Training must go on

Lately lots of changes happen in my organization and my main project hitting the wall too. Also, I suffered the usual dip in emotion after every big race (failed to score the highly anticipated PB made it worst). To overcome this, I do shopping.

I got myself double doses of endorphin from the books by two famous Japanese Ultra Runners, Hirofumi Ono (a.k.a. the White Radish Costume Runner) and Ryōichi Sekiya (4 times 24hrs Ultra World Champion). I signed up for Seremban Half Marathon, got myself a pair of Drymax Socks (will be running in Bare Access in the coming Challenge68 Ultra), and tentatively get a new pair of Merrell Bare Access later in the RSH Warehouse Sale. The family will have more shopping over this weekend because the bloody GST is coming.

After the Seoul trip, I rested for few days. Only resume my running last Saturday. As I back in Ipoh, I decided to run up the Bukit Kledang as part of the training for the 1900m elevation gain in Challenge68. The training was great. Surprisingly I found a way to keep my effort manageable when scaling the incline, just keep the stable breath by counting it, and never thinking of stopping until you reached the target. My target for this training was simple, 1.5km up (out of the whole 6km road to the TM Tower) with close to 144m elevation gain. Then I walked up another 1.5km, and ran all the way back to start. The descending of 3km over 350m was fun! I clocked 5.5min/km pace in Bare Access. Usually I descend slower than ascending in road race. Now is time to put in some training on how to descend properly with some speed.

Apart from the hill workout, I add in evening run. Challenge68 will start at 6am, no matter how fast I go, come noon I will still be in the race. It preparing my body to endure the heat (plus I planned most of the long run sessions in April to be done in 8/9am-12pm). The usual 6 morning training sessions will still be continued. Evening workouts planned for all easy days (Monday, Friday & Saturday), and Tempo run (Thursday). The easy run was just to building up my endurance. And the tempo run will be a continue session from what I left in the morning. As I need to finish my morning run by 6am, I usually don’t have enough time to cover the planned tempo run distances (especially towards the end of the training program). So the evening session will be filling up the gap and also training the body to restart into target racing pace after some break.

The game plan for this 68km race was ready too. Plan A (711) very aggressive and Plan B (828) relatively conservative. Tentatively I will mix them up and play by ear. The elevation gain doesn’t look very scary as I break it down to average elevation change per KM. But the plan was draw out with the CP elevation. There will be more to be expected in between CPs as the organizer announced 1900m elevation gain in total. I will need to do lot more hill workout in order to follow thru the planned pace.

After putting down all these plans, I felt some relief of my emotional stress. May be I just need to have something to divert my attention and perhaps doing venting helped too.

In short, training (the show) must go on. 6 weeks until my second Ultra road race.