6 days to Berlin: the long run without running

With 6 days to go it’s time again for the Saltin diet, starting today. Two and a half days - rest of Sun, Mon, Tue - a carb starved diet, then one switching day, eat a little of all, and finally 3 days of carb loading, the fun part. Training needs to go hand in hand with the diet. An emptying run on the first day, i.e. a long run, 25km or so. However with the muscle inflammation on the left side of my hip running is off the training plan right now.

Substitutes for running are in the first place none. When preparing for a running race, you better train by running. Co-ordination and having the right muscles trained in the right way is essential, especially on long distance where a lot comes down to efficiency in the running style. Fortunately, the last 10 weeks (or almost 400 days if you like) have done large parts of that.

Next in line are most probably biking and swimming. Where I prefer swimming over biking right now, because of the co-ordination part. Don’t want to get this repetitive round movement with constant load into the nerv system and then at the starting line in Berlin on Sunday morning the body is all tuned to cycling and not running. Swimming was mentioned as part of the training program anyways, so there can’t be much wrong with it. I opted for the latter today.

A brief calorie consumption comparison shows that you need to at least swim equally long time wise than run, if not a little more. Urrghhh. Swimming for 1,5 - 2 hours, that’s a killer prospect. I’m not good at it and after 100m crawling I’m normally totally exhausted. Breathing is somehow tricky. So I divided the whole effort today into 10 - 15 minutes segments.

The first 10 minutes riding the bike with the family to the indoor swimming arena.

The second and third 15 minutes playing with the little princess in knee deep water and on the water slide

The fourth 15 minutes swimming in 100m increments

The fifth 15 minutes swimming some more 100m increments thinking that swimming is totally stupid and no fun at all

The sixth 10 minutes sitting in the sauna and enjoying the silence (there was absolutely no conversatoin among the 6-8 people in the sauna)

The seventh 15 minutes water jogging with other folks twice my age and three times by width. After 10 minutes it darned on me that water jogging is titally stupid, too and went back to swimming for a couple of more 100m increments.

The eigth 15 minutes were the sum of sitting in the sauna a second time and riding the bike back home again.

This should count as carb emptying training session! Pasta, eh… basta (can’t get my thoughts off the good food…)

Tags: berlin-marathon, long run, Saltin diet