Run, Koper, run

Ok, I think I already made it clear on this blog that I love California; at least from the running perspective. I also highly praised all the perks at work . But what about the work itself, some of you were asking? Now, at first it was difficult for me to say anything reasonable on that topic, as I was just warming up at work and wasn’t quite sure whether I’ll like it or not nor what it really was about. And then the problem was simply lack of time -- between work, running and writing weekly reports for this blog I really was hard pressed for time. But now I’m sitting on the plane from San Francisco to Amsterdam (1 week of vacations with my better half, yay!!), typing on my beautiful new Pixel (that subject probably deserves a post on its own) so I don’t have any good excuses anymore. But before I tell you why I like working for Google let me answer the more obvious question that some of you were asking, which is: what exactly do I do there? What do I do at Google? When I was jo...

Long story short: what a dreadful, dreadful race :) Let me elaborate... I left for LA on Saturday morning. Or rather: we left, as I was going with two fellow Googlers. We made it to the expo and then drove to our hotel in Santa Monica. After going for dinner (pasta, naturally) it was basically time to go to bed, as we had to get up at 3am (!!!) for the shuttle; unfortunately we didn't manage to find an alternative mode of transportation for the start. Not surprisingly I didn't get much sleep that night. We got to the shuttle and arrived at the Dodger Stadium around 4:30am. The start was at 7:30am. So we had 3 hours to kill. Beautiful. There wasn't much we could do so we were just sitting, getting cold and urging the time to go forward faster. I wasn't very smart the following day and didn't plan any breakfast, so I had to satisfy myself with a banana and a roll that we got. So I hardly got any sleep and I hardly got any food, could it get any worse? It turn...

Rather unusually I'm publishing my weekly report before the week is over. That is because this is the week of the LA marathon! So I know I won't be doing any more trainings until then and the marathon itself, as usual, deserves a separate race report :). And I will use this post to talk a bit about my goals for the race. On Tuesday I went for my usual fast run. I was debating whether I shouldn't be doing it on a hard surface instead. The truth is that during the last half a year I run almost exclusively on trails. And I love that but I wonder whether it won't be a shock to my legs and knees to now, all of a sudden, do 42.2km on the road. But in the end my urge to face my PB on the Baylands Shore Loop prevailed :). And for most of the run I thought I had a new PB in my pocket. I was going strong and couldn't imagine loosing it in the second half of the run, when the wind was helping me. But I did, missing my PB by 20 seconds (but still clocking my 2nd fastest time ...

Duh. My Dotcloud setup for my Opa -based app powering the weekly widgets that you can see above was giving me grief lately. I was this close to giving up on Dotcloud, but finding and setting up hosting somewhere else would have taken time that I don't have right now. So instead I spend a good couple of hours fixing and upgrading stuff on Dotcloud. Oh well. Anyway, it's supposed to be about running, right? It was a pretty decent week. After a lazy last week I started with an easy run on Monday. I only managed to go late in the evening so I had to resort to a dreadmill. On Tuesday I did my traditional faster run on my usual loop. I thought I could make my new PB, as I was doing real good on the first part, but then I realized that the wind (always present there) was blowing in the opposite direction that day. So instead of a slight boost I got a head-on wind in the last section and missed the PB by 16 seconds. On Wednesday I was going for a work offsite in Squaw Valley ; t...

My good performance in the Montara Mountain trail run came at a price: on Monday I could hardly walk. On Tuesday I was still hurting all over but decided to go for a casual run, mostly just to get the blood flowing and speed up recovery. It went fine. On Thursday I was already feeling fine and was planning to do another run, but I had squash scheduled in the evening. I thought that maybe I should take it easy, so in the end I skipped the run. Instead I went on Friday. I did my fast run and was hoping to improve my PB on my usual route, but it didn't happen. Still, I registered my second best time, just 5 days after an ultra race, so not too bad. Actually, it's funny, when I used to run marathons, after a race I'd usually take at least 2 weeks of very little or no activity to recover. Now, I'm doing 50K trail ultras, which certainly aren't any easier, but I try to be back in the game within a few days. I guess it's all a matter of conditioning your body. And...

Another Sunday. Another 50K to run. On Saturday I went for a hike . I was tired after the hike. And I'm tired when I wake up on Sunday. It's 6am, so I'm also sleepy. My left hamstring is like a barometer, it seems to give me trouble whenever I'm too tired or overtrained and it's giving me clear signals that things aren't peachy today. To top it all I forgot to replenish my supplies, so instead of a Powerade I'm going for the race with a bottle of Cola ;). Due to all those factors I didn't have my expectations too high. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that I already paid for the registration, it's quite likely I would have decided not to go. But I did. So I go. At least the drive goes smoothly, I reach the start and finish the toilet business just in time to run to the start and, without breaking stride, continue running into the race. Due to all of the above problems I didn't hope for a great finish time. I'd be happy if I made it ...