Run, Koper, run

Before Another year, another Arc as they say?... After 3 unsuccessful attempts in 2017, 2018 and 2019 , I still didn't get the message and was planning to be back for more beating from this brutal race. For the first time my better half was to be there to support me and we kinda had an agreement that this year was to be my last attempt; now or never. So armed with that knowledge I threw myself at some serious training. I grabbed a training plan from Sage Running and was following it to the dot. The previous year I kinda thought I was doing OK with training, but it was nothing compared to my determination this year. I did 9 consecutive weeks of 100km+ mileage (peaking at 124). The last of those were four days spend over the New Year break in Cornwall and four recces of the course. By the end of it I almost covered the whole course. Most importantly I did cover the bits — last 50k+ from Pendeen lighthouse to the finish — that I never got to in my previous attempts. Coming...

The road to Arc Arc of Attrition... the good ol' Arc... Admittedly I have some history with that race. There's some love. There's some resentment. We definitely bonded over the years though. This love-hate affair started in 2017 when I tried it for the very first time without quite knowing what I was getting myself into. Winter race, very technical trails, lots of ups and downs... I wasn't ready for any of it and had to throw in the towel halfway through, being borderline injured. Then came 2018 . I was very determined to get my revenge from previous year's DNF (my second one ever). I was better prepared and I did fight for longer but after 70 miles I was done again, this time busting my shins. Training And so 2019 was supposed to be the year. I promised myself to train hard and come race day to show it who's da boss! I was always the happy-go-lucky kinda runner, never really following any structured training or plan but just running for the joy of it....

Arc of Attrition 2017 Long time no see, huh? First a quick recap. 2016 was a year of no-running (long story...). Almost literally. Only by the end of the year I decided to go back at it and came up with a crazy idea of signing up for the Arc of Attrition , a 100-mile long, winter-time coastal race in Cornwall. Yeah, not exactly smart. I guess the only thing I have in my own defense is that I didn't fully know what I was getting myself into... With less than three months to get ready and little to no running prior to that I had to ramp up very quickly. And I did. And so I got injured. Less than three weeks before the race. Yeah... It seemed the race was over before it started. My physio was definitely more convinced of that than I was. However, I recovered surprisingly quickly and went from barely being able to walk to feeling completely fine in time for the race. I decided to give it a go. Gingerly... Gingerly my ass. The plan was to walk. At a fast clip I figured out...

Done with running?... again? After an unsuccessful attempt at a 100-mile ultra-marathon in 2013 I proclaimed that I may be done with running . This wasn't so. Yes, true, I pretty much stopped running for 3 months following that race but then I came back at it. With a vengeance. And I got it in 2014 when I raced, this time successfully, in the same bloody race . So this time around I was much more careful to pronounce the end of my running career. However, it's now been more than one year from that infamous race and not only my appetite for running didn't come back; I essentially stopped running altogether. There are many aspects that contributed to that state of affairs, not least of them the fact that I moved to central London, where hitting the trails is, ekhm, substantially more difficult than in California. And once used to the trails, hitting asphalt somehow isn't that tempting anymore. So this blog post might just be the case of me trying to convince myse...

Once again I'm writing with a 2 month delay, so, as my memory isn't too good, this post will be heavy on the photos and light on the words... at least, relatively speaking. In August I was going for a week to Cambridge, MA for a work summit. My first thoughts were not about how to prepare for this trip work-wise. My very first thought was: I'm going to U.S., I need to visit one of the national parks! The summit was starting on Monday, so I could go on the weekend and have 1 or 2 days somewhere in the wilderness. And so the planning begun. I could not find any famous/interesting park in the direct vicinity of Boston. But then I came across Telegraph's list of America's 20 best national parks (I love top-X lists) with Acadia National Park on the list. 5h drive away it wasn't exactly close but I decided to go for it anyway. After a direct flight from London I landed in Boston around 1pm, quickly got myself to the car rental and by 2pm was on my way. There wa...

Disclaimer: I'm writing this 4 months after it happened so this is just a rough approximation of what happened on that day ;) It was decided. I was moving to London. With all the excitement and lots of things to look forward to, I'll be very honest: there were things I knew I'll be missing from California. And on the very top of that list was the beautiful nature and trails that I only begun to explore in the past 2+ years. So when the date was coming up — and it was coming up fast — I knew I had to do something special for my usual weekend trip series. My usual choice would be a long run but, seeing as I hardly did any running in the past six months, practically since Chimera , somehow this didn't seem like such a great idea. Instead I set my sight on cycling. Past 2 months I did some training on 2 wheels. Nothing too crazy, mostly just one long ride per week, but hopefully enough to give me a chance of surviving such an adventure, as opposed to getting fried af...

Or: How does it feel like to run for 30 hours straight. I think the above subtitle pretty much summarizes what this post is going to be about. But let's start at the beginning. Few days before the race. For most race reports I try to reconstruct chronologically what happened. This time it was such a long endeavor that there are gaps in my memory that stretch for hours. So instead, I'll try to talk about different aspects of this race, in short sections, only roughly sticking to the timeline of the race. There we go. On traditional pre-race bad luck Before almost every race things tend to go wrong. It happens so much that I even came to the conclusion that it's not that things go wrong, it's just that I'm more acutely tuned to problems and I notice them more. Screw this theory. Things do go very wrong before races. If you don't believe then listen to what happened to me on Thursday and then tell me that I'm wrong. During the day I went to wash my car ...