Refocusing and Rebuilding

After my performance at the STWM which was the grand finale to my 2013 season, it is difficult to refocus and mentally prepare for the next season. I was looking at some of my stats from the 2013 season and since Jan 1st of 2013 until the end of October 2013 (10 months) I ran more than 6000 km, climbed more than 35000m (4 times up mount everest), burned more than 500,000 kcal (just to put some perspective 3500 kcal is 1 pound of pure fat, so 500000/3500 = 143 lbs of energy used), and between running, strength training, and cycling more than 700 hours. With such big numbers it's hard to get myself mentally prepared to do it again next year, and with even more kilometers and effort. Because when it comes down to it the goal is to improve week to week, month to month, and ultimately year to year. In 2012 my biggest running week was  145 kilometers, in 2013 my biggest was 230 kilometers. That is a 58% increase! What impact did that have on performance 2:52 marathon --> 2:34, a 10.5% improvement. Another 10% is a 2:18 marathon, 14.8% would mean Olympics. So how do I get that. Well it won't take one year, not two, not three, but the beauty is I'm 21 yrs old - if I can gain 2% per year math says 7.5 years from now - oh my goodness look at that, that is the year of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

 Nice to dream about the future, but for now the only way to get there is to make it my goal to improve every week, and be better tomorrow than I am today. That starts with re-energizing my legs and my drive for winter base-building by racing tomorrow in the Casablanca 8k. The only unfortunate part about the whole thing is I was so excited to try out a new racing flat-the Nike Lunarspider R3, all 5.6 ounces of it, all of it fast. Living here just north of Toronto, you would think you could access anything you
needed or ever wanted. But no, running stores in Canada don't sell any true racing flats, and now running warehouse has basically stopped shipping to Canada. Must be too difficult to ship to us living here in igloos in the tundra or something. Plus, Saucony Canada is a joke, for God sakes update your site, the cortana 2s are like 2 years old, I wear to cortana3s yet according to their site they are not out yet. Nike, don't get me started, so much flash, sure it looks really pretty, yet try navigating through it quickly and I doesn't look so pretty with loading circles spinning endlessly. Whatever I'll stop ranting, looks like I'll be wearing my marathon racing flats (adios 2.0). I could wear my interval/10k flats the adidas hagio 2.0 but they are currently in palliative care. Just making sure the transition to shoe heaven is painless. In terms of the gameplan for the race,  pretty simple - run fast and maybe try to have some fun along the way. Last night was a great high-intensity average about 3:07 per kilometer on loose gravel track for 7 x 1km repeats (HR got to 191). Now I'm not expecting to go 3:07 per k for 8k but I would be content going 3:13-3:14 for something around 26 minutes. But that be said I'm not going to put to much pressure on myself, the goal here is not to set a world record or anything its just to get myself pumped up for the long winter haul. Conditions or tomorrow look to be okay, but it will be interesting. The temp. looks good 6 degrees feeling like 2, but the interesting part is the 33km S wind. Now you are never going directly N or S, you start going WNW, then NEN, then turnaround to SWS, and back ENE. So yo are always on an angle to the wind, which I have never raced in before, but like I mentioned a couple posts ago, I try to learn something for every race so I can improve for the next one. So until next time, as the kenyans say train hard, win easy.