gobino's bites

Road to Valencia - Part 13 πŸƒ

maraton_1

Intro

This is an ongoing series of how I'm preparing for the marathon of Valencia, taking place on Dec 7th. I'm using Stryd to train for this event based on running power, a metric I have found very useful for the past years.

I'm ramping up my fitness, hope to finish somewhere around 3h10 / 3h15 3h30 (adjusted goal due to prolonged sickness).

Read my introduction post here or check out the full series.

Week 12 training schedule

Distance: 50km

Week 12 review

Overall feeling: Happy πŸ™‚

I'm happy to be running again and feeling more or less ok. I still have a runny nose, and some of the family are still coughing, but it's not too bad to keep me from going out and run.

I must admit that it was hard to get started again. Taking a rest was the best I could do for my recovery, but I feel I lost momentum and focus on my running, so going out, especially in the dark turned out to be very challenging.

And while I could have gone all-in again, and complete everything as planned, I did not want to risk anything (sickness or injury) and went for easier and shorter runs instead. Also, there's only a couple of weeks left, so I'd rather wanted to focus on volume, rather than speed etc.
I wanted to complete my long run as planned, as currently, the longest I ran was 25km, but as we were off for the weekend, I could not be away running for 3hours. Instead, I did almost 2 based on feeling which went pretty fine. This was better than nothing.

Additional training, tools & comments

With all the off days, the excitement for running seems to have vanished. While I normally kept track of everything, read running articles, proactively looked for small adjustment to help me get better,... I just did my runs and that's it.

Perhaps it's the fact that I realised that I'll not be at my best when I'll be at the starting line and have let go. Although I must admit I'm still looking at the potential finish time from my tech gadgets to see it's improving (and it is!).

One thing I still kept doing where my box breathing exercises and I have tried to do a bit of mental training as well (after getting an article in my inbox). So now I'm doing cold showers and holding my breath after breathing out to increase resistance. Let's see if this can give me a few extra percentage gains.

This week

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#2025 #2025-11 #article #road-to-valencia #running