Goals: Ease back into volume following another 24h trip to Europe
- 3 x Zone 2 runs + 1 x gym, 3 x floor climbing
- Distance: 33.28 km (-46.02 km / -58%)
- Time: 3h 23min (-380 / -65%)
- Load: 455 (+11 / +2%)
- Calories: 2888 (-3835 / -57%)
- Elevation gain: 266m (-611m / -69%)
This was always going to be a mid week. Long-haul flight back to Sweden (again) on Monday, followed by days of recovery. Last time I made this trip, in December, it led to several weeks of being sick. I decided to learn from my past mistakes, and to ramp more gradually this time. I think I executed on that pretty well.
My first real race is mid-March, and one limiter for me is leg strength. While I’m away from home I don’t have convenient access to a gym, so I’ve had to improvise a little. In the next six weeks I’ll be doing what I call my “Chassis build” where I increase strength and balance, and I’ll be doing it primarily with weighted exercises where I’m staying and by walking up and down a lot of stairs in our building. And lots of running, of course.
I cautiously ran 6km on Wednesday to see how the body reacted. The following day I ramped it up to 12km, followed by four sets of 12 floors in stair climb (768 steps of ascent in total) and some strength exercises. I had some light cold symptoms the next day and decided to back off to see if I’d wake up better or worse the next day. I’d take it slow and miss one or two days cautiously, than go too hard and miss another two to three weeks like I did last time. By Saturday I had reason to believe there wouldn’t be a cold, so I ramped up to 15km followed by another 4 sets of stair climbs (768 steps).
On Sunday the weather didn’t really permit running, so I did another 8 sets of stair climbs. I stop for 30 seconds at the top of each set to allow my heart rate to recover. The idea is to have to measure it over time. It also gives me some pause to stop and feel how my body is feeling, and by the last few sets my legs were shaking. Not uncontrollably, but noticeably. It just means that this is needed. I’m not sure I’ll keep it up, it’s not a great substitute for real elevation gain on trail but currently haven’t found a good hill around here.
