However, I had gotten a bit injured right before that 3000m race, then managed to make things worse the week after the race (though, surprisingly, seemingly not during that race). That injury messed up training for Broad Street, but I was going to run it regardless, even if it were to end up a slower jog.

Training

I’m starting this story from when things went to shit. While doing a long run on the Horse Shoe Trail on 28 Feb, I fell. I lost a bit of my ear and, worse, hurt my hip. I skipped some runs, made those I still did a lot easier, then showed up for the 3000 metre race I had the week after. In the warmup, my hip worried me still, I was ready to call it quits immediately, but once the race started, my hip felt fine. After the race, my hip even felt better than it had all week. Confused, but happy.

Thinking things were OK again, I planned a workout on Wednesday. In the first rep, my hip immediately said nop. Things felt worse than they had before and that continued for a while. I switched to walking instead for the rest of the week.

The week after, I tried out jogs on many days. As long as I did not run too long, my hip seemed to hold up. I also did these on the nearby rail trail, to keep them flat and easy. Yes, in retrospect, maybe I should have just taken more days off. It is so much harder to decide in the moment though. And thus I continued that many jogs approach for another week. I just wanted to run.

The week after that, the week of 30 March, we had a Texas trip planned. This involved a lot more walking, especially once we got to Big Bend National Park, so I ran a lot less. That gap in training I had already planned for though.

Once back home, I went back to building my base back to “normal”, i.e., the 70 km per week that I had reached prior to breaking myself. I did make a change. Before, I had been spreading the 70 km out over five days and, wanting to have fun weekend long runs, threw too much distance at my long runs: up to 25 km. In my less desperate-for-running times, I would have been the first one to say that with only 70 km in a week, you should not bother with a long run over about 18 km. So I listened to old self (really, to JD) and I now spread the 70 km out over six days while aiming for a 16–18 km long run. I am thinking I will keep it that way for a while after the race too.

Finally, the week before race week, I wanted to actually try some faster running again. No hope remained for the time I had originally filled in for seeding (58:15), but, being a sucker for round numbers, I decided I should still aim for sub 60 minutes least. Sixty minutes at race pace tends to be about what gets suggested for “Lactate Threshold” (LT / T) kind of workouts. You see where I’m going with this. I just did some T work at the pace that would get me to the finish in one hour (3:43.6 per km). Did 2×2 km of it on the track because I wanted to get the exact right feel and because I wanted the flat stability for my hip just in case. It felt… fine? I did the same workout again the week of the race. I had not slept anywhere near enough, but got through it on grit. That gave me even less confidence in actually managing to hold the pace on race day. Oops.

Goal and Strategy

As I said, originally I had filled in 58:15. It seemed like a good goal going by my 5000m in November and is supposedly equivalent to just about a sub-17 5000m. Again, I’m a sucker for round numbers to aim for. Anyway, that was out the window.

Instead, I was just going to aim for the hour (well, for 59:59), at a pace of 3:43.6 per kilometre. Do that for the first maybe five km, see what my heart rate is at, adjust for more speed from there if heart rate is too low. If my heart rate was too high by that point, the plan was to just hold on to the pace anyway and live with the potential crash and burn.

Pre-Race

Ugh.

With my goals and hopes out the window, I had been ignoring the logistics until the week of the race. Not that I could have changed much about them, but boy was that annoying to think about. American races start pretty early compared to Belgian ones. This one was poised to start at 7:00 in the morning. From where we live in the suburbs, there was no train option to get to the start early enough. Instead, my two options were a last minute $200+ hotel room or waking up really early, driving to the parking lot near the finish line, and taking the metro up to the start line (the race is point to point along Broad Street). I was tempted, but decided not to spend that money.

Thus the night before, I started my evening routine by like 20:00. Took some melatonin, went to lie in bed, read the book I had been reading. All the usual approaches to when I have trouble falling asleep. To my surprise, that actually worked somewhat. I don’t know exactly when I fell asleep, but I think I might have even gotten six hours of sleep.

My alarm went off at 4:20. Good thing I’m pretty good at immediately getting out of bed most of the time. I got going with the usual morning routine, but with more purpose than usual. I had three bites of the pasts leftovers from the night before. I had a banana. My wife (who was nice enough to tag along for this madness) and I headed out the door at 4:40. The drive to the parking lot took about 50 mins, we arrived by 5:30 or so. I changed into my running gear, threw a sweater over, was too cold, but we made our way to the metro station that was right there. Got to the metro platform by about 5:38–39 (I remember looking at the clock too often, waiting for a metro to show up), waited five minutes for the express train to arrive, got in like sardines, and after some more delay we were on our way. The express line still stopped a few more times and every time our idea of being in there like sardines got hit by a “it can always be worse”. By the end of the 30–40 minute ordeal, I was sweating a little from the heat of the mass of people in that cart. Dicht bijeen is warm.

We arrived at the start area with about 40 minutes till the start. Walked to the toilets. There were a lot, but the lining up was a bit disorganized, you had to kind of guess which line belonged to what number of toilets. Anyway, that was uneventful and we headed to my corral. Everyone under 62 minutes seed time got in the red corral, right behind the elites. I did not really have time to jog around for a warm up (and did not want the mess of figuring out a good spot nearby to even try that), so I made do with swinging legs, some running in place, some jumping up and down. Not ideal, but I also was not really worried about it? It helps that I did not expect a PR here.

Race

The start was given a bit abruptly and off we were. I started off partly by feel and partly by glancing at the watch. Early on, there is not much trust you can put in that GPS time reading anyway. The pace felt right though. Once the GPS caught on, my feeling was confirmed. I assumed the people around me must also be aiming for an hour and we all just stuck around that same pace. Specifically, I tried to stay near a guy that, going by his jersey, was part of the club that organised my previous two track races. They have some speedy boys and girls and I had noticed a lot of their shirts in the start corral.

Watch splits kilometres one and two, rounded to the second: 3:43, 3:43

Pretty much bang on. After those two first kilometres though, I realise that my heart rate is not going up to where it should. Historically, my LT-aka-one-hour-race-pace heart rate is around 170–173. My watch said my heart rate was around 155. At that point I decided to let the reins go. Speed up by feel, keep an eye on the heart rate, and see what happens. Finishing in an hour while running an entire race in the high 150s would not have sparked joy.

Anyway, I started blasting.

I picked up the pace and I picked off people. Always a little worrying when you suddenly go faster than most people around you, but hey, I had the idea in my head now. Things felt fine, running fast is fun.

By about halfway, I did get the first thoughts of “you know, letting the body relax could be fun too”. We ignore those feelings.

Kilometres 3–9: 3:34, 3:33, 3:32, 3:36, 3:33, 3:33, 3:34

Since the race is a straight line, you see the city hall from quite far away already. A little over halfway, at about 9 km, you finally reach it. With it, you also reach the only four turns as you have to go around it. They are not tight turns though, so you can just keep it rolling.

Just a little past the city hall, I spot my wife’s bright yellow jacket. She yells at me I’m doing great. I had told her about the one hour goal, naturally, so she knew I was ahead of schedule.

And ahead I was. The race provided mile markers and a (gun) timer at every one of them. For a race where you know you need to run just faster than six minutes per mile, that works out to some easy math. I saw my time get further and further ahead of every next multiple of six. I was over a minute ahead of schedule, so projected finish of 58:xx. I would have to implode pretty badly for sub 60 to fail at this point.

A few kilometre later, I realise I have to reign myself in some, I need to slow down. While my heart rate is still just hovering around 163–165, i.e., lower than I would expect, I feel pretty sure I cannot keep up the pace I was running. I don’t worry about it though. Accept faith, see if there is someone I can follow for a while. I tell myself one thing though: I can’t let myself go slower than 3:43.6, the pace I had originally had in mind for the entire race. I am on track for 58:xx and I want to keep it that way.

Kilometres 10–13: 3:37, 3:38, 3:42, 3:42

A lot of this stretch is spent thinking “right, follow that person” … “OK, I can’t really follow them right now” … “Well, they’re also not pulling away very far, so keep them vaguely in sight”. Rinse and repeat. It keeps my mind occupied though. I just want to make sure I keep going. I also already am thinking about when to start pushing to the finish. Last 800m or so sounds good.

Those last bits, there’s actually a slight double bend in the road. Everyone else seems to be sticking to the lanes painted on the road, I aim for what I think is the straighter line. I’m also pushing a bit again, but there’s not much to push.

Kilometres 14–16.1: 3:40, 3:41, 3:37+31

Results

Official results and my own GPS.

My official splits (chip time), compared to the goal pace.

Honestly, can’t complain. Sure, the course helps (slight net downhill, one direction). Since I was still already going to be happy with sub 60 today, going faster makes me happier still. Technically this is a PR since it is only the second 10 mile race I have ever run. In reality, the pace of my half marathon PR was a 57:06, without even accounting for being able to run it faster if there is no expectation of another five km tacked on after it. Ah, to be in that shape again.

Right past the finish line, a guy walks up to me and asks me about my Belgian themed shirt. Turns out he is a Belgian too. He saw my singlet during the race and it motivated him to beat me. He managed to, he finished nine seconds ahead of me. We chatted for a bit, commiserating the lack of talking Dutch in our respective areas.

After that, I walked to a shuttle that would bring runners back to the nearby parking lot. By the time I reached the shuttle, I felt like the parking lot was not too far any more anyway and I just walked the rest of the way.

Future

I think my main takeaway from this race is my body might have been lacking in endurance and my mind in the will to push through the pain. That will be a matter of running more again and running harder more often again, both in workout settings as in race settings. Time will tell whether I manage.

As for actual future plans, I don’t really know. Past two months distracted me some from even looking ahead much. I’m thinking I’ll look for a race in fall just to keep something on the horizon. Probably should do some smaller stuff sooner.

In the near future I want to get my consistency back. I’m thinking along the two obvious fronts here: distance per week and workouts. I think my distance per week will be back at 70 km per week again easily enough once the week of taking it easier post race is past. I want to finally push towards 80 km again. Really I want to push beyond that, but given my recent history I will take the build up there nice and slow. In terms of workouts I will see what makes sense, but I think I will start with just some more LT work, it feels less destructive to play around with. I really do like “Repetition”, i.e., 200s and 400s, though, so who knows.

Training

I kept my training approach pretty much the same as what I was doing (and as described in that previous race report). I don’t quite trust my body to handle much more still, so I am keeping any building slow. What that amounts to most weeks is: five days of running with one run workout day and one long run day, walking for about 1h each on the two other days. For the workouts, I think I most like the “Repetition” work as described in JD (i.e., 200s and 400s at 1500m–mile race pace), but I switched it up enough because I need improvements a bit everywhere. In a regular week, the spread is as follows, but I adjust based on life.

Over the past months I also jumped up to 70 km per week, which is not a huge increase by any means, but I just want to continue running consistently, so, again, abundance of caution. Long runs are 21–25 km. Workout days 12–13 km. Rest just sort of fills in to get to a distance. Here’s an overview of how the weeks were filled in. Paces were mostly determined based on that previous race, but slightly faster, based on the big kick I still had at the end.

I did not realise how quite interrupted this block has been in terms of workouts. Admittedly, I am still in the “as long as I get my distance in” camp. I just want to run. If there are constraints, workouts are usually the first thing to get thrown out.

As expected, the travelling messed up my training. Jetlag in all directions, walking making me worried about how much I should even be running. This time was just a matter of holding on to some consistency and I knew that was going to be the case heading in.

After that I tried to get back in a workout flow, but the weather decided differently. It snowed a decent amount the weekend of 17–18 Jan. Snow remained through the following week, so I could not use the track. I replaced my Repetition workout with an LT around some neighbourhood block in the area and promptly failed to hit pace targets at all. That following weekend of 24–25 Jan it got cold (-13C high that Saturday) and it snowed a lot. Then the really bad cold remained for an entire week. I planned in a down week to avoid it and eventually moved to my wife’s gym’s treadmill because the cold seemed to be flaring up my knee again. I wonder if that is how I reinjured the knee last winter, that also happened in the cold as I remember hopping over snow (and it hurting right after that hop). For the rest of my outdoor runs up till about 4C or 5C, I ended up wearing thermal underwear under my tights. I wanted to make completely sure that my muscles and tendons could stay warm enough. The week of 2 Feb, some days got warmer (-2C high), but a lot of the week dropped back down to the too cold temps and I did a treadmill LT workout. Week of 9 Feb it got a little warmer again (still freezing all the time), so I ended up using the local rail trail for an LT workout.

Week of 16 Feb, I thought to check out the track, the snow was melting a little bit. The track disagreed. Somebody had cleaned parts of lane 2 and parts of lane 3. I had preferred lane 1 because I wanted to do VO2max workouts, I like my 1 km to be precise. Because things had begun slowly melting, the track was also very wet. I could feel my shoes did not have enough grip, there were several minislips on steps throughout the workout. It did not go well, but I had my excuse ready. That said, I also felt tired all week, so am not surprised I was off pace. As long as the idea of an effort is there?

It snowed some more that Sunday 15 Feb, so Wednesday last week I went to the rail trail again and did a Moose fartlek. That post says how I did, but it boils down to a change of pace workout of 15 minutes at LT, 5 minutes at VO2max. I am not sure where exactly I sat for this race, but I felt things would go alright enough.

Then came Saturday last week.

The snow had been melting a bunch and I thought to finally make some progress again on my running of the entire Horse Shoe Trail. Nature trails here, and the HST in particular, are very rocky. You have to pay attention when you run them. I am not too bad at that in the ups and downs (of which there are a lot). I get complacent when the terrain flattens out a little bit and you feel like you can pick up some speed. Anyway. I got my foot hooked on one rock and couldn’t keep my balance. Fell to the ground, hit my head on a rock, giving me a deep cut in my ear (turns out ears can bleed a bit), scrape on my knee, scrapes on my arm. All that on the right side of my body. In retrospect, I think my left hip also felt a little bit off right after the fall, but I thought nothing of it at the time. After I managed to stop the ear from bleeding, I finished my long run.

My left hip got really sore later that day. Both on the lateral side between the bony parts (very sore) as on the front side around where your front thigh muscle connects, I think (sore, less than the side). Oops. All the scrapes I could ignore, but this soreness was a bit too much. I walked the two days after and even that was unpleasant the first km or two. Tuesday through Friday I did daily jogs (6–8 km) and went to the rail trail to avoid elevation or anything that might further upset the hip. It was slowly healing, but had me worried, especially for Saturday, race day.

On top of all that, the cut in my ear made it so I only dared to sleep on my left side, the painful hip side. A wonderful combo. Sleep was not good this week.

Goal and Strategy

So back when I signed up, I had filled in 9:45 (3:15/km, 39 seconds per 200m lap) as seed time. It was a bit ambitious when I filled it in, but I thought I might be able to put it together with a good race day. After the week I had, I was going to be glad to finish the entire distance. I had already paid money, soooo I figured I would still just show up and hope for the best. As it turns out, my seed time was right at one of the cutoffs they used to decide the heats. I was placed in a heat with 21 other people that all had filled in a seed time of at least 5 seconds faster than I had, and often more than that. If that had not been the case, maybe I would have changed my race planning, but now I figured just aim for that seed time and hope. I did not want to run way slower than everyone right from the getgo.

Pre-Race

Woke up at 7:00 to get ready, 3000m heats were to start at 10:00, I was heat 3. Some oatmeal, some caffeine, toilet use. Had also packed my Vaporflys as my track shoes are in Belgium. I am sure it would look a bit silly on a track, but then those shoes just always look silly. Left at 8:00 to drive into Philadelphia. Arrived at the track a little past 9:00 since we parked a decent walk away from the track; it would be easier for our planning for the rest of the day, i.e., meandering, eating, and drinking in Philadelphia. Checked in, got my sticker bib, got ready, started jogging the track a bit. Did not like how the banked corners felt on my hip, but thought that would be fine at higher speeds, maybe. Did a lot of leg swinging inbetween jogging, hoping to activate all the hip muscles. Not sure whether I achieved anything with it besides noticing that there’s actually still quite some soreness/pain closer to the edges of my range of motion. How’s that for a vote of confidence. Fuck it, I was here, let’s just get on with it.

Saw 60 year old Michelle Rohl break the age group world record with a 10:28 3000m. Damn.

And after that, it was my heat’s turn.

Race

Being the slowest seed, I start on the outside of the track. I’m used to that by now. The start gun caught me a little bit by surprise. In my Belgian track races a jury member would usually walk by, checking everyone’s feet aren’t on the line right before the gun. Here they saw it from the side and just shot the gun. Feel like I lost half a second right there with my slow reaction time. Anyway, that gave me the opportunity to immediately cut to the inner lane. I knew I was going to be last and it seems I was starting out that way.

I had half a mind of trying to hang with the second to last group, but I think I figured out pretty quickly that that was not going to be a good idea. Going by the splits it seems I stayed within half a second for 2 laps (400m total). 0.8 seconds by lap 3, 1.7 seconds by lap 4. Ye, this was going to be a time trial. Also yay for these detailed splits provided by the organization.

Somewhere in those first few laps, the banked corner almost made me fall into infield. I wonder if that’s more common if you’re going slower. Made some weird hand movements there to keep me in.

Through 1 km I was actually a little too fast: 3:13.16. However, I felt that that was not going to last. Laps had been slowing down, breathing had become more laborious. I did not really see my splits, but I knew it was not going right.

For the 2 km mark, I did know what time I had to be at (6:30). Actual time was 6:34.69. Nice, not too far off, but I knew I was running off pace and that I was not going to manage to get back up speed again. So that delta was only going to grow.

With exactly two laps to go, the first guy lapped me. Going by the seed times, I had also expected that, the spread had been more than what I was hoping to run per lap. Because it was expected, it was in no way demoralizing. Some more people followed that first takeover. I stayed in lane 1, but also tried to make sure I did not take up too much room so went a bit too close to the inside. Again almost fell to the infield, had to keep my balance through two left steps before I saved it.

Anyway, I just tried to keep up my own pace somewhat and brought it home.

Results

Official result: 9:59.23. Sub-10 still, at least? Last in my heat by almost 17 seconds. If I had been just on the other side of the cutoff, I would have had a battle for first in the slower heat (and going by the actual time I would have lost, though a battle has a way of pushing me harder). Of the 55 participants across the open 3000m heats, I was 34th. There was also a high performers event, but that is not included in that listing. Those add 11 women (4 faster than me) and 11 men (all faster than me), making me 49th of 77.

The results also provide detailed splits (they provide three numbers past the comma, I include one). I compare the offset to my goal of 39s per 200m, 9:45 for the 3000m.

It is not what I wanted, but oh well. After the week I have had, I am happy to just finish the race without feeling my hip. Looking at equivalences, it is also definitely better than my time at that 5000m in November where I ran 17:42. This 3000m time translates to about 17:17 over 5000m. As I look that up, I also realise that 9:45 would be equivalent with just a little under 17 minutes. Maybe that is why I had originally chosen it as seed time. Ego.

Anyway, I’ll take it. I think that actually means a very small speed up of my workout paces is warranted again. More suffering, here I come.

As an aside, I had a nasty track hack rest of the day. My throat did not like that indoor track race.

Future

I signed up for Broad Street Run, a 10 mile race on 3 May in Philadelphia which, as far as I can tell, is literally just running one long street straight down from north to south. Yay, grids. I forgot what I filled in as seed time there. That race should be busy enough that I can just adjust what I think I am capable of running without being worried I will look like a fool.

Assuming this hip thing is past me, I’m hoping for a good eight week block. The original plan from here on out was three up weeks, a down week, three up weeks, race week. I am now in the process of planning a national park trip and, coincidentally, that seems to be overlapping with the down week. So the down week might end up being an extra-down week to accommodate for the walking that will no doubt happen. I do have to actually still work out the details of that plan, so I best get on that soon enough.

After Broad Street, I do not have any idea of a plan yet.

The Goods

• 30 minutes total running, non-stop
• Five sets of six minute blocks, where a six minute block consists of
  • Three minutes at 10k to half marathon effort
  • One minute jog
  • One minute at 5k effort
  • One minute jog

Notes From the Episode

• If you need to build up to it, start with 3 or 4 sets. Can also make the three minute block be two minutes, or do just 30 seconds at 5k effort. Tinker with amount or length, not with effort.
• My own note for the 10k to half marathon effort: these are fast people, their half marathon is under 1h10 at the time of this podcast. For the rest of us, maybe use time-based instead. Something like race pace if you would be racing for 30 to 60 minutes. Moose adds that he thinks of them as “feeling a bit harder than threshold”. I assume that that is like Jack Daniel’s “Threshold” workout, which is a one hour race effort. Similar remark for the 5k pace, for them that is a 15 minute effort if that. If you have a 30 minute 5k, maybe reconsider the pace you are aiming for.
• Also on pace, aim for that 1h effort originally, can always build up to closer to 10k after giving the workout a try a few times. Or if feeling very confident, during the workout.
• The three minute blocks should not be that difficult. It’s not too hard, but enough to feel tough after the fifth rep of it.
• The 5k effort is about changing gears, faster leg turnover, heartrate spike, get that lactate going.
• Ensure a difference between the 3 minute effort and the 5k effort. First should feel medium, second should feel hard.
• Jogs are not floating, not supposed to be fast, not a walk either. At the start they might be 45 seconds per km slower than the three minute effort. By the end, that might be 1–2 minutes slower. Try to get the heart rate down in that one minute. The jog after the 5k effort will likely be a lot slower than the first jog. You will need it.
• Try to do by feel. Don’t show pace on your watch. You don’t need heart rate either, the intervals are small.
• It’s some threshold running (15 minutes total), mixed in with some VO2max (5 minutes total).
• Don’t let the 5k speed tempt you into flying into the next three minute block.
• Last sets should match the first sets, don’t start too hard, don’t finish too hard.
• Should get to halfway feeling pretty good, doesn’t normally get hard until fourth or fifth set.
• Put a recovery day before and after.
• Week out from a race, stick to three sets.

Trying It Out

After looking up the definition, I figured I should actually give it a try before publishing this post. It had also snowed again and I did not trust the local running track to be clear for my originally planned track workout. The rail trail in the area, however, does seem to get cleaned almost immediately and is a good candidate for a time and feel based workout. So I put the workout in my watch and gave it a go. For presentation purposes, I give the reps a name (LT = Lactate Threshold = that one hour effort, VO2max = something around 3–5k race pace, here 5k) I am used to and removed the jogs.

All jogs were give or take 200m on the GPS. Largely 4:40 to 5:00 per km pace, so in the normal run territory. Nothing like the shuffle I have between reps in a track workout.

The goal I had in my head beforehand was 3:45/km for the three minute blocks and 3:25–3:30/km for 5k, based on eyeballing JD’s conversion chart. In the first set I glanced at my watch rather often, I wanted to get the right feel going for the workout. I also definitely did not want to way overdo it as scheduling constraints meant I would be doing a long run two days after this workout. After that I tried to focus more on the feeling, only glancing at my watch from time to time for a bit of confirmation.

Quite some of the reps are actually slower than I thought they would turn out to be based on the watch glancing. It is what it is. It was supposed to be feel based, so this is something that can improve over time. That said, as suggested during the episode’s discussion, I did not start feeling a little tired till the last two sets. Never had that feeling of “come on let it be over” though. The short reps probably helped, the slightly slower pace maybe did too. I should note the weather was also great at 5C, no sun, no wind. I added the peak HR of every lap in the table above. Due to the short reps, I don’t know whether anything can be concluded from it, but it still stood out to me that it never went that high. Top end of my GA range is maybe 155.

Next day felt nothing, so it was light enough on the legs, at least the way that I ended up doing it. If I did it again I would probably try to be a little bit faster for both “on” reps. I wish I had given this a try earlier on in this winter, then I would have had a better alternative than the workout I did the other week on a badly cleaned lane of a snowed in track. Anyway, I will probably try this one again at some point. Just need to see when I want to fit it in.

Where To Find the Explanation

As mentioned, it was in episode 223. In particular I found it at timestamps 1:02:50 through 1:13:20 in that episode.

I did not actually relisten to it, I extracted the relevant block with ffmpeg and had it transcribed by a machine learning tool. I wanted to skim through it and jump back and forth. Text is better for that. I am adding the transcription here, with some corrections by myself.

Moose you wanted to bring a session to the show this week and obviously to stroke your own ego, you’ve picked a session that’s named after yourself.

Well, I actually before I get into it, I just I think people need to understand the relationship between work and rest and volume and duration a lot better with their when with their workouts. And I think this sort of series talking about different workouts and how you might go about changing them to to specific purposes might might help that because a lot of the time I see people doing workouts like let’s just say 6 by a K at a certain like and 60 seconds off they won’t know what effort to go at and so they just go really hard and smash themselves or then they might do 8 by a K with like it they don’t understand the difference in the like how how all the those different variables within a workout are connected. So I think if we go through a series of them, then they might start be able to plan their own training a lot better.

So the first one is, it’s called the moose fartlek. Not sure who came up with this name, but brilliant, because it is a brilliant workout. So 30 minutes total running. It’s a workout that can be done for someone training for all distances. I feel like it’s nice to throw into a marathon block and it’s also nice as a sort of aerobic workout for a 5k like in a 5k block as well. So the 30 minutes is broken up into five sets of six minutes blocks run continuously. So, it’s non-stop running for 30 minutes and it’s organized like this. Five sets of three minutes at 10k to half marathon effort, one minute jog, then one minute at 5k effort with one minute jog. And so the jogs, they’re not, it’s not floating. It’s not supposed to be fast. It’s not a walk. It’s somewhere in the middle if that makes sense. So at the start you might find that you’re running about oh I’m going to say 45 seconds slower per k than your 3 minute effort for the jog, but that might end up being a minute to two minutes slower by the time that you’re finishing the workout, especially if you’ve gone a bit harder

and understanding that that pace might not be super accurate because it’s only a one minute

like it’s only measuring minutes. Yeah.

And it and it doesn’t matter really like as long as you’re trying to recover and get the heart rate down in that one minute.

Yeah. The idea behind this whole workout is you don’t have pace showing on your watch.

It’s run to feel. You don’t even need heart rate showing because the intervals are quite small that I actually just run this one all to feel. So it’s 3 minutes at your 10k to half marathon effort, one minute easy, one minute 5k effort, one minute jog. So the three minute reps are just under threshold. Like when I say just under threshold, I mean just over just over threshold in terms of it’s feeling a bit harder than your threshold. runs. We’re after a sort of, we want you to get in the rhythm. 3 minutes at that shouldn’t be that difficult. It’s not too hard, but it’s enough to feel tough after the fifth rep of it. So, you shouldn’t go chasing the feel of of being cooked at the end of these three minute reps. And then obviously the jog. Then the 5k effort is about changing gears. So, we want to spike the heart rate. We want to get the legs turned over into that faster cadence, quicker ground contact time, like a bit more power. We want to flood the blood with lactate and then that one minute jog after the 5k effort is probably going to be a lot slower than the one minute jog after the three minute effort because you’ll need it. And then you come off that jog back into that steady run again. So it’s sort of cycles through a few gears in this workout. You get a bit of a bang for your buck. You get some threshold running. You get some VO2max stuff as well.

And is it fair to say, Moose, when you go back to that three minute effort, you should almost feel like your brakes are on. Like you shouldn’t be working to hit that effort. It should be like, okay, I’m comfortable here. You’re still working, but you’re comfortable because you’ve just come off that much stronger one minute rep.

Yeah. I want to see a decent difference between the 5k, between the one minute and the three minute. So, for instance, if I go out there, if I went out and did this tomorrow, I would do the three minutes at I would hope to see that it would come out about 3:15s and then the one minutes would be at about 3 minute pace. So, about 15 seconds for me. But it like to reiterate, it’s not about pace. There has to be a real change in feel. It has to feel medium and then it has to feel hard.

Hey Moose, I got a similar question to what Brady asked because I know every time I’ve given these type of sessions to people because you run one minute a lot faster than that 3 minute and then you have a minute recovery. The temptation or you know you go out then to start that next 3 minute rep and that first minute is significantly that first minute of that 3 minutes sometimes is significantly faster because it feels easy after you’ve done that 5k effort. So like how do you I guess make sure that you don’t cook it early. that that three minute rep coming off the quicker 5k effort.

Yeah, I think you’ve just got to be comfortable with it not being as hard

and you’ve got to be patient and be a bit more disciplined there. It’s again another thing that we practice when we train is being disciplined and understanding pacing especially early in a rep. So you might do this session a couple of times before you get it right. And then the one I often find the one minute effort I go too hard because I feel like I’m let off the leash a little bit and so instead of running 5k effort, I end up running like 3k or 1500 minute meter effort and I ruin the session that way

because then minutes a minutes they’re not long enough to even to recover before going back into a three minute.

That’s it. Yeah, you and so it does take a little bit to get right, but 30 minutes isn’t that long. And especially like you should get to you could do this out and back and You should get to halfway with this feeling pretty good. It doesn’t normally get hard until like the fifth or fifth fourth or fifth set.

Yeah. And I think it’s sometimes good there like planning to get back further than what you went out. We’ve gone all out at the end there. Like I’ve made the mistake before where I’ve just got one of mine up here where we’ve kind of hit 2:50 pace for the first minute, but then by the last one we’re hitting 2:30 pace for the last minute because we’re like one more minute to go. Let’s just full gas it. That’s not what you want to do. You should be able to mash the last 1 minute.

Classic classic trail for 2:30

2:31 pace. Yeah, we did we done 390 m in the last minute.

Straight road, too. No GPS bullshit there, fellas. We did 9.3K. Anyone beat that? I’ll give you a Patreon subscription.

So, no, I wasn’t finished. Can I continue? Sorry. The trap then is then I would pick another location to do the out and back. So, you don’t want to go, “Oh, last time I did this, I got to that driveway in 15 minutes. This time I’m going to fang it and get you know, 200 m past that driveway. No, no. Then you don’t want to become obsessive with it because then even though you might not be looking at your paces, you know where about you are on the road and you’re going to turn that session into a bit of a race.

Yep, that’s a good point.

Moose, have you often like cuz like 30 minutes is like quite a long session for some people. Have you slowly like built this up in people’s programs where initially they might do three sets of it, then four, then five?

Yeah. Yeah, I have.

Start with three normally Build into it or even start instead of going three minutes I’ll go like two minutes one minute jog and I might even just do like 30 seconds at 5k effort as well just so the volume is down I still keep the effort levels the same like I don’t change that I either just change the amount of reps or the duration of each rep

yeah I actually also don’t mind doing three sets maybe like a week out from a race. Like if you just want to keep in tune with two different paces without like everything being hard or everything being a bit too easy, it’s a nice 18minute workout.

Yep. It’s good for that too.

Yeah, it’s it’s got a lot of flexibility this workout.

And I would I know you said like that 3 minutes you’ve got in the notes here like a 10k to half marathon pace. The first time people are doing it, it’s better to just hit that half marathon effort or pace instead of jumping straight into 10k effort or pace because that might you might not have a positive experience. in the first time. Get one on the board first and then maybe see how that pace felt and it adjust the next time you do it.

Yeah. Yeah. Or even do the first two reps at half marathon effort and then you can start to to drop it down.

I’m going to say I’m going to keep saying effort here because Sorry. Yeah. I was This one’s all about effort. Yeah.

And ideally in your week, of course, you wouldn’t do this workout the day after or the day before another workout’s planned. Like you’d follow this with a recovery day. You’d have a recovery day before hitting it fresher.

Yeah. At least one recovery day. Like we believe in two workouts a week with a long run. And so say you do this on a Wednesday morning, then you’ll have Thursday off, maybe Friday off as well. Not off, but just easy. And then then you’ll do a workout Saturday.

That was good fellas. I enjoyed that.

elevation_in_metre / distance_in_km >= 10

Your run is hilly if that one is true. Ran 13 km with 100 metre elevation? 100 / 13 = 7.7. Sorry, that was flat. 150 metre elevation? 11.5, that was hilly. Does this throw out a lot of information? Yes. Is it simpler than alternatives? Also probably yes.

Now the tricky thing here is what source to use for elevation, because depending on elevation data and the smoothing applied that varies a lot. Over the twoish years of using my current Garmin watch, that is the one I default to for this calculation. Presumably Strava is pretty samesy. Note that Strava will use your watch data unless you tell it not to, when it will override with its own elevation data.

Now I wanted to make a little graph here and compare values over time. I have my data already locally in GoldenCheetah, so I glanced at that and… realised I cannot use the elevation data. Before I got my current watch, I believe there was no elevation data added to the activity itself, so GoldenCheetah would fill in those blanks using its own sources. Whatever source it uses or used for that, however, would always give way more elevation gain than Garmin or Strava assigned to an activity. So much so that I had always disregarded it entirely. So data prior to the current watch I cannot use. I left Belgium pretty soon after getting this current watch.

Eyeballing the numbers of the runs in my current location and of the few runs when I visit family, I’d say my feeling of “I have more elevation now” is correct, but I am too lazy to delve much deeper into a proper analysis where I would have to somehow clean up the old data or find a different source.

Why did I feel the need to write out this post then, you may ask? Well, I was not sure about that actual formula any more, so I wanted to write it down. This post will also serve as a reminder for if I feel like checking out that difference in hilliness again: probably not worth the effort, future me.

Training

The last two years have been less consistent in running, from time to time my left knee patella tendon complained too much and I was forced to put on the brakes, and again, and again. I think I peaked around 70–75 km of running per week in that time with the best stretch (in terms of distance) in the last quarter of 2024. A far cry from the 120 km I often reached before that time period. Besides doing a parkrun somewhat faster during a long run back in summer 2024 and some attempts at Lactate Threshold workouts later that same year, I do not think I have really dared to run fast fast.

Back in January of this year, I had another patella tendon setback. Coming back from that setback, my right achilles tendon suddenly complained in April. I gave it a week or so of rest, picked up some swimming, and decided to just stay conservative for a long while.

In May and June, I just ran every other day. The non running days I either went swimming or walking. Due to running every other day, half the weeks had three days of running, the other half had four days of running. Distance-wise I built up from 31 and 41 km (for the three day and four day week, respectively) to 42 and 55 km (again, respectively).

July and the first week of August, things were a little less consistent. There was a trip to some national parks and a trip to my family across the ocean. The national parks involve more-than-usual walking and I have been more careful with this kind of trip, i.e., I am letting my running take a back-seat when the walking jumps up like that. Visiting the family involves jet lag and that sleep confusion can really mess up your body. So there, too, I tried to be careful. That said, I think I played it all correctly and did not push too hard. By the end of that period I had switched to four days of running per week and about 55–60 km per week.

From the second week of August onwards, I felt more confident again. My body seemed to have survived the switch to four days. I could let my life get into a bit of a rhythm. I was running about 60 km per week. I was eager to try running harder again. I tried a careful Lactate Threshold kind of workout (~1h race pace), just 4×1k. Went OK but I had no clue where I was at in terms of shape, so the workout was largely by feel and “this might be right”.

I signed up for a 5 km race at the end of August (the week after that LT workout) to have an idea where I was at. Ran it probably at the maximum I could do on that day. I finished in 18:51. Did not know how I felt about it, but at least it was a reference point to start doing workouts more regularly. The next week I switched to five days per week so I could have a workout day, a GA day that wasn’t too long, and a long run day. The two other days are recovery jogs to keep the weekly distance where I want it at, hovering near or at that 60 km per week.

The week between that point and now, I stayed on that five days of running schedule. Distance remained largely the same as I wanted to focus on dealing with the workouts. Weekly running distance 60–62 km.

I made the track my place to go mid week: Repetition (around 1500m race pace), CV (around 30 mins race pace), and VO2max (JD says 11 mins race pace, elsewhere also described as 3–5k race pace, but that’ll depend heavily on your speed) were the workouts I spent time on. During this period the hot humid summer ended and I felt stronger and stronger in the workouts. The VO2max workouts especially gave me confidence to think my shape was closer to 18 minutes for a 5 km. I was doing those workouts at paces that should have been more tiring, but my heart rate remained surprisingly chill.

Similarly, I ended up moving some of my long runs to flat and simple river trails (Perkiomen Trail and Schuylkill River Trail for the locals). This let me run more strictly to heart rate and get an idea of what paces sticking to my heart rate zones gave me. It had been hard to get a view on that in the months prior: my routes had been hilly and the weather had been too sunny, too hot, too humid. These flat long runs in pleasant running weather at a concentrated clip gave me extra confidence too. I seemed faster than that race in August had indicated.

Don’t let this overview fool you, I was not prepping for this race. I got invited to it the week prior and it seemed like a great opportunity. That said, I am happy enough with this preparation.

Goal and Strategy

So when I got invited, I had to give an estimated time. The VO2max at 3:37 per km pace still felt easier than I think VO2max should feel like. That 3:37 per km for that workout is prescribed for people with an 18:22 5 km time (JD tables). If it feels too easy, I should be faster than that, right? Round it up and you get 18 minutes. So I filled that in as a goal. Was I sure that I could run that? No, not at all. In fact, it felt a bit like an optimistic stretch goal. Not much strategy involved in aiming for that, just go for the even split. 18:00 is 3:36 per km, 43.2 seconds per 200m, 1:26.4 per 400, 2:52.8 per 800. Remember enough of those numbers and hope for the best on the day.

Pre-Race

The race was in the evening, which usually involves me overthinking everything I eat all day and when I eat it. None of that today. Made sure to eat enough oatmeal for breakfast, was hungry at lunch and ate more bread than I usually have been eating at lunch. Had some dinner leftovers around 15:00–16:00. Drink enough water during the day and stop early enough with it. Was an hour drive in traffic to get there, so left around 17:00 to arrive at the track at 18:00.

Found the organising group on the track and got my bib (a sticker for your chest, a sticker for your pants). Passed by the toilet. Swung my legs and hips a bit. Jogged on the track from 18:30 onwards. Toilet again. Some more dynamic stretches. Switched into race clothes and shoes with 12 minutes to go (19:00 start). Started some strides with 2–3 minutes to go, heading towards the other side of the track to arrive at the start position.

At the start line, I found out they had organised some pacers. One of them was was going to do 18 minutes. Perfect. We said our hellos, one other guy and a woman also were aiming for 18:00, so we had a little group of us. With that, we were ready to get going and all lined up.

Race

We were off and I quickly tucked into the inside of lane 1, right behind the pacer. His back was going to be my view for a while. I listened to them call out the time at the first 200m, 400m, and 800m, the pacing seemed on point. I pressed the lap button at 1000m and indeed: 3:35.8.

There was some headwind on the far side (and thus probably some backwind on the home stretch), but it was not that bad. The pacer reminded us to tuck in behind him to have the wind blocked. I think I was still maybe half a head taller than him, but I replied that I was trying and that it was mostly OK. I also told him he was doing a great job, pacing us like clockwork.

The next five laps were uneventful. Things felt easy, sometimes feeling like I was holding back a step to not bump into the pacer, but I also figured the typical 5k pain could come quickly. I split at 1800 and the lap time looked fine still. I forgot to split till 3000 and did not remember what a 1200m split should be at. Did not bother trying to work that out and trusted the pacer.

Around that 3000 mark I started thinking “OK, stopping running would be pleasant now”. There’s that familiar feeling! I brushed the thought away by reminding myself it was only five more laps, less than nine minutes (dividing 18 by 2 is about all the math I could deal with).

Our group of four (pacer, me, other guy, woman) had dwindled down to three at some point, the woman had to leave a gap. It did not really register during the race, I think I vaguely noticed one running shadow fewer, but it also did not matter much to me. I was here to see my time, not to place.

With maybe three (or four? I don’t remember) laps to go, the other guy started speeding up. He went around me on the straight, then around the pacer around the very start of the turn, then stayed on the inside of lane 2 for the rest of the turn rather than cutting back into the inner lane. I wanted to yell at him to not run so much extra, but did not feel like I had breath to spare at that point. I also did not bother matching the acceleration whatsoever. Again, I had the one goal here: see whether I could go under 18 again. I still did not feel confident about it, I really was not sure about my shape. So instead I stayed behind the pacer, letting him keep it at a nice just below 18 min pace.

With like two laps to go (I am guessing here with lap counts, things just get blurry and keeping notes is not my main focus during the race) my choice not to follow felt vindicated as I started feeling painful stabs in my abs, slightly right from center, slightly below the end of the ribs there. Running long with those stabs was not going to work. I focused on switching my breathing a little and after 200 metre the pain subsided.

At about 500 metre to go, on the home stretch, the pacer started slowly veering into the second lane. I got the hint, he wanted me to start pushing for the end. Man, this guy knows what he is doing. I slowly passed him during that home stretch. The other guy that had tried to break away from us was still only 5–10 steps ahead of us. I don’t know when exactly I started pushing, I think I waited till the 400 metre mark. I caught up to the other guy fast, went around him, and immediately broke away again. By the middle of the turn I had a gap already. The pacer yelled at the other guy that he should try to hold on to me. The other guy could not. On the far side, with 250 metre to go, I reigned in the pace a little bit, but not entirely. Things felt surprisingly acceptable still. I was a little worried I had gone out too hot on that final lap, but the body was not ready to call it quits yet. I kept going, leg turnover remained OK. I pushed to the line without cracking.

Results

(Strava)

Official time is 17:41, but it was all hand timed I believe, so let’s say ±1 second. They also gave a “1 mile” and “2 mile” splits in the result. I assume they mean 1600 and 3200 metre, because getting that mile, i.e., 1609 metre, exactly seems unlikely. With that assumption, these are the numbers from the official results.

I also have manual splits from my watch. “Lap Offset” compares actual lap time to expected lap time for an 18 minute 5000m (3:36.0 per km). “400m Offset” normalises it to a 400m distance.

That kick was quite strong, I might have left too much in the tank. :)

Oh yeah, it was a race too. There were two heats, I was in the slow heat. I was 6th out of 10 people in my heat (pacers not listed in results). The fast heat had 21 people. It was won in 14:46 with a slowest time of 16:50. So I was 27th out of 31. The other guy from my group finished 4 seconds behind me. The girl from our group that wanted to go sub 18 finished in 18:04. The friend that had invited me to this race had been aiming for sub 16:00, which might already have been a PR for him. He blasted that goal out of the water and finished in 15:34 with a big negative split and looking in control for a lot of it. Fireball.jpg.

Musings and Future

Well. My workouts will be getting a jump in intensity now. I surprised myself today. My maybe sub 18 turned into blasting under and having some left in the tank. It also feels nice to achieve this on just 60 km per week. I was running twice as much before all this nonsense, though my PR was also more than a minute faster back then. I have to learn to stop comparing myself to that though. Those days are gone. For now.

Now logically I should be looking for another race a month or so from now. Regroup, do a few workouts, aim for something faster. Find out the limit of this shape I am in. However, we have some travel coming up later this month. Then the end of the month after that, we are heading to my family across the ocean. Both of these trips will mess up my running consistency a little. I might decide on a race on a whim, but I do not dare to plan for one.

In Belgium, I would often plan these around train lines. Go to one stop, run to the next. Repeat. Here, I do not have that luxury. Instead, I have to drive somewhere and do a loop (or convince my wife to also waste half her day). Progress is a little slower, but I do not mind.

My Blob

Besides the obvious activity around where we live, I have been creating tendrils vaguely in the cardinal directions. The north and then west one follows the “Horse Shoe Trail”. East is aiming to connect Philadelphia’s center city. South came to be from having to drop my wife off at the Wilmington train station and evolved into another sillier idea. West was more in the process of checking out some parks and nature areas and then wanting to hook them up. For those north, south, and west tendrils I have further ideas. More on them later in this post.

Now, there are still various loose miniblobs. Philadelphia is the most obvious one, but I will get around to that eventually. The connection itself is easy: there is a paved trail along the river. I figure I will be heading in that general direction at some point and try to do it at that point.

The other loose miniblobs are just part of natural progress for now. Some from races, others from checking out a different park or nature reserve, some just from feeling like doing a few neighbourhoods of streets. I am not (yet) as crazy about keeping every new place connected yet as I had become in Belgium. I will connect them, at some point, no rush.

Horse Shoe Trail

The Horse Shoe Trail is a 230 km long route connecting Valley Forge to the Appalachian Trail. I believe I first encountered this trail nearly a decade ago by accident while running in Valley Forge. Specifically up Mount Joy and Mount Misery there. After that, I mostly did not think about it any more for quite some time.

Until the past year that is. I have been slowly chipping away at it when I am in the mood. It was easy enough at the start, all of that is quite nearby, but by now requires a decent bit of driving to reach my next point. I am about halfway through it. As with all things, there is no rush. That said, this is definitely my main Long Dumb Shit goal, time permitting.

One of the weirder challenges with this has been, at times, finding a convenient place to park the car. That is partially on me, I would like to trace the trail if possible. In other words, no matter where I park, I need to still connect to the HST. I cannot just connect my blob in the general direction.

Just as a side note for non-American readers (or non native English speakers, perhaps): while this is called the Horse Shoe Trail, it is not all on trail. The word trail evokes a certain state of the path to me. The people managing this trail do try to get land access for that kind of path, but there are chunks where you are running on streets rather than a beaten path. They also have something called “rail trails” here, which, at least in my area, seems to largely be asphalt bike and walking paths following a former train line. No trails in sight.

Visiting the Capital

Philadelphia is nestled nicely in the middle between New York City and Washington DC. After connecting so many things in Belgium, it seemed obvious: connect all three together. I do not recall whether I had had this idea before or whether it formed while I was making my Wilmington (Delaware) connection. At the very least, the latter solidified the idea in my head.

This plan will be a total pain to actually get around to. It rather quickly becomes a drive™ and, unlike with the Horse Shoe Trail, I doubt I will be able to find nice nature running on this route.

Practically, I have made the focus of this idea the DC side. My wife sometimes needs to be in DC for work, her brother lives there, there is just more chance of us heading in that direction. I figure I might be able to sometimes squeeze in a run when we do so. Eventually there will be some progress.

The very shortest route (read: definitely not the one I will be able to take) between my blob and the one in DC is 161 km. At a rate of “maybe I will make some progress every 6 months” (at least once the first few 10s of km of that are done) I think this will be a very long term goal indeed. Still, a boy can dream.

The distance is not even the first main hurdle to tackle here. Do you see that big blue river there cutting through? That is the Susquehanna river and I have to cross that. I had a look at the bridges across it and THEY ARE ALL HIGHWAYS. Come on, America, stop hating everyone else. OK, some are “highways”, so more like state routes, but I still could not spot sidewalks or shoulders I would feel safe on. As I get closer, I will have a better look at all the bridges again, but for now I only see three options:

1. Cross all the way in the north west of this map, at Harrisburg. Not my preferred option. The only option that seems to actually have a sidewalk.
2. Try crossing safely at Norman Wood Bridge / Holtwood Road, that is the crossing you see if you start at Lancaster and follow the map straight south. Technically this is supposed to be part of the “Conestoga Trail System”, a marked trail. In reality (or at least, going by Google Maps Streetview), it looks like a very narrow unmarked shoulder (read: a slightly wider lane) on a bridge where I would fear for my life if I saw a truck coming.
3. Once a year in September (I should check up on that), there is a running race that uses the highway bridge near Havre de Grace. That is the point right before the river turns into a lake / bay. The plan is simple: sign up for that with the sole purpose of crossing the river. Even if my map is not close to it at that point, I will feel obligated to sign up just to check that part off.

For the time being, I am dismissing option one. I will get close to Harrisburg as I continue the Horse Shoe Trail, but it is just such a far way down from there.

Coincidentally, option two might be an alright option. Notice that tendril heading due west from the blob? I was planning on connecting that to the “Enola Low Grade Trail” a rail trail that goes further west (and eventually a bit north). If I make that connection anyway, I can use it to connect from the Enola Low Grade Trail down south to the Norman Wood Bridge. Cross there and head south-south-west towards Baltimore. There seems to (eventually) be a Baltimore light rail stop on the north end of the city that could help with making the connection further to Baltimore proper.

Meanwhile, option three would see me continue the tendril that passes by Wilmington and because of the running race would give a safe bridge passage (which cannot be guaranteed in option two). From there, too, the plan would be to continue to Baltimore. This one might be manageable depending on the exact train coverage in this area. The plan would then be to drive down to a train station, go to another stop, connect the two. No looping needed. I don’t know whether the train coverage is feasible for this.

Both option two and three would result in me reaching Baltimore’s Camden Station. A train station on the south side of its downtown (by the looks of the map). There seems to be a commuter train between there and DC, but it does not seem to run on weekends. I’ll figure that out once I get closer. Either way, the aim would be to connect to Greenbelt: the north-east end of the green line of the DC metro network. Once there, it’s a simple connection to what I already have in DC.

Schuylkill River Trail

The Schuylkill River Trail (SRT) is another bike path. I had been doing parts of the SRT to connect down to Philadelphia, but nothing more. The SRT wasn’t a focus. Heck if I am being honest, even connecting to Philadelphia hasn’t been much of a focus. I just don’t feel like driving in that direction for a run that does not sound like it will be pretty.

However, as I am thinking about things to list here, I would say that is a likely candidate in terms of easier sidequests. At the very least connecting things to Philadelphia really should happen at some point. A good chunk of the river is also not that far from us, so it is a bit easier to get to. Furthermore, it will finally let me get around to connecting the heatmap from some races to the rest of my blob.

In case you read this and know Dutch: yes, Schuylkill is a Dutch word. I encourage you to pronounce it that way, even if the locals won’t understand you.

Other Side Quests: Enola Low Grade Trail, Conestoga Trail, Perkiomen Trail

As mentioned in the DC section, there is a trail called the Enola Low Grade Trail that I am hoping to connect to with my west pointing tendril. Another one I heard about is Conestoga Trail, which crosses the Enola Low Grade Trail, crosses Norman Wood Bridge (again, see the DC section), and also on its north end connects to the Horse Shoe Trail. Finally there is the Perkiomen Trail, which on the other side, branching off the Schuylkill River Trail and follows Perkiomen Creek.

Of these, I would say the Enola Low Grade Trail is the priority. Both for how it will look on the map and because it will, apparently, maybe make my connection to DC easier.

Once that one is complete and I have progressed enough along the Horse Shoe Trail, I feel like Conestoga Trail might connect things nicely together. I am not convinced about this one yet, it is more me taking notes of busy work further down the line.

Finally, I believe that the Perkiomen Trail is not very long. I just need to get in the mood to make progress on that. It does not connect me to anything I particularly care about and it will not look particularly nice on the map, so, ye.

Jotting Down Other Ideas

Suggestions welcome Stupid ideas encouraged.

• As briefly mentioned in the DC section, connecting to New York City would also be nice. I just have done nothing for that nor thought it out in any form.
• Connecting south east to Atlantic City (New Jersey) is something that I sometimes wonder about. I have some runs in NJ that I would connect on the way there and it seems like it would be a pretty straight line across NJ.
• I am not in any way used to camping or multiday walking. I do not have camping gear. Anyway, walking and camping a section of the Appalachian Trail sounds appealing. Maybe start with just a weekend?
• Once I have finished the Horse Shoe Trail, I might be tempted to connect it to Harrisburg anyway.
• Write my name somewhere that I am unlikely to run through in the future. Make it big enough that you cannot miss it when looking at my heatmap and having, say, both DC and Philadelphia in view. If feeling less egocentric: draw something. Perhaps somewhere along the DC-home route, I can draw an arrow pointing south-west and the text “DC”. Have that on the far end of Susquehanna. Have Philly on the near end.
• In Belgium, I had connected the Netherlands and France borders. Here in Pennsylvania, I found out there is a Holland, New Jersey right across the eastern border with New Jersey. There is also a Paris, Pennsylvania right before the western border with Ohio. The shortest route seems to be about 536 km and I never have to go west like that, so chances are pretty slim, but you know, adding it to the ideas box.
• Look at current map. Get to edge of heatmap. Run a vaguely circular route. Repeat. Use it to fill in the map with runs and making it look somewhat busy. Not sure how much I want this, but it came to mind while writing this post.

The end of this post feels a bit rushed again. I was getting tired of writing things out (planning them out is much more fun! actually running them even more so!) and wanted to just get it out there. Apologies for any mistakes.

My Vicinity

In my immediate area, I am just focused on getting more streets in. Evidently.

It is going OK so far. Nothing groundbreaking happening here, just chipping away at it with the diminished amount of running I do nowadays.

Running here is not always ideal. This place is made for cars; pedestrians be damned. The way to build here is often a busy road with dead end housing areas branching off from the busy road. Such a housing area can be just one street or it can be ten or more of them. In a housing area it is usually safe enough to run. Many of these residential streets are like three cars wide and not that busy. Newer ones even have sidewalks. I think they finally realised those could be useful.

Going between those housing areas is often a pain though. The roads connecting them are busy. They do not have sidewalks. Quite often they are only just two cars wide, my guess is because this area got settled much before the introduction of cars. If you are lucky, there is a flat grass section next to the road that you can hop on to if a car is coming. If not… hope for the best. Because of this, planning a running route involves a lot more thinking, a lot more keeping track of areas to avoid, a lot of detours to get anywhere.

Anyway, you make do. You get where you can get. There is a decent amount of nature, though the suburban lawns are a scourge on the earth (not to mention so useless on hot and sunny days). There are so many big birds of prey here to stare at in amazement. Those parts of running here are what I like.

With this area being so car heavy, I have also come to accept their usage myself. In Belgium, I would have scoffed at the idea of driving somewhere to do a run. Here, I do it as well from time to time, even just to run some streets, not just for “adventure” runs. It just is such a pain to get to places otherwise. That said, I find the effort of driving to places for a run also a pain, just one I deal with from time to time.

Cities

Because the roads to get places are just so dangerous to pedestrians and because things are quite spread out, focusing on cities has not been as fun. If you know you have to drive to get to the far side of places, it just becomes more of a chore.

I still glance at their progress though. I have one “city” completed and a handful near completion, depending on your definition of near completion. I am not particularly focused on dragging them to completion though. Maybe once the number of streets becomes too small to ignore.

Something I also have a look at, is my ranking in all those cities. Not many people here are active heatmappers (on CityStrides anyway). I am first in many low percentage cities, just due to a lack of competition. There is one guy here that has a few places completed, otherwise there would be even more first places in the centre of the map there. A little competition can motivate me, though since that person has them simply completed, it is not as exciting as a race to be the first one to complete.

Hexagons

As I had done in Belgium, the hexagon map has been my focus of completion. The map also paints a different picture. For some cities it looked like I had widespread progress, the hexagon map shows I have just done streets near me.

The street grid is not very dense here, so completing a single hexagon might be easier in comparison to Brussels? Though the hexagons are also about 15% larger in area here: 0.73 km² instead of 0.63 km² in Brussels (reminder that the earth is a sphere). That said, progress has felt slower than in Brussels, probably because getting to places is more of a pain.

My focus is on getting more green hexagons. Maybe once those really get too far away from me, I will think more about the blue wave spreading too.

PA Ranking

There is another thing I have been paying a little bit of attention to. Citystrides has a leaderboard for the number of streets you have completed within a region. So while I have over 13k worldwide, only a fraction of those are completed within Pennsylvania. Currently it says I am at 2038 streets in Pennsylvania, putting me in 21st position in the commonwealth.

I will probably never be first, the leader has nearly 14k streets in just Pennsylvania. Just climbing up the ladder adds a little extra motivation though. As with all things, the better you get, the harder the progress will be. I need another 1500 streets to get 10th place. Doing 1500 more still will only bump me up to 7th. For the time being, my goal is top 20. After that I will likely aim for 12th, which puts you on the first page in Citystrides.

What Else?

As I did in Belgium, I am working on some sillier projects here too. This blog post was already taking too long to put out there though, so I will keep that for a next post instead.

In this post an overview of what I had been up to in Belgium prior to leaving.

Out With Cities, In With Hexagons

After finishing Brussels, I had a bit of an issue. The cities near me stretched out awkwardly away from Brussels.

I was not motivated to focus on just one of those cities, getting to their far side was just not a simple task. What I really wanted to do was chip away at streets nearest to me while still feeling (and seeing!) progress. Of course I can just look for the nearest streets, complete those, carry on, but it was not as visually appealing a way for me to go about it.

In came the H3 hexagons (announcement blog post). The idea with these is to cover the globe in hexagons and a few pentagons to make it all fit nicely (technically the term seems to be “geospatial index”). There are several “resolutions” of these covers: the higher the resolution, the smaller each hexagon is. For every position on earth, it is deterministic to which hexagon at which resolution that spot belongs.

What does it mean in practice? I picked a resolution (eight) that I felt made sense to me in terms of the size of each hexagon. In Brussels, that resolution makes each hexagon about 0.6 km² (the next resolution up or down makes this about seven times smaller or larger). I used that resolution to cover my entire area.

For each hexagon, I want to calculate how much of it I have completed. There are a few ways to go about this. My approach ended up taking streets from OpenStreetMap and breaking them up in the nodes that compose them (in more GIS terms: LineStrings and their Points). Next, it adds nodes in-between if two nodes of a street are too far apart. So a *-------* becomes *-*-*-*-*. For completion calculation, the approach then forgets about those streets and puts every node in its corresponding hexagon. If I have “run a node”, i.e., a GPS reading came close enough to the node, then the node is marked completed. Finally, a hexagon’s completion is the percentage of its nodes that are completed.

Now, I had already completed Brussels, but I still wanted some extra work within the city. So, eventually, I have went from considering just streets with a name, to also including footpaths and cycleways with a name, to (after my move away from Brussels) also including anything that is part of a hiking or cycling route (think a GR or E route, or the ACT).

The final result for the greater Brussels area? Well, I cannot show you what it looked like when I left, which was also prior to adding hiking and cycling routes, but I can show you the current state of the map. OK I could figure out a way to show you the state at that point, but I am not willing to make that effort.

I have grown quite fond of this visualisation. There is a sense of achievement for completing a hexagon. You see your green wall growing. You can figure out the sort-of nearest incomplete hexagon easily. You can combine hexagons into a larger sort-of hexagon that you can embiggen. I even like making my wall of only in-progress hexagons larger, meaning I have run or walked through the hexagon at some point. Since actively using this visualisation, I noticed I have paid way less attention to actual city progress.

Tricountry Points

On the last update, I had one final tricountry point to connect my heatmap to: the border between Belgium, Luxemburg, and Germany. Spoiler alert: I connected that too.

In September 2023, a friend told me I should use his car for a weekend trip. I decided to take the car to go do some walking in the German-speaking parts of Belgium, as these are not as accessible by public transport. While there, I also ended up passing by the tricountry point and connecting that up to the village of Burg-Reuland. I had not planned this out particularly, but decided on it while I was passing by anyway. Then I ignored the tricountry point idea again for half a year.

By March 2024, I knew the clock was ticking on my move. I also knew that once out of the country, I was unlikely to ever complete this last connection. Thus motivated, I worked out the path I might take.

That March, I connected Aywaille to Verviers. I had already spent a weekend in Aywaille once and wanted to connect my runs and walks there to the rest of my heatmap blob. In April, I went to Aywaille again and connected it to Coo, just north of Trois-Ponts on the map above. Coo is famous (in Belgium) for its waterfall, some thinking it is the tallest in Belgium. Coincidentally, I had, by accident, walked by the actual tallest, but very unknown, waterfall in Belgium during my little trip in the German-speaking part back in September 2023. In May, I connected Coo down to Vielsalm.

That left the connection I had been dreading. For the previous connections from Verviers down to Vielsalm, I always went from train station to train station. Easy enough, comfortable, pretty fast. Burg-Reuland, however, does not have a train connection. Instead I had to take the train to Verviers, followed by a bus going all the way down. It is lucky that at this point I was committed to finishing things up. That May 2024, I made the trek down to Burg-Reuland, ran back up to Vielsalm, and completed my spiderweb connection of tricountry points.

The End

I moved out of Belgium back in June 2024 and evidently will still be passing by my friends and family there somewhat often. Doing any special running and walking adventures, however, will not be high on my agenda while there.

As such, my current heatmap of Belgium will remain stable for some time. Here it is.

I can look at that map and recall several fun moments, beautiful sights, or memorable suffering. I would not mind thinking up more of these silly ideas just for the memories they create. Doing these also made me more appreciative of just being in nature for good chunks of time.

My new location does not make these adventures as easy (or at least, I have not quite found my same groove yet), though I have some ideas I am slowly working on. More on that if I hold on to this writing mood.

In August 2023 (yes, three), I was running 120 km per week. In August 2023, I was also doing a trip in Europe that involved a lot of walking. One week was over 80 km of walking and that does not include the walking indoor, such as museums. By the end of August 2023, my left knee hurt. Overuse, probably. Though I would like to add that I also, at some point prior to the left knee pain, went on my knees to look under the bed of a rental apartment before we were leaving, bent down all the way, and thought “that did not feel right”. I still think about that moment.

I gave it a rest and took days to a week off. Things did not get better on their own. Around mid September, I went to the kine (PT) that helped me through my comeback from breaking my ankle. He went with the pain being overuse leading to a badly inflamed patella tendon (a tendon at the front of the knee, just south of the kneecap). I had a bunch of sessions with him, did more elliptical and biking again, followed the strength routine he gave me religiously, as much as I hated it. For the curious: lots of balancing on one leg, squats on one leg, jumping on one leg, …

Things got better, slowly. Things broke down again, rapidly. Few bad nights of sleep? Pain is back. Take an awkward step? Pain is back. Bit too intense knee stretch (that the kine gave me)? Pain is back. It was a lot of overthinking of every niggle in the area.

I was allowed to build up running again pretty swiftly. First run back was 28 September. Rest in-between runs was paramount. Run a day, two days without running, run a day. Oddly enough I was allowed to up the distance every third day of running. By December I was running over 20 km per run, but still taking two off days between every run. By that point the kine had told me I could continue on my own.

In the new year, I switched to three days of running. After three weeks of that, I switched to every other day of running, then quickly switched back to three days of running because I did not like how the knee felt. This was also right after a trip to the USA, so my sleep was entirely messed up around that time. Note that off days I still spent on an elliptical, a bike, or doing a walk. On off days, I also kept up my routine of exercises the kine had given me.

I stayed at three days of running per week for quite some time. Most weeks this totalled up to around 53 km (15, 15, 23). Eventually, I settled on weekends where I would do the long run on Saturday and a sometimes equally long walk on Sunday. I kind of liked that setup, I managed to spend a lot of time in nature that way. I still wished I were running more, but I coped. This continued till the end of April 2024.

New May, new me, I switched to running every other day. I toned down the weekend walking because I did not have the time any more, but kept biking (mostly bike commute) and ellipticaling on the off days. The knee seemed to be holding up, but from what I recall it would still randomly hurt depending on the day.

Besides a transatlantic flight messing up my schedule and my sleep, June and July were pretty consistent in continuing every other day. I was also still doing the kine routine, I had settled on some exercises I did not hate entirely. I also had more free time in those two months, so did more walking again instead of elliptical. Biking was not an option.

August was another Euro trip. A year on from the last one, I played it a lot safer. We did not walk as much and I definitely did not run as much. I toned it down those weeks, squeezing in a recovery jog here-and-there. I averaged around 27 km per week for those three weeks.

The latter half of August I got back into the alternating days of running and things felt fine. Mid September I switched to four days of running, totalling about 60 km per week, and I did not fall apart.

At some point in September and October I think I gave up on the kine routine. I noticed the stretching involved in it would from time to time mess up my patella tendon. I had grown weary of it and that was the drop. I now wonder whether that (sometimes intense) stretching was actually hurting it more. The stretch in question was sitting on your knees and do a controlled descent of your butt towards to heels of your foot. When I started this ordeal, I could not come very close at all. By this point in time, I could easily sit down entirely into the stretch, but sometimes I felt that a tiny niggle in the patella tendon would exacerbate and hurt way more because of this move.

Either way, the running went well enough. I was still worrying about a bad night of sleep or a misstep ruining things (and sometimes it did still create small setbacks in how the knee felt), but by and large the worst seemed finally behind me. I started more properly thinking about my future running again.

In November 2024, I moved to five days of running per week, hitting about 64 km. I also reintroduced doing a workout once a week. I call it Lactate Threshold, but I do not think I am hitting that. I cannot move my legs very fast any more, that will have to improve again over time. Still, it felt good to create a bit of a burning lung feeling again, even if it was not all that special. I reintroduced taking a down week every fourth week, now that it was beginning to feel more again like I could use it.

December saw some more transatlantic travel, but I (and the knee) managed. In January I switched to six days of running a week. 70 km total, three of the days are recovery jogs.

I am just finishing a down week this week (and have reintroduced strides) with my eye on running 75 km the coming weeks. Of course, yesterday I made a misstep in a deeper patch of snow and today my left knee area hurts. Strangely enough it is further south than (the usual pain I felt in) the patella tendon. That will be a day off today and a reevaluation tomorrow.

I have noticed I am more at ease with where I am at. I still want to be fast, I still wish I were running more, I still have hopes of running good races. I will continue working towards those goals. However, making the decision to take that day off today came easy. Easier than it would have before the injury. Yes I am still annoyed with today and the past, but I am more accepting of my situation. I do not have as much free time as I used to. I cannot run as many different routes as I used to (for heatmap purposes, more on that if I feel like writing another post). But I am still running. I do still love it.

I chug on.

A long overdue update on my heatmapping, the previous two updates were all the way back in Jan 2022 and in May 2021. Eighteen months have passed, so you might imagine I have made some progress.

Running All Streets

Brussels

Done and dusted. I achieved this goal on 18 Oct 2022, being the first person to complete Brussels, as far as I can tell. After that was completed, I still spent some time cleaning up the map. Sometimes CityStrides marks a street as complete despite you not having run properly through it. This involved checking the map and looking for gaps in streets. I think I got everything significant.

Once that was done, I also ended up turning on CityStrides’ “hard mode”. It sounds fancier than it is. When trying to complete a street, it tends to offer you some respite from shitty GPS by counting a street completed as long as you ran by 90% of the nodes in the street. Hard mode turns that off and requires 100% of nodes. Flipping the switch forced me to redo about 1-2% of streets in Brussels. This was done in Feb-Mar 2023.

Kraainem

At some point after Brussels, I decided to start running the streets of Kraainem. This city is right up against Brussels (and, I imagine, would be part of Brussels in many other countries). All runs for it involved starting from my work, running about 6 km in one direction, doing some streets, and running the 6 km back. Kraainem is pretty small, so this was honestly finished relatively quickly. Compared to what I was used to from Brussels anyway. :)

What City Next?

I have been a bit lost in deciding what to do next. Everything requires rather dull out and backs. The distances to get anywhere get larger and larger too. Almost all the cities right up against Brussels also extend quite a distance away from Brussels. Their far sides require a straight out and back long run to reach.

Instead I have been chipping away at the closer parts of all of them. Just get my completion percentages up, try to move up in the rankings of each.

For recovery runs on days I have some time to waste, I end up biking about 11 km to Machelen. This smaller city next to Brussels provides an easier completion target — once I get there by other means.

With long enough runs from work, I can reach Drogenbos and Linkebeek. These two “cities” are tiny, so also an easy target if I can reach them.

Long Dumb Shit

At first the trips I had to make to get anywhere with these goals felt a little over the top and like a bit of a time sink. But with a clear goal in mind, i.e., making my heatmap cross Belgium, I justified their existence. At some point in the last 18 months, however, I got sort of addicted to them. Take the train somewhere, go for a run in a different environment, optional city sightseeing, take the train back.

I now lovingly call them my “Long Dumb Shit” Adventures, since I tend to only justify the effort for long runs.

To be clear, the goal here is not completing streets, just to make my heatmap look nicer and achieve silly goals in the process.

Cross Belgium: North-West to South-East

This goal was the first to spark my interest. I wanted to run across Belgium. One could do this more easily just going north to south, the shortest route. That felt a bit boring, so instead I wanted to connect the north-western point to the south-eastern point. That’s the Belgian-Dutch coastal border on the one hand and the Belgian-French-Luxembourgish tricountry point on the other.

The work on this started in earnest around March 2022 and became a real focus by September. The north-western side was relatively easy, the furthest I had to go by train was about an hour. The south-eastern side was more of a time sink. For the furthest parts the train takes around three hours. Those trips were a bit much. The final connection was eventually made on 26 November 2022.

I used the train for all of these, running between stations. It helped that one of the main lines in Belgium reaches from the coast through Brussels all the way to Arlon (actually even to Luxembourg, capital of Luxembourg!) in the south-east of Belgium. Once in the south-eastern side of Belgium though, I did need some regional trains too as the distances between stations got a bit far for what I wanted to run.

The Belgian Coast

After the main goal, I snuck in an easy one. Running the Belgian coast might sound like a feat if you do not know the geography, but it is only 65-70 km in length. I had already done some parts of it too, needing just another two runs to finish it. This was accomplished on 10 December 2022. I quite like how it looks, but it was not much work, so it is hard to really call it an achievement. Quite some sand running was involved, which is not the most pleasant.

Cross Belgium: North to South

When I came back to my Long Dumb Shit in February, I decided to make that north-south connection after all, realising I needed just four long runs. Guess how many weekends February has? Completed that goal by the end of the month. It felt more like a little extra to keep busy, never a real goal. Yes, by this point my weekend shenanigans had become the norm.

I went through Lier and Antwerpen just to connect runs there to my heatmap blob.

Tricountry Points

When I was nearing the end of my north-west to south-east connection, a colleague said the logical next step was to do all the other corners of Belgium. To sum them all up:

• Belgium-Netherlands-Coast: the north-west point I did.
• Belgium-France-Coast: other end of the coast, finished when running the Belgian coast.
• Belgium-France-Luxembourg: the south-east tricountry point I did.
• Belgium-Germany-Netherlands: north-eastern point, relatively easy to reach with a main train line from Brussels.
• Belgium-Germany-Luxembourg: eastern side of Belgium, northern tip of Luxembourg, bit harder to reach by public transport.

It’s that second to last one I eventually decided to focus on, though my mind was not really into it. At first anyway.

Belgium-Netherlands-Germany

First weekend of May I did a first stage of this goal. A shorter forest route connecting Verviers to Eupen, adding a little sightseeing walking around in Eupen afterwards.

I then ran from Huy back to Namur, 30k of running along a river. Not ideal for shade, but a lot better than I had expected. Also something I accidentally did right that day: run on the side of the river where the sun is coming from, otherwise I think you also get the reflection of the sun on the water beaming against you.

Next another long run to connect Verviers to Liège. Ran out of energy and/or dehydrated on this one, not sure which, leaning towards the latter. The last few km were a struggle. A decent amount of it was in nature if I recall, so should have been shaded enough, but my body just did not take it well that day. A water fountain along the way that I was hoping to use was also not operational. I think I might not have had enough water before leaving home, so I started the run a bit dehydrated, making the water I had brought insufficient.

After that came running from Eupen to Aachen, which I talked about before. Remember how I said I was not into this goal? Well, by this point I was adding a weekend trip to make the connecting more pleasant.

All of the previous happened in May 2023. Then I took a little break from it until the end of June when I finally got around to connecting the final part: Huy to Liège. I had been dreading it a bit because it was also along the river and I was not expecting much shade. Summer had started in earnest so that was promising to not be pleasant. In the end the heat turned out alright, I must have gotten somewhat used to things. However, I did smash the big toe of my right foot on a rock that was jutting out and took a tumble. Some scrapes and the toe started looking purple and blue, but ended up alright for running. Either way, another connection made!

Belgium-Germany-Luxembourg

This final tricountry point one might be a goal for fall 2023. There is a train line that goes down from Liège that should get me close. I have not quite figured out how to go from the end of following that line to the actual tricountry point, but I will tackle that problem when I get to it. Let’s see what my motivation is by then.

Future

• As mentioned, when it comes to city completion I am a bit all over the place for now. Just doing streets that are in reach. Try finishing the smaller “cities” when I have the time to reach them. This is likely to remain my approach.
• The last tricountry point is a goal now. How easily I will get there remains to be seen.
• When looking at it on a country scale, the map feels a bit empty. I have a mind of filling in the gaps with my long runs when I am not in the mood to travel half across the country. Just take public transport to somewhere closer by, do a loop, colouring in the map as I do so. Of course I have to ensure everything remains connected to the main blob in the process. I have started some of this near Dendermonde and Lokeren, as you can see on the final July 2023 map above.
• Related to the previous, I also want to get at least one finished street in all cities near Brussels. The definition of “near” will grow larger as I make progress with that goal.
• If at all possible, I want to connect every bit of heatmap I have to the main blob. That will be more something for when an opportunity to connect it arises.