Tomorrow I will run. One day earlier than planned. Sunday will be a photo-shoot day. Sara has written a new book, and the publisher want a photo of her on the cover. A photo in nature. Looking at the weather, Sunday is the best day for a photo-shoot. Lucky me. Now I can run one day earlier. That run will be the first of the next phase, which means more speed-work.

80/20 rule

I’ve been training according to the 80/20 rule, which means 80 percent of my training is easy running, and 20 percent of my training is fast. Easy running in my case means keeping my heart rate under 150 beats per minute.

If you’re interested in this, stay tuned. Soon I’ll explain to you all the details. But for now, it was hard to do this 80/20 stuff in the beginning. Very hard. Or actually easy. Very easy. Too easy. During my first runs I was walking more than I was running. My body had to learn to perform with a low heart rate.

Different approaches

The reason to run slow, is to build endurance. The more slow running you do, the easier it becomes to run long distances. In the beginning that’s all you want. Speed will come later.

There are different approaches to 80/20 running. Some experts say if you do an easy run, 100 percent of that run should be easy. Others say you can combine it. You can do 80 percent of a run easy and 20 percent of it hard, for example by doing intervals.

Black and white

I took the black and white approach for my first training block. My goal was to be able to run half a marathon. I didn’t care about the time. Twice a week I ran slow, and once a week I would do either an interval training or some other speed-work.

I have to say, it worked very well. In my first running life I found closing the gap from 5 kilometers to 10k easy, but from 10 to 15 very hard. 15 to 21 was okay, as far as I remember, but everything above 21 was extremely hard.

This time, getting to 21 kilometer went very smoothly. I never had the idea that I was struggling to run more kilometers. Even when I ran the Viking Steam Trail, 24.1 kilometer, I still felt I had energy at the end of the race. I think my last two kilometers are proof of that, because with 5.12 minute per kilometer and 4.56 they were my fastest kilometers that race.

Running 30 kilometers

The first goal of my second training block is closing the gap between 21 and 30 kilometers, as I told you yesterday. Because I like speed-work, I’m choosing the second approach of 80/20 training this time. Mixing 20 percent of speed with 80 percent of slow running in one run. I’m curious how that’s going to turn out. I’ll keep you posted.