miscellaneous news, tuesday 1st august 2006, 10:53am

Kuehlungsborner Stadtwaldlauf

since there's a serious lack of OL around at the minute (well, apart from a couple of days of the Lakes5 next week), I've ended up doing a couple of normal races. Thankfully not road races, since both of them were entirely on forest paths/tracks (and both on mapped areas), but still straightforward races.

I use the word straightforward slightly liberally: the first was a Stundenpaarlauf, otherwise known as how far can two people run in an hour. The loop was about 750m with a slight downhill near the start and corresponding slight uphill near the end. In teams of two, alternating laps, one hour, at the end of the hour the start pistol fired again and all runners drop their number where they stand. In other words, an hour of competitive interval training.

After about 15 minutes I was already saying it was enough, although it got easier again towards the end.

The second races was the Kuehlungsborner Stadtwaldlauf - 14.4km in 6 laps of a 2.4km course through the town forestin Kuehlungsborn, which is basically flat. The first couple of laps were fine, the next four not so, but given that my target time was an hour (yes, I really have been doing that little training) and I was about 10% faster than that then I can't complain.

It will be nice to see some hills next week though!

Kuehlungsborner Stadtwaldlauf Course