One week to go before my Winter Race in Ratzeburg

By now it is less than week before my big winter race, a 26k trail run around the lake at Ratzeburg (Infos at http://rsv-triathlon.de/Adventslauf/index.htm).

Training

My training has been going okay. I managed to do a few longer runs (20k, 29k) and a nice long tempo run (14k of marathon pace within a 20k run), but my overall training volume has not been that high, most of the weeks were around 35 to 40k. Overall, I think I made a lot of progress (and I haven’t been sick), but still not quite the training I wanted to do.

Weight

The big thing that has changed was my weight. After my wife’s birthday, we went on a pretty strict diet. I tried to cut back on carbs and eat as much fruit and veggies as possible. This worked really well, I lost a lot of weight – went down from almost 92kg to under 88kg within four weeks!. So now I am at the lowest I’ve probably been since late 2007 and I hope to get down even more within the next few weeks (tricky around Christmas) and months. I felt okay on my runs, and was really surprised with my first swim since more than a month which went really good even in the faster parts.

Expectations

I’m not really sure of what is possible in Ratzeburg – basically, that is what makes racing fun. I was hoping to be able to go under 2 hours (which would be a 4:35/k average pace), but I’m not sure that that is a pace I’m able to run on the tough Ratzeburg course. I’m pretty sure that I can PR the course (2:09 something, just under 5 min/k pace), and I think I should be able to get at least under 2:05 (4:47 pace). I’m really looking forward to how fast I can go.

I just hope that the weather will not turn out to be a deciding factor. We’ve had pretty miserable weather with lots of rain and wind in the last days – in my nearby forest most trails are impassable. After my half marathon in Alstertal I’m looking forward to another muddy trail run (especially in the ups and downs in Ratzeburg). It’s supposed to get colder in the next days and usually this means it’ll get a bit dryer. I hope that this will help to have good racing conditions – but as this is one thing I don’t have any influence in, it’s not worthwhile to spend too much energy thinking about it. I just have to have the gloves available if it turns really cold.