Did another lunch-time bike ride. Fairly average, 26.98km, 1:02:02 duration, 26,1 km/h average speed, 184m elevation gain. The bad part (and I’m not sure if it’s entirely the fault of today’s ride) was that in the evening, I had excruciating neck pain, which in turn …
Just like the previous weekend, I headed to my favourite training track, at the INS (“Institut National des sports”); reasoning that since my achilles was still on probation (so to speak) I shouldn’t subject it to anything extravagant. So laps on a flat track it …
Driving your car for 35 minutes just to get to a spot where you then ride your bike for 2 hours seems a bit redundant; or maybe even wasteful because why not just start biking at home? But that would mean I’d always be hitting the same old spots, at least initially, and where’s the fun in that? Part of the appeal of running or biking is to explore and see places you’ve never seen before.
Today, I was starting my bike at the Saarschleife near Mettlach (Germany). I’d done hill trainings here a few times, but never biked. With my flu-symptoms mostly gone, I decided that I didn’t want to do an undulating course (sweat on the way up, get cold on the way down) but rather some continuous effort. The obvious choice then was a cycle path that travels along a river.
I ended up doing my biggest distance ever, at 52.5km in slightly over 2 hours. This translates to an average speed of 25.9km/h (all according to my Garmin, and including a small break); which I think isn’t too bad for an amateur rider on a mountain bike with grippy tires. My pace started to suffer a little on the final kilometers – one energy gel probably wasn’t enough to keep my energy stores up.
The route that I chose took me from Mettlach to Merzig, then back again to Mettlach (30km); and then I did a shorter loop from Mettlach to Schemlingen and back. I initially estimated that 1/3 was on easy dirt surface, with the remainder on road surface; but my numbers may be off a little. It doesn’t matter much. I wouldn’t rank this as a stellar ride, more of a “get the job done” kind of deal that hopefully is just yet another small step in improving my overall fitness.
Here’s the Strava activity.
The days are getting shorter and I’m spending precious daylight minutes in traffic jams to and from work. Fortunately, we do have showers at work and I can take flexible lunch breaks, so the obvious solution is to exercise at noon, when temperatures are at …
Well. That didn’t last long. Posted a “daily training log” on the 19th, and promptly fell ill and didn’t do any training for the next few days. Would have preferred to take a sick day or two and recover at home, but forced myself to …
I really like reading other people’s daily training logs. George Zack for example has been blogging about training and various races in Colorado and elsewhere for years, and it’s always motivating to see consistency not just in training and racing, but also in documenting it all.
One of the big reasons I’ve always been reluctant to blog daily training updates is that I am not a very consistent athlete. Back in 1998, before the format of “blogs” was popular, I was training almost every day and competing often; but all of that vanished in the early 2000s after a major Achilles injury. Back then it didn’t even occur to me to write about my training or the competitions I ran – in the infancy of all things internet, there wouldn’t have been much of an audience. I don’t have an audience now either, of course.
The same Achilles tendon is plaguing me again in 2015, so for the time being I can’t even have firm goals or post about them for fear of having the rug pulled out from under my feet. But still, maybe there is value in posting about little accomplishments; and maybe I’ll look back at this later and wish I’d documented more.
As for training today, the sports doctor had suggested I tentatively restart some easy jogging. A month ago, we’d already discussed that option, but back then it turned out to be too soon. Of course a month ago I’d gone running (partly) on trails, with some elevation gain; and I’d started with a whole 30 minutes.
So this time around, I scaled things down to the bare essentials: 20 minutes at 6:30min/km pace, on a flat and smooth running track. Afterwards, I did some stretching (feeling very much that I’d lost some more mobility over the past few months) and drove home. Throughout the rest of the afternoon and evening, I could feel the calf muscles tensing up and there was a noticeable pull in the Achilles tendons on both feet. This doesn’t bode well.
The injury on my left Achilles tendon continued to heavily influence all my sports activities in August. I had another two doctor visits and two physiotherapy appointments. Unfortunately, a limited test to return to running (as prescribed by the doctor) proved to be a little …
My left achilles tendon has been the biggest source of trouble in my entire athletics career, and by early July I was once again at a decisive point as far as the severety of the injury was concerned. There was a lot of inflammation around …
Track trainings: 6 track trainings in June. Still trying to find the right balance, since the pain threshold is quite low as far as the achilles tendon is concerned. What’s making this harder is that during the training when the achilles is all warmed up I feel a lot less pain than the next morning; when it can get really tight and uncomfortable to walk on. Mostly did “alternative” trainings (jumps, lunges, goblet squats, etc,).
Road&Trail Running: Only 7 sessions, but two of those were fairly hard vertical races (943m and 1000m elevation gain). So I had to factor in a few days of taper (taking it slow in anticipation of the races) and recovery (since each race weekend not only meant a physical effort but also over 1200km and 12 hours behind the wheel). Furthermore, I overdid it on a road session during the middle of the month (ran too fast, which exceeded my pain threshold on the achilles), and took it slow for the remainder of the month since I did not want to compromise my 2015 goal race (Chamonix KMV) on June 26th. 7h21, 50km, 4190m elevation.
Walking: 121km, which is on the high side for 2015. Did quite a lot of lunch walks, and did one long 25km outing in Chamonix the day after the KMV. 27h46, 121km, 4272m elevation
Cycling: With the focus on two races in June, I only managed to do three MTB sessions; one of which was entirely on streets. 3h29, 84.5km, 1065m elevation
Total time outside: 46h41
Average body weight: 79.70kg. Body fat 13.47%. Almost the same as in May, but I didn’t track during 4 days in Chamonix (didn’t take a scale); which probably had a minor impact since I actually increased in weight during the end of the month because my eating during June was less than optimal.
Injuries: The achilles tendon continues to feel a little worse with each passing month. I’m more and more resigned to the fact that I will probably need to take a month (or more) of complete rest (as far as running is concerned, at least). I have another doctor’s appointment coming up on July 7th.
Somewhere along the climb, there was that moment where everything just kind of faded away, and my entire mental focus was reduced to just that next footstep – to get that ideal foot placement, with the most grip and the least amount of slippage. Long …