My left knee is slowly feeling better, my right shoulder still doesn’t feel good. If it’s a tear in my rotator cuff, it’s healing very slowly. I don’t think running a marathon, 10 days from now, is going to be wise. So this evening I will be redesigning my training schedule.
See, I was hoping to run a mid-winter marathon at the Rossignol Run in Belgium, January 15, but I think it’s wiser to take a little bit more time to recover. Better do a step back now, than not being able to run my first ultra in Sussex in March.
Houffa Trail
So it looks like the Houffa Trail in Houffaze, January 22, is going to be my first race of 2023. I’ll be running that one with my sister. She’s a trail runner as well. More a canicrosser than a trail runner, but now her dog Lucca is getting older, she’s running more and more on her own.
The Houffa Trail in Belgium is a 23 kilometer race, with 770 meters of altitude. That will be a good training for Sussex as I have to do 1.600 meters of altitude there.
Long distance running
The way I had planned it, I only had one week to recover from my mid-winter marathon, before I was going to run the Houffa trail. I don’t have any problems running half marathons, but one week between a marathon and a half marathon with 770 meters of altitude is probably a bit short.
Well, it’s short for my legs. I think I know what went wrong with my left knee. December 10 I ran the Brabantse Kluis Trail, 32 kilometers. Only 2 weeks later I ran a 36,8 kilometers long run. My knee was hurting at the end of the Brabantse Kluis Trail. Two weeks was too short to recover. I’m still getting into this long distance running. I have to give my legs the time to adapt. If I want to or not, I have to keep in mind I’m 50 years old.
Mud Sweat Trails
So the new plan is to recover first. If all goes well, I will run a marathon at the end of January. If I can’t find a nice trail race, I will run the train trail Zutphen to Ruurlo, that Mud Sweat Trails has created.
That organisation does really fun things. One of those, is one of my goals for 2023, but I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow. Now I really should start redesigning my training schedule.
