The meaning of life (is not Stoltzekleiven)

The Stoltzekleiven Opp race is approaching; it is on Saturday! During early spring, especially when I was trying various therapies and was advised to take it easy on running,  I walked up Stoltzekleiven frequently to keep up my conditioning and get enough cardio training. I reached my best recording ever in February when I managed to do it in 14 minutes and 25 seconds with the help of my friend Mats, who was with me and motivated and pushed me all the way. Although my injury worsened from then on, and I could not run at all after some time, my leg strength improved thanks to HSR exercises three times a week, in addition to strength training twice a week. Just before he summer holidays I was able to do 14:50 at Stoltzekleiven all by myself.

Unfortunately, the three weeks of summer holidays worsened my Stoltzekleiven form much more than I was expecting. After the summer holidays, walking up to Stolzekleiven was one of the first things I did, and for several weeks it was impossible to get below 16 minutes. I must admit that I got quite a lot stressed by this. After all, Stoltzekleiven was the only thing remaining on my A list, and during early spring I was pretty sure that I would manage to go below 14 at this year's race. Now however, even going below 15 seems to be tough...

After the summer holidays I did quite a bit of steep mountain fast walking, in Jotunheimen, at Gullfjellet, at Skåla, and at Storehesten, and I thought that would be good training for Stoltzekleiven. I also did some biking and swimming in connection with training for my first triathlon, and although this meant less training at Stoltzekleiven itself, I was hoping that it would give good varied improvement of my general form that would also be of help at Stoltzekleiven. This is exactly what happened last year. I was mainly training for Oslo half marathon through August and September, and not at all training at Stolzekleiven, except for participating at trial races. Still I improved my time by 48 seconds last year compared to the year before. So the half marathon training helped my Stoltzekleiven form a lot. Unfortunately the same side effect did not come this year from triathlon training and participating in uphill races.

While I was feeling quite depressed about the whole Stoltzekleiven thing, last week I received the very sad news that a very good and old friend of mine died. This news really took me off guard and shook me more than I could have imagined. Until now I have been blessed to be able to say that I have never regretted anything that I have done in life. But for the first time I regret something I have not done. I am so sorry that I did not have more contact with my friend during the past couple of years. We used to be very close, but our contact recently limited itself to email and message exchanges, and I regret so much not having called more often and not having asked more often how he was. His illness progressed suddenly very quickly at the end, so perhaps I would anyway not be able to catch him to say a final goodbye, but the bare thought that I was worried about running injuries and Stoltzekleiven while he was fighting for his life is quite unbearable. This is also why I am a few days late with last week's blog post. For a while none of the stuff I have been writing about seemed important or worth writing about anymore.

On the other hand, being reminded about how short and unpredictable life is made me appreciate even more how important it is to make the best of every single day of life. Being passionate about something, no matter what it is, makes us experience all the emotions that human beings are capable of. I decided to continue with my blog and to try harder at Stoltzekleiven for the memory of my friend, who loved running. At the same time, I was discussing my lacking improvement at Stoltzekleiven with my trainer Ketil, and he warned me that my negative and stressed attitude could be affecting my performance. I decided to let my shoulders down and not get stressed about the resulting time. Just try harder and do my best. With this background, on Thursday, I came closer to 15 minutes than in a long while, with 15:11.

Yesterday I participated in the last trial run of this year's Stoltzekleiven race, and my time worsened to 15:25. But I was just back from a wonderful weekend at Kjerag and Preikestolen (where the first and the last pictures are from), and I comforted myself that perhaps my legs were tired from the hikes of the weekend. This year, I have been so lucky to be able to do several of the most spectacular mountain hikes of Norway, like Trolltunga and Besseggen, and now Preikestolen. With the sudden loss of a dear friend reminding me how fragile life is, it feels good to have grabbed the opportunities of these adventures when they showed up. No matter how Stoltzekleiven 2015 goes, I will always have the wonderful memories of these trips. And there will hopefully be many more Stoltzekleiven races for me in the future.

“Life is short. Break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably. And never regret anything that made you smile.” (Mark Twain)

Back to basics

Back to mountains; back to bootcamp!

Holiday in the sun with family and friends I don't get to see that often was truly wonderful, but you know that I was really really looking forward to getting back to some uphill training. Coming back home and going back to my routine training has been even better than expected. The few days back in Bergen have been full of wonderful training, and my legs are loving it. I have also been lucky to meet many of my running and training friends in just a few days, and I feel super energized with renewed motivation. I am still partly on holidays, and a few times this week I trained twice a day with some sleep in between. It is so nice that it strengthens my wish to be able to do this for a longer period some time in the future. I do keep telling myself, though, "Don't get carried away now; do not make the mistakes of the past". And believe me, I am cautious!

I wanted to do a real mountain hike as soon as coming back to Bergen, and I am blessed with friends who are so spontaneous that I could do it with them already the day after arrival at home. We had an easy pace hike up to Gullfjellet Wednesday afternoon, chatting and laughing all the way up and down. Still some snow there on the path towards the top, but much less than I was expecting, considering how much there was during the Gullfjellet Opp race in June. 

I also wanted to get back into serious strength training. Although I did quite a lot of it during the holidays, it is just not the same without an instructor or a trainer. Ketil is on holidays for another couple of weeks, and I wanted to fire up my muscles before resuming our personal training sessions. What better way to do it than to have double floor classes at Barry's Bootcamp?! My lovely training buddy Irene, who is by the way scheduled to give birth in three weeks and still in full training, and I made plans to go to some sessions together, and already Thursday morning I was at a core (abs) session under the instruction of Christian, and my goodness it was tough. I think I have left my abs a bit unattended during the past three weeks. Christian put high intensity and kept the heart rate going  high throughout the class, and I cannot ever remember to have sweated that much during a strength training session; sweat was dripping from my nose tip, ear flips, and elbows. Afterwards I was completely exhausted; I could not remove myself from the couch for several hours.

Christian is not only a great instructor; he is also an infinite source of motivation at all times. He has an incredible story, which is so inspiring that whenever I feel down or sorry for myself because of injury or pain, I read a couple of his posts to draw myself up. He has a serious illness, cystic fibrosis, which disables about 70% of his lung capacity. Without training he would actually die. In fact it is such a mind blowing dilemma. Thanks to his intensive training he is able to slow down the progression of his illness. However, he cannot become an old man unless he gets a lung transplantation, which he is not yet sick enough to get since he is fighting his illness so well. He improves his shape and runs marathons, and then comes a rainy winter with lots of infections where all training is lost, and he is back to square one. He repeats this restlessly over and over again. Whenever I feel like complaining, I think of Christian. He is so strong, and nobody should complain unless they fight at least as hard has him.

The same afternoon, Frank and I went for the regular Melkesyre Stoltzekleiven training. I pushed it but I was still a couple of minutes behind my personal record. A bit disappointing, since I was very close to my record just before the summer holidays, but OK since I had heavy legs from the strength training and the Gullfjellet hike, and it has after all been three weeks with no uphills. Fortunately, the race is still two months away, and I hope that gives enough time to get back into shape and improve my recorded race time. On the positive side, from the top of Stoltzekleiven we had a wonderful easy jog up to Rundemanen and Blåmanen, which was a lot of fun and went really well with respect to my injury.  My hamstrings are working quite well now for steep uphill fast walking and slow terrain running, although I am still no good at flat fast running. I think the treadmill intervals of Barry's bootcamp classes will be a nice way of getting back into speed training without putting too much strain on my injury, and on Friday I was planning to attend a regular class. But listening to my body (wow, I am good at this now!), I figured that it would be better to rest my legs, and I went again for a double floor class (no treadmill, just strength training for the whole hour). To my big surprise Ketil and his fiance Mona were there to attend the class, and I had the bench between Ketil and Irene, with Mona just behind; you can imagine the pressure I felt!

So great to meet and catch up with all these wonderful people all at once and so unexpectedly. The class was instructed by Tage the legendary, who brought Barry's Bootcamp to Norway, first to Bergen, then to Oslo, and soon to open a second branch in Bergen. No matter how good or bad shape you are in, bootcamp classes are a great way of getting into better shape. They can prepare you to start running faster or longer distances, in addition to making you stronger, or make you even faster and even stronger if you are already in great shape. I daresay it is more efficient than any other training for strength and speed.

In the meanwhile I am of course also back to my HSR training with the regular machines, and back to training sessions with Melkesyre. Although I do my own variant sometimes (walking up Stoltzekleiven instead of running intervals to Fløyen) it is simply wonderful to meet my gang before the start of a session and to rejoin them at the end. The HSR is going well, too. I was happy to see that I have kept or increased the weight on all exercises. On top of that, my injury feels even better now after a few days of uphills. The only disappointment is the leg curl which is still at the same weight and pain level as it was before the holidays. But I am able to do it properly and draw my leg all the way up to my butt. The day I will be able to increase the weight on this exercise will be a new milestone. I am looking forward to it!

Patience is power.

As good as it gets

It's been a busy week. On Monday I managed to squeeze in time to do both my rehab exercises and a close-to-record go at Stoltzekleiven. But then I was on travel from Tuesday to Friday, and I did not get to do any of my routine training. I had in fact very optimistically packed a whole mobile physiotherapy center with me, but the days consisted of late nights and very early mornings, and in the end I was just too tired to do anything else than sleep when I was in my hotel room.

 

I had had three consecutive days of hard exercise before leaving, and I thought at least that the rest would be good for me. However, sitting still for long hours for four days seemed to make everything worse. When I finally got home Friday evening I was feeling stiffer than ever, and the injury seemed to have worsened. I felt an urgent need to get moving. Fortunately, the weather report for Saturday was wonderful and I had already agreements with several friends for going to the top of Gullfjellet. On Saturday was the Gullfjellet Opp 2015 race, and I had decided several months ago to participate. Yesterday, instead of cancelling my plans, I participated in the class for fun, where your time is not registered. As the weather report turned nicer and nicer, more and more friends decided to join. Not all of them the race, but many of them the slow fun walk up. In the end we were many who took it easy, and it was such an incredibly nice day. We started early enough to get to the top just before the winners, so that we could cheer them into finish, and enjoy the excitement there.

Interesting enough, the topic of the conversation many times during the walk up was how important it is to rest and listen to your body, and how we are not really very good at it usually. We all enjoyed so much to take an easy pace walk up and just talk and lough all the way, and have time to stop and enjoy the views and take photos. And we kept asking: "Why don't we do this more often? Why do we always run?" I felt so lucky that I had so many friends who decided to do the easy walk this particular time rather than the race. Although the weather was sunny at the start, it got more and more cloudy as we ascended, but then it started to clear up more and more as we got closer to the top. Exactly at the moment when we reached there it became completely clear and sunny. Wow, could we have been more lucky?!

I very often find myself feeling lucky. On the other hand, I am sure that in reality I'm not more lucky than others, but somehow I spontaneously end up taking things to be my luck. If a nice coincidence happens I get so excited. In the middle of all injury and rehab at least I feel that I have been very lucky with circumstances around the competitions that I missed. Like on Saturday, I am sure it would have been much less fun to race, especially since more friends did the easy walk than those who raced. In Bergen City Marathon 2015 it was raining heavily, and Bergen Fjellmarathon 2015 was so muddy and slippery that improving my time from last year would probably not be so easy. So in a way I am not that sorry that I could not race in them. And I did participate in some sense, since I was there and cheering and having fun. Another piece of luck hit me last week when the Storehesten Opp 2015 race was cancelled due to too much snow. I have been to this peak once but not during competition. I was planning to participate this year, having my time registered, but not pushing it beyond my injury. This would have been fine, but you see I have a bet with my father-in-law, who sat a limit last year on how well he thought I could perform. I am sure to be able to beat that limit, but probably it would not have been possible this year. So the cancellation of the race suited me just perfectly!

I think it is important to pay attention to the good things that happen and register them as good luck. I am afraid too many people rather pay attention to the not so good things, and just register those as bad luck, without observing the good things. How can you ever be happy if you do that? If you feel sorry for yourself, especially if you think your bad luck is the fault of others. Of course we must allow ourselves to feel sad; after all what is life if you don't experience the whole range of feelings? But try not to get buried in sadness or despair for too long. And please don't misunderstand, I am not talking about real life crises or serious illnesses; I know that not everything is possible to get over just thinking positively. But for a normal average everyday life, where not much extraordinary is happening, I think having the ability to get excited about the little good things and ignore the not so good things, is a step towards happiness. Fortunately physical exercise makes you able to do exactly that! With endorphins running in your body all the time, all you see are birds, flowers, and the sun. I read an article last weekend which I found very interesting. A famous Norwegian psychiatrist says that we should all have 0.5 per-mille alcohol in our body constantly. I agree completely! :-) But you can indeed achieve the same or even better effect with physical exercise.

Today Frank and I repeated last weekend's discovery, the path from Munkebotn, via Dræggehytten, to Rundemanen. I just like this path more and more. This time I was even able to run parts of it, my first running steps in a long long while. The weather was even nicer than last weekend, and although we were a bit too late for the regular Sunday meeting of Melkesyre at Brushytten, guess what: yes more luck, they were still there when we got there!

Every single day offers many options. Make sure to choose those that will make you happy!