… I just can’t let it be. Every time the word Rotterdam appears in front of my eyes, this tune of the Beatiful South kicks in, here with slightly modified lyrics. But neither did I want to compare people with pickles nor describe blonde and beautiful people in masses (as their lyrics do), but rather [...]
Continue reading about It could be Rotterdam, or Vi-e-nna, LondonHam or burg…
It’s time to set a goal for the overtime of this project. As previously estimated we look at a spring marathon with a decent flat course and a good starter field. Since training over the winter sucks, especially in the Nordic, the final marathon should be as late as possible. May/June would be great. However, [...]
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Having thought about it - what went wrong, if you can say so - for almost a week now, it seems that the main reason why the result of the Rotterdam Marathon was no 2:39h but a 2:49h is that 8 months of training, albeit quite intensive training, just is not enough [...]
Continue reading about Rotterdam Marathon analysis - for geeks!
Rotterdam Coolsingel, the main street in the city center, 9:45am, there are already hundreds of people walking around here and there in the starting area of the marathon. Our group, a party of four, Stefano, my “younger brother in arms” and me plus our best supporters just arrived. Everything looked well organized, although finding the [...]
Continue reading about Rotterdam Marathon - dying the long slow death
When travelling to a marathon abroad with the primary supporter wifey (aka the queen), at arrival at the race location priorities may slightly diverge.
Arrival at Amsterdam Schiphol airport, the queen goes “oh look at all those variations of stroopwaffles in the shops here, shouldn’t we buy some?” The runner goes “the food on the flight [...]
Continue reading about Countdown to Rotterdam - 2 and 1: Arrival at the race location
More than two and half thousand kilometers behind in preparation, reduced the weight by 8-9 kg, went through the worst part of a Saltin carbo loading diet, bought new race shoes and tested those, coincidence on the race day is not quite what we’re after here. Flight to Rotterdam is tomorrow, arrival there on Friday, [...]
Continue reading about Countdown to Rotterdam - 3: Packing for success
6 days to go. 9 kilos down since August last year. After today’s training session the scales only showed 72.1kg anymore. The Saltin diet shows it’s effect. Lost about 1.5 kilos in 3 days. I expect to go down another 0.5 to 1kg, but that’ll be it for Rotterdam. For Berlin in the fall, we [...]
Continue reading about Countdown to Rotterdam - 6: weight loss
7 days to go. It’s Saltin diet time. The Saltin diet is an extrem form of carboloading and got it’s name from the Swedish professor in physiology Bengt Saltin, MD, who developed this method in the late 60’s and 70’s. He’s nowadays the director of the Copenhagen Muscle Research Centre. Asking five people, you get [...]
Continue reading about Countdown to Rotterdam - 7: Saltin Diet
8 days to go. The first weather forecast predictions provide indications for the Rotterdam weather on the race day, April 5th. It looks good, way too good. Let’s monitor it at weather.com
With officially 13 degrees Celsius, we’d have 16 - 18 degrees in the sun. This is best marathon weather one could think of. It’ll [...]
9 days to go. Was running with the racing shoes today that arrived yesterday. Good feeling. Tried to go hard and pushed the pace to 3:45 min/km several times. It’s tough, it feels like a distant wish to go that pace the whole marathon distance. But of course it’s -4 degrees out there right now, [...]
