through Hungary with my friend Karol and then in 2007 in Croatia with Natalia & Karol. And this year we decided it was time for another bike trip! Day 0 We set off around noon on Thursday, 5th of July. Part of the ritual was picking a place where to go to. We considered pretty much all the European countries in the end settling for Estonia. Advantages: not too far away, not too busy, ability to (legally) sleep in the wild and seaside! The only problem with Estonia was the weather. The forecasts were promising quite a bit of rain and if there is one thing that can spoil biking holidays, it's rain. So just before going we made a last minute (literally!) decision to go to Hungary instead :). With Karol we had great memories from the Hungarian ...

Not quite as planned... Good beginning of the week. On Monday, after a long break, I again tried FiveFingers, with a gentle 6K run. Then intervals on Tuesday where I put in a decent effort, averaging 3:39 on 400m intervals. The surprising part is that after lousy preceding weeks I should have been well rested, but both on Monday and especially on Tuesday my legs felt heavy as if I was just coming out of a 100K week. Weird On Thursday two runs. First hills with the usual run over the bridge, where despite heavy tiredness I still managed to improve my pace by 5 seconds per km (though with 169(!) as average HR, instead of 159). Then an easy run in the evening. And that's where things went wrong. I had serious plans for the weekend and if I pulled them off that would make for a very good week, but due to various reasons I didn't do anything at all over the last three days. Oh well. Next two weeks I'll be biking in Estonia. Then back for less than two weeks and Lakeland 50....