I woke up this morning still a bit lightheaded from the hot yoga yesterday. If you recall it was almost 50C in the room and I probably hadn't drunk enough water beforehand to deal with those kind of temperatures. Nevertheless I went to my Pilates lesson at noon and after that I was feeling okay again, although my leg muscles were aching from the Pilates itself.
After I got back from my Pilates lesson I loaded up on some wholegrain pasta and took a second sachet of Bios Life Matcha, which I am finding is really good stuff. I also took a few spoonfuls of whey protein in water. With all of that my body was primed to run, and all I needed to do was rest long enough for the food to be digested.
During the break I watched the part of Rocky IV where Rocky is training old style and his opponent Ivan Drago is using high tech equipment and cheating by injecting himself with anabolic steroids. That always inspires me to get out and train, and give me old school versus new school any day I say. I would much rather be out running in the fresh air than in a gym.
I took Negrita with me on my run, and we went to the woods in Opfikon. On the path next to the Glatt river some guys dog tried to lunge at Negrita and I went off on one at him because his dog was not on a lead. It is quite difficult staying calm when you are in the middle of a fair paced run with all the adrenalin pumping through your body. For that reason I was quick to show him the birdie and to raise my fists in anger. Sorry to my fellow Brits for giving the British a bad name as being aggressive, but he deserved it, and I didn't lay a finger on him anyway.
I realised that I was easily going to be able to do the 20km in under two hours even though towards the end of the run Negrita was beginning to slow up. I eased back a bit and let her catch her breath. Today was the first time I was running whilst listening to music. I was running with my AEG Aqua MP3 player that Anny bought me for my birthday. The player is attached to the headphones so there are no wires at all, which is great. The only reason I haven't been running to music in my training this year is because I won't have any means of listening to music during the MDS, so I wanted to learn to run without it. Music does tend to make me run faster though, which is probably why today I had to make a conscious effort to slow myself down in order to stay fresh enough to get in more miles tomorrow. I was listening to Marc Anthony's Mended album.
I deliberately went out today without a pack, because I still have around 90km left to do this week and I don't want to overdo things. Either tomorrow or Saturday I will do a very long run (greater than 50km) with a pack. If I can manage to do 160km this week I will be very happy, and go into my tapering period with the confidence of knowing that I have done enough training to do well in the race. So far this year I have run 862.56 kilometres (approximately 536 miles).
On a closing note it may not seem that significant but the last few runs have included 200 metres of elevation gain. Here in Switzerland that is nothing, but in the UK that is a pretty big hill. For those of you who know the Monmouth region, that is equivalent to running from Monmouth up to Trellech.
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