Goals: Ramp up volume after travelling back home to BC
- 4 x Zone 2 activities + 1 gym session
- Distance: 52.67 km (+14.43 km / 38%)
- Time: 5h 47min (+125 / 56%)
- Load: 331 (+133 / 67%)
- Calories: 4693 (+1302 / 38%)
- Elevation gain: 494m (+146m / 42%)
This was always going to be a mid week, with 24h of transit from Stockholm to BC on Tuesday January 13 taking its toll on the body. Because I hadn’t recovered from the illness by that time, it also damped hopes for hitting the ground running back in BC. I took a blood test the day before I left, and had 5x the max reference value for inflammation. Normal if you are or have been sick.
That inflammation stuck around (more on that below), but I still managed to carefully rack up a respectable 52km in Victoria. Much of that was on the local Burrito League segment that luckily is located just a few 100 meters from my home. Was fun to run back and forth, and meet some new people in the local running community. I also snuck in a road-to-trail run in Royal Roads, and although the RPE was gruesome relative to the pace it was really nice to just get out to run in the woods. Something I didn’t really get much of in Stockholm.
I spent some time this week analyzing my health and activity data, with the hope of being able to better identify when my body is so strained that more training can lead to sickness. In the process I learned a lot of interesting things, but something that stood out to me about this week was how relatively high my cardiac cost was after coming back to Victoria.
I pin this on the inflammation and possibly residual fatigue after being sick, and less so on the travel. The reason is that there is no increase in cardiac cost from Dec 12 onward, which was the day after I travelled 24h and stayed awake 36h on the BC-to-Stockholm leg of my travel. It seems to be coming down little by little, so we’ll see where it settles next week.
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