Run, Koper, run

It's Saturday. Tomorrow I'll have to wake up extremely early for the race so this is my last change to catch up on sleep. Doesn't work. I wake up at 9 and after some tossing and turning in bed realize that the sleep won't come back so I decide to get up. I turn to the side... aw! It's my abs. They hurt. Courtesy of CrossFit. I put my legs on the floor... ouch! It's my hamstrings. Crossfit again. Finally I stand. Owww! It's my calves. That's probably still a remainder from Big Basin . Wonderful. Looks like I'm all ready for tomorrow ;). But actually it may not be such a bad thing. Let me explain. I was planning to take it super easy with this race. But I know myself. If I reached a point in recovery where nothing was hurting, I'd convince myself that I recovered well and would probably go strong in the race. Which would not be a good thing. Because I certainly did not recover yet; my frequent racing actually improved my recovery time, but one w...

Not much to say about this week. I did almost no running, two CrossFit workouts and then the finale was the San Francisco marathon . No spoilers. Read the report for details; it certainly was a race like never before...

So Sunday was the Big Basin 50 day; a race that I was so much looking forward to. Because of my cold I wasn't even sure whether I'll be able to participate. I was trying my best to recover until Sunday and I did feel a bit better but not completely healthy. Still, I decided to go. I learned with those long trail races that making pre-race plans is a tricky business at best. This time things were even worse because of the cold. Of course ideal goal would be to improve my personal best by topping my Horseshoe Lake result from only three weeks before (5:18:51). In principle that should be possible, especially that the race was featuring only 972m (3,190') of elevation gain and as much as 1,765m (5,790') of elevation loss. However, given my cold I knew better than to make overly ambitious plans. Apart from the course being point-to-point, instead of the usual loop, another novelty was the fact that on this day it was only marathon and 50K, with all shortest distances ...

Slow week. Monday off, then on Tuesday CrossFit, followed by a steady run, which went terribly. I assumed it was because I was tired (from CrossFit), plus there was a really strong wind (hardly unusual on this route but this time it seemed particularly annoying). On Wednesday just an easy run and then another CrossFit training on Thursday. I wanted to also go running on that day but I felt very tired and moreover I started developing a cold. I was wondering if perhaps my bad performance on Tuesday was not caused by the first symptoms of the cold. In any case I only had three days to get better, so no exercising until Sunday, because on Sunday I had the Big Basin 50K race to run! If you read the report from Big Basin then you know that I did well and am super happy with my performance. That means that I deserved to take things easy in the upcoming San Francisco marathon next Sunday and I plan to do just that. What else. As you can see I managed to extend my weekly summaries with a...

After nearly 50K run on Saturday and a rest day on Sunday, on Monday I was ready to continue the long weekend adventure. As I mentioned before my plan was to go to Point Reyes, which I heard is a beautiful place, but it being almost 2-hour drive away I would be too lazy to go there on an average weekend. The amazing thing is that I was really tired on Sunday and went to bed extremely early, around 21:30 or so. I set an alarm for 8:30am, just in case, but I was almost sure it won't be needed; after all when was the last time that I slept 11 hours? Those good times seem to be long gone, right? Well, wrong. On Monday morning I was woken up by the alarm and if it didn't ring I'd have easily slept more. Instead I hopped into the car, went to grab a quick breakfast and set off towards Point Reyes (all photos in this post are from there). After crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, when I hit highway 1 things got really annoying as I got stuck after an irritably slow car. It's ...