Last race of the year, a little whisky, and some reflections

Join a running group!

I've said that before, I'll say it again. If you have an interest in running, there is nothing like being a part of a running group.

You have of course your family, friends, and colleagues, but nobody can understand you like your running buddies when it comes to training and competition goals, injuries, frustrations, joys, victories, and failures. With who else can you talk for hours on a single injury history, or on a training period towards a competition, or on heart rate zones? Who else will always cheer you, encourage you and motivate you whatever your goals are, and comfort you and give you pep talk during your down periods? And every now and then you can be even lucky to make a new friend for life, getting into deeper topics and opening your hearts to each other.

Friday evening was the annual Little Christmas Whisky Race with a party afterwards. I must admit that I am still struggling to get back my form. I was 4 seconds faster this year than last, but the ground and air conditions were perfect, so I should have done better. OK, so a marathon breaks you down, but think of all that training I invested in before Amsterdam. Should that not pay off now when the fatigue is gone and my energy is back? I could easily get buried in this kind of negative thoughts were it not for the frame around the race. With the whisky bar at the finish at the top and the party down at the club house afterwards, there is no way one can feel down after such an event. So yesterday, instead I found myself thinking about how fun it is to get older.

Yes you read right. When I say this to my younger friends and colleagues, they are always surprised. Perhaps I would also have been if I heard it in my twenties from people in their forties. My goodness, I remember how sorry I felt for them then. When my older colleagues at that time spoke about reading glasses and graying hair, I pitied them. Still they were the ones to have the most fun at parties, and I was always astonished by that. (I mean, like, isn't life almost over?) Now I know why. As we get older, as long as we are lucky to keep our health, life gets easier on many plans. Kids are growing and can take more and more care of themselves, you have reached a level in you career,  for most the economic situation improves, and you get more time for yourself. If you, at this point in life, start investing some time in a rewarding activity, like sports, and on top of that find a group of people to do it with, then life becomes a play ground and you are back to the joys of childhood all over again.

Just think about the race and the party afterwards, and all the people involved in organizing such an event. Carrying food, drinks, and fire wood up to the finish area, registering people and timing the racers, preparing the party, baking cakes, doing kitchen duty, cleaning afterwards, .... And how effortless and easy it all goes when there are so many people who are willing to contribute. It is always like this. There is always somebody who takes initiative to organize a party, a dinner, a weekend trip, a training session, a mountain hike, you name it. With all the extremely sad things going on around the world, I feel so blessed to be surrounded with all this kindness and positive energy.

My experiences from my local club Varegg, with my Bergen running group Melkesyre and Fjellgeitene, and my Istanbul running group Istrunbul, who embraced me so warmly for the brief time I spent there, make me think that running groups all around the world work in this positive way. If you're rather interested in biking or swimming, or other sports, there are groups for those as well.  I follow online quite a few such groups both in Bergen and Istanbul, and they all seem to burst with positive energy. There is no reason to hesitate. Don't do it alone.

Join a group!

Ingrid's recipe

No, not for Christmas cookies :-)

Although my main focus for the time being is uphill running and leg strength training, I haven't forgotten all about flat running. Every now and then I like to do a long run, but there haven't been any short or fast runs recently.

Still I want to build a basis for the street races of next season, and I have stumbled upon some interesting advice from the Norwegian multi-distance world champion Ingrid Kristiansen. In her blog, she gives a winter treadmill schedule for setting a 10k PB in the spring. She indicates the speed of a progressive 50 min run, which should feel very easy at this point. But she will increase the speed as the winter proceeds. Her initial advice is for advanced runners who want to do 10 k below 40 minutes, and this is how it looks: start with pace 5:55. Every 5 minutes, decrease the pace 10 seconds. The last 5 minutes are at pace 4:25.

Now, my goal would rather be to manage 10k at 50 minutes or below, which means exactly 1 minute slower per kilometer. So, it is very easy to change the suggested paces to what I think fits for me: start at 6:55, and decrease 10 seconds every 5 minutes, ending at 5:25 for the last five minutes. Ingrid also gives a heart rate indication of how the pace should feel. Her heart rate at start is around 140 and at the end 160, well below her threshold.

To test this on the treadmill, I translated the pace (min/km) to speed (km/h) since this is how a treadmill works. I ended up with the following schedule, changing every five minutes: 8.7 - 8.9 - 9.2 - 9.5 - 9.8 - 10.1 - 10.3 - 10.6 - 10.9 - 11.1. It looked really easy compared to what I manage normally. So far so good. But I had forgotten how boring I find treadmill running, and how hot I get when I run indoors.... The heart rate started out even lower than what Ingrid suggested, but it ended up higher at the end.

In general, I do get a higher heart rate when I run indoors, which I think is due to the temperature. No matter where, I always find the indoor conditions too hot to run on the treadmill. I suppose a training studio holds at least 20 degrees C and of course there is no wind.... If I were to design a studio, I would keep a separate room for the treadmills, set the temperature at 14 degrees, and install some fans to simulate pleasant wind. In fact, perhaps every treadmill could be covered, like a glass bubble, and one could set the temperature as low as one wanted inside there, and the sound as high as one wanted and played one's own music without using ear plugs. I wonder if such mills exist. If not, perhaps I should apply for a patent... :-)

Anyway, so treadmill running is no fun, and I must admit that I am not sure I will be able to follow Ingrid's recipe after all. Perhaps I can rather do it outside, on a flat stretch. I found it very pleasing and motivating that it is such an easy workout, so I do want to follow it up in one way or the other.

What I do enjoy much more, are treadmill intervals at Barry's Bootcamp. I owe a lot to this kind of training, which brought me up to shape to run my first half marathons. But I haven't done it much after I got the taste of outdoors training. I do regularly go to Barry's Bootcamp still, but normally I have either personal training session with Ketil, or I do a pure strength training session, called double floor, which means that one skips the treadmill part of the class and stays on the floor throughout the entire session. This week, though, I joined two sessions with treadmill running. I had forgotten how fun it was! And I realized that I'd lost a lot of sprint speed compared to before. So I'll definitely do more of this through the winter.

The rope jump competition is also very useful for running form it turns out. I have read that many top athletes rope jump several times a week to keep their ankles strong, their tendons soft, and to increase their calf strength. I can now do 2:15 at a time. And I really feel the increased strength. It is so great to have friends who initiate such games to combine fun (there is a lot of incredibly funny discussion every single day), competition, and increased strength and form.

Play hard, win easy! .... or the opposite... whichever inspires and motivates you :-)

Working on the uphill form

The Blåman races showed that my uphill form had declined a lot since last year. OK, so I was still in post marathon recovery period, but come on: for the last 11 months I had mainly been street running, most of it flat. When I resumed strength training after a break of about 6 weeks, it became also evident that I had lost quite a bit of strength in my legs.

But all that is going to be fixed now! First of all, fortunately the post marathon fatigue is finally gone and my energy is back! The Blåmann races inspired me to move most of my training to uphill running and walking. During the long training period towards Amsterdam, there were several spectacular mountain hikes during beautiful weekends that I could not join due to the 30+ km runs in our training schedule. I now realize how badly I had really missed the mountains. It feels wonderful to be in the low season and not to have to train towards a particular goal (yet!), so I simply pick the training sessions that I feel like participating, and these days the offered menu contains mainly uphills. 

One of the things I've been wanting to try all the way since last year is the long uphill intervals of Fjellgeitene on Thursdays. They are as long as 8 minutes! And there are six of them! Scary enough just the thought of it. It took me more than a year, and many conversations with and encouragement from Lars the chief goat,  to mentally get ready for these. Finally I tried them this week! Yey! And it was not even that scary! Between the 8 minute intervals are 2 minute breaks. In the breaks, the group jogs downwards. To compensate my slowness compared to the rest, I rather walked uphill during the breaks. In the end this worked out a bit too well; I got further than everybody, and followed Jonathan Albon (!!!) all the way to the top of Rundemanen. Next time, I think I can allow myself to either stop during the breaks or perhaps even slowly walk down.

Fjellgeitene also inspires in a very fun way when it comes to leg strength and plyometric training. I think we can call it the annual winter challenge. Last year, there was the daily toe raises challenge. How many toe raises can you do without a break? You stand on a step with your heels hanging on the outside. You lower yourself slowly, then raise yourself on your toes slowly, and repeat. This year's challenge is rope jumping. How many seconds can you rope jump without a break? It has to be done in a speed of about 100-120 jumps a minute, and the rope has to pass under your feet between every single jump (no double jumping). It is surprisingly tiring! So far my record is 60 seconds, but fortunately the challenge continues until February, so there is still time to improve.

All this is of course not enough to get my leg strength back. As promised, I have returned to my weekly personal training sessions with Ketil, and my goodness it was about time! After the first session I could neither sit down nor get up for several days; my legs were incredibly sore. The good news is that strength comes back pretty quickly. Also the running form is coming back. The best indicator for this is the Hordnes forest runs of Melkesyre every Monday. This course is pretty hilly, with a lot of ups and downs, so even the prescribed easy pace of 6:30 can feel challenging. At least it did two weeks after Amsterdam. It felt like a race. Since then it got better and better, and last Monday it was finally as easy as it should be.

But don't think that I have forgotten all about flat running. I have something new to test out. I will tell you next week :-)