After my last post on cycling I spent a lot of time thinking about my running. Not the kind of focused thinking for a relatively short while, with quick conclusions. More the kind of thinking that lingers in the back of your head for weeks. Sometimes it pops into your consciousness, with a new idea or new way to interpret data, but mostly it is running in the background. Eventually, I arrived at three truths: I can improve my form…
For a while now I’ve been feeling kinda stuck between seasons. My 2018 racing season is pretty much over, but it’ll be quite a while before I can properly kick off the next season. I haven’t decided on my race schedule and ambitions for 2019 yet, but unless I’ll do another ridiculously expensive overseas race early (which is unlikely!) I won’t be racing again before early May. Which also means that I need not bother with a fully structured plan…
‚Tis the time of year when I randomly sign up for events. As long as I don’t have a new goal I feel lost. I can’t really sit still, but can’t really commit to much either. The result is that whenever someone asks me to join for a local event my default answer is „sure“. The Cycle Tour is such an event. A 100k rolling road race that targets mostly recreational riders. There is a timed race going on, but…
I recently started dabbling with google charts to visualize data. For an analog native like me it’s pretty new to look at code when fixing a graph instead of mashing buttons in excel, but so far I’m enjoying myself and slowly getting the hang of it. Mostly because it is well documented even for the most simple minded user, like me. To try my hand at geocharts I took the number of comepetitors from each country racing in IM Hamburg….
Contrary to large parts of the rest of the civilized world and Australia, Golf still has a whiff of old fart about it in Germany. It is perceived as expensive, boring and the first address for snobbery and sudo-exclusivity. You hardly see young(-ish) people on the course and never anyone who is can be located near anything that would feature on RedBullTV. Weird then, when I talk to friends from the US for example, where even the crazy MTB DH…
Finally the big day has come! Not entirely as expected though. On our way to Hamburg the news hit that the swim would be canceled due to high concentrations of blue and green algae and be replaced by a 6k warm up run. Bit of a bummer that my first ever long distance triathlon would not be an actual triathlon. But we were already on our way, had put in the work and nothing better to this weekend and so…
Holy stokes, we’re almost there! I am already deep into my tapering, but ramped into it a bit too quickly. On a business trip last week to Portugal for three days I didn’t have time or the pool to go swimming and neither did I have the chance to ride. So while I managed to move my bike and run workouts around during the week, the swim suffered. Only one session, open water without wetsuit. It felt okay though and…
I’ve been a fan of Portugal and its people since my first visit to Lisbon two years ago. So when I got the chance to present a paper I wrote at a conference in Porto I didn’t think twice. I had three days and two nights to spend, but as always most of it was busy with work. I still managed to take a few walks across town, trying to soak it all in and even a run to the…
The big day is getting closer every day now! I know that’s kinda obvious but it is beginning to feel much more serious now, humbling and a bit scary. It has been a wild ride so far. I clocked another maximum effort week, collecting more than 700 TSS and as many as the week before. Just like I planned and I feel like that is also close to the maximum of what I can realistically recover with work and family…
Sitting here at my desk I can hardly believe that it’s less than three weeks before the big day. Properly scary. I am also pretty fatigued, my plan to really push it the last week materialized. I’ve logged a 710 TSS week, including my longest run in a while and longest swim ever. I am tired and cranky, hungry all the time and only think about my next workout and race day logistics. Swimming: Two sessions in open water, one…