With my eyes set on Tuesday for a baseline run I decided to just do a fun run this morning.
Normally I will do a hill repeat session on Sunday, but that would be too intense and too close to Tuesday. Therefore I decided to start today by doing what felt right - it turned out to be a progressive run until marathon pace. In order to keep the impact small enough that it won’t require multiple days of recovery , I decided to slow down at 5km and just ride it out from there.
This run showed the progress I had been making for the last few weeks of hill repeats and strenght training as my zone 4 pace seemed to be a lot closer to 4:00 min / km than I expected it to be.
I noticed that the focus on hips, back and core resulted in a more efficient posture, causing me to run this pace relatively easy. The last 5 km felt like a cooling down but were still in line with my older marathon paces (progress!)
The views were very nice again and the weather was gentle. We had a little night frost but the sun made up for it.
The plan for Tuesday is to mimic the Jungfrau route and see how my body can handle it.
In general the run will finish based on whatever criteria comes first:
A. 5 hours time limit
B. 42.2 km
C. Injury
It is a simulation not the Jungfrau event itself, so there is no need to go all out and risk weeks of recovery. If all goes well I will test roughly 2000 m of climbing during a marathon with almost all climbing concentrated in the second half of the run.
Little scared but also excited!
Happy running