Road 2 Tallinn: Here we go
A new topic coming up on my blog for the next five month: My second long distance race.
I want to take you with me on this journey and show you my way to the Ironman Tallinn – hopefully together with the Zwift Academy Tri Team on the Road to Kona.
It will be a long way. Especially the way that I will cover in the next weeks with the long runs. Serval hours, Serval days.
And those runs should be the starting point of this small “Road to Tallinn 2020” series. Hope you enjoy the blogs.
Waiting for Zwift Response
As within my first post: I am currently awaiting, anticipating the repsonse from the Zwift Academy. I shorten the waiting duration with the first couple of long endurance sets in the last days. Especially before the information about the Zwift casting my runs had a distance of 20 to 23 ks. This was more to come back in form instead of a long distance training. But now the motivation with Ironman Tallinn has changed.
We – the run group I organize in Augsburg – yesterday did our first run that exceeded the 2 hour mark by a few minutes. We did take all the trails on the west side of the Lech to go South and came back at the “Staustufe 23”. It is a long way from there to the “Hochablass”, which is the first chance to cross back from the east side to the west of the river. This helps a lot with the motivation, because going back will just make the running go longer. So as soon as you cross down south of Augsburg you are on your way back. I really love it. Even if the run is tough, it will get easier mentally as you “run back home”.
Currently my coach and I combine two kinds of long runs. One week I do a flat run with some sprints that gives the kilometer base. The other weeks I do a hilly long run to train for the route of the Ironman Tallinn in Estonia. Apparently there are some cobbles and some meters up and down on the run. Hope to get some altitude endurance to climb the track in Tallinn easily.
Target set: Ironman Run
My goal is, that I will be fitter, strong and more stabile after the 25k mark on the run comapred to my race in Roth in 2017. Back then I did few – to few – base miles on the run and therefore suffered more then expected. My longest runs were 35k in training and 43k at the Wings for lige World run. I hardly got to the 30k mark in training. So the days after Roth and the regeneration of my legs was tough. So for this season I want to prepare better, want to run more and want to get more core training for stability in. Hawaii and Tallinn should not hurt as much in the muscles due to lack of base miles, but they should hurt because of pace and energy.
What is it that I do
My last week had 4 runs:Meine letzte Woche bestand aus 4 Laufeinheiten:
Thursday: 10km with 2k – 1k – 2k – 1k speed intervals
Friday: Easy endurance run with 16km
Saturday: Some easy 6k after a hard bike day
Sunday Runday: 28k long run, with the Augsburg Boys
Conclusion
During the sunday longrun I felt the fatigue in my Legs during the first half. Until the turn-around I was sceptic, if I would make it without injury or major pain. But in retrospetive: The last couple of ks were the best of the run, because the body somehow got used to the run. So the long run was a successfull but tired one.
Today – sadly on the one hand side, luckily on the other after this weekend – I did not make it into the pool. This is due to the semi-optimal opening hours of the local pools on Monday here in Augsburg. But so I went to the Gym and got into a little bit unknown theretory.
Next to my runs I will pick up the base miles on the bike starting the upcoming weekend. So stay tuned and follow me around.
And in Germany we say #LäuftBeiMir. Which translates to “Runs for me”, and expresses that everything is working out 😉 Have a great start into your week
Tom