19/08/2024
When your life motto is: "life is an adventure",
Practicing triathlon and (mountain) climbing are my great passions in life. Exploring and pushing your boundaries to ultimately get the best out of yourself gives me a lot of satisfaction, although I have to say that this is mainly after training and races. After participating in many triathlons with generally good results, I felt that I was too much in my "comfort zone", so under the motto "the older, the crazier" there had to be an additional challenge.
The extreme triathlons turned out to be the right answer to give both the training and the races that extra challenge. Not finishing in the Himalayan Extreme due to food poisoning, was not only a deep disappointment but also an immediate motivation push for a repeat and to focus more on the extreme variant.
Some things require a more specific preparation, where training in the cold (swimming), covered altitude meters (climbing) when cycling and running and trail running, already provide an extra challenge during training preparations.
With the Solo Point Five (extreme half ironman distance) in November in Nepal, the specific training started slowly and last Sunday I had my first trail run race training.
The King of Doi Kham organized by Mae Khanin Trail. The distance was 5 loops of 5 km, with 2 long steep climbs with a total of 1100 meters of altitude.
I had given myself the assignment not to make a race of it, but to keep running at as flat a pace as possible (each run the same time), which is the key to extreme races. To my surprise I was able to easily run in the leading group after the start, but that was until the first long descent began. Descending is a clear technique that is not my strongest point and where I notice that the somewhat "reckless" running downhill has also clearly decreased with the climbing of the years.
In short, during the descent the leading group disappeared from my view, and I could focus more on my own assignment "no race - flat speed). The run went fantastically, until I missed a tree root / stone in the third run and, as is somewhat the case with a trail run, I fell over a few times. The damage was not too bad, but I noticed that my lower back had made a strange twist and during the rest of the run my back stiffened and it became a painful story. The 4th round went well but became increasingly painful, so as part of training I decided to shorten the run by 1 round to 20 km and 880 meters of altitude.
But all in all very satisfied with the result and the overall feeling. What certainly helped was that I received my monthly package with Fruitbounds 2 days before, so that I could keep my energy level at the right level both before and after the race.
Thanks to the organization and all volunteers of Mae Khanin Trail, for organizing a well-organized and beautiful trail run.
Creating Balance Coaching/Team Negative Split Fruit Bound Doctor Sport Buzzwoo Grand-café De Oude School HimalayanXtri Mae Khanin Trail
