Last week in Pittsburgh

Now that our life in Pittsburgh is coming to a close, a new marathon cycle has started. This week, Steffi and I started training for the Amsterdam Marathon in October, a fitting choice give our new (and for me old) country. I foolishly shipped off Daniels' running formula with the rest of our stuff, so I will have to reconstruct the schedule from old training logs.

The last two Wednesdays I didn't need a training schedule, because Wayne, one of the runners of the Wednesday running group, gave us some track workouts. This was quite fun to do, especially because I typically don't run the sort of distances (200/300/400 meters) that Wayne let us do. Most marathon coaches don't incorporate those in marathon schedules, but who cares when it is fun! This week is officially the first week of training, so I did 16 miles on Sunday, a short run on Monday, the track workout on Wednesday, and 9 miles today. With a 15-ish long run in the weekend that will be a respectable first week.

I still have to build back my speed: the mile that Wayne let us do on Wednesday took me 6:29. Let's attribute that to all the 300's that we had to do before that.

Running in the Netherlands will be strange because there are no hills at all. Hill training is something you receive naturally in Pittsburgh, so I wonder whether there are any opportunities at all, or whether future hilly marathons will all be miserable. At least Amsterdam will be flat.