Start SLOW - be it running, weight loss or changing habits

An important thought I got reminded yesterday during my run. Starting slow can be the deal breaker of your success story. As said, be it running regularly, training for a specific distance, weight loss or becoming better person through simplifying your life and being more conscious about your choices. How many times did you jump into a great new things just too fast and became overwhelmed sooner or later? Leading in a frustration that you are not able to keep up your insanely intense start of the new practice and finally quitting. If this never happened to you, lucky you! You can stop reading right now. For the rest of us, starting slow in order to stick with your new habit is especially valid for running.

Wordless Wednesday - Love PINK

Marathon training getting serious

My first full marathon! That is what I am training for as you might know if you are a regular reader of my blog (for which I am very very grateful). But things are getting serious! Several important things happened today: I had two trainings in one day. Of course, I am used to run and cross train in one day, e.g. squash and run, spin and run, swim and run, but I have never actually ran twice in one day. 

Grateful Friday

Wanted to pop in quick funny post, but while thinking about it, I changed the concept. List of gratefulness. I am grateful for many more things in my life, but these few mainly running related things made my Friday really cool. Acknowledging that you have so many things to be grateful will simply improve your mood instantly. I am trying to get this acknowledgment in my routine now, world suddenly becomes better place! Try it for yourself and feel free to share your things you are grateful for in the comment section.

Wordless Wednesday

Rainy training = muddy dog & muddy runner = shower required

I'm soo STUPID

Don't forget your own advice - your body will remind you anyway ...

This is just a quick post to remind myself of how stupid I can be not behaving according to my own advice. As you might know from my previous post (Time for changes) I am very excited about my new cooperation with The Coach. I get a "micro-cycles" that consist of 7 training sessions with given pace and distance and I do these on my own together with a given warm up and pre-run exercises. I also have one training session per week with The Coach himself. 

Time for changes

My friends say that I am hyperactive and I travel a lot and my life is full of changes. Now I would say that used to be true when I studied in France and had my internship in New York City and so on. I am very flexible in thinking, in making decisions, but to have stability in my life, I am kind of conservative in other areas of my life. In the past few weeks together with my ongoing marathon training, there have occurred few changes that I think are worth mentioning. Switching from the BC era being one of them (will finally explain in this post). I hope my example of becoming more open minded can help some of you as well. The changes are concerning mainly my running, but not only the running :)

Alive and reporting back to duty :)

As you can see on my mileage, I haven't been running much during the last week because of being attacked by some cruel immunity attacking something. As the result, I have several aphthae in my mouth that have almost prevented me from eating for several days, I also slept most of the two days of bank holidays we had (Tuesday + Wednesday). I tried to go back into training on Friday, but that didn't really work, so I took one more day of rest and finally today I managed to get a full-value training. I guess I can blame myself for pushing my body little too hard, together with some work related stress that was bigger than I admitted to myself and here I am with a week of recovery and more or less no training (OK, half of the mileage of the week before).

I have pretty exciting news for you folks, but have to get some rest, so stay tuned, it is coming very very soon. Little hint ... the past weeks and months of training are soon to be called the BC era.

Good night and good luck!

Great Nike ad ... Petra Kvitova, the new female WIMBLEDON WINNER

It is the Wimbledon final weekend, I am just watching the men's final, but the most important game for the Czech Republic was held yesterday. And it went great, Petra Kvitova  won her first Grand Slam at Wimbledon at the age of 21! I am not that much in tennis, but the Czech people are known for getting very nationalist when we are about to get such a great victory in any sport :) So congratulations Petra! But why I write this post is the marketing opportunity Nike made from Petra's victory (being her sponsor).

Summary of June training

I guess, with the more serious training approach, it might be useful to share some of my training details. My mileage is increasing and I have the usual doubts ... should I increase it even significantly more? In order to clear out some things I did two steps forward. Ordered myself to get tested for the lactate threshold etc., next available slot July 15, so I will have more knowledge about my zones and at which heart rates I should do my workouts. And step two, I emailed a running coach that my friend recommended to me. We'll see how it goes. Letting someone else decide how should I run :)