Welcome to My Training Journey

I cut back my Sunday long run, but it was still too much. By 8K, my Achilles and left calf were already starting to play up. I was genuinely tired, but I still pushed through: 10K easy plus about 2K at tempo. The result showed up on Tuesday — my motivation was gone. Sure, work deadlines and bad sleep didn’t help, but I can’t ignore the signal. The end of the week was harder. Work urgency ramped up, and my kid caught a fever. Luckily, I have a secret weapon: pram jogs. Huge relief that my one-year-old can sit in there for more than an hour.

New year, new goals. The first one is the Ballart Half Marathon at the end of April, with 15 weeks to go. Another goal is to keep journaling, at least once a week. As usual, I was gonna give up this journaling project just like before. Until I heard this analogy in this podcast with the author of Atomic Habits: Our journey of chasing the one we want to be is like Sisyphus pushing the stone. Once you stop moving it, it goes all the way back, resets. Journaling will make me better at things, not just running, so I will keep pushing the stone. My running hasn’t gone backwards too much. I did some stride sessions last week, plus an 11 km long run (for me). This week, I started looking forward to training. I was looking forward to the easy-ish one-hour run, and I was looking forward to the tempo session. I can feel it in my body, which is the biggest indicator of readiness, I believe. Importantly, journaling practically enables experiments. For the first half of the build, I am going to replace my Tuesday speed session (400 meters) with a medium distance (6-8km) run with a lot of strides. I will go for a few parkruns to benchmark this practice. Happy to be back!