The Book Plank

The Tilburg Ten Miles experience As some of you might know, I have been running quite fanatically over the last couple of months. So far I have done the 10km at Rotterdam and the half marathon in Leiden (21km 97m). A colleague of mine, who lives in Tilburg, mentioned that the Tilburg Ten Miles was an exciting and challenging race and I never bat a way a challenge! So as a well known TV personality always says "Challenge accepted!" and I signed up for the race. It is 10EM (English Miles), which translates into 16.1km through the heart of Tilburg. After having finished the half marathon of Leiden late May I really upped my training schedule for the full marathon later this year in October, trying to run at least 50km a week and usually on Sunday 30km+. This has been quite tasking on my both physically and mentally as well as I am completely drained after finishing the runs. So I decided to take the training schedule a bit light and doing 30km+ every other week. So the ...

In December I decided that I wanted to run a marathon, looking for one near the end of 2013 I found the marathon of Amsterdam as my target. However I wanted to experience how it was to run in such a big crowd and in a competition kind of way. For this I signed up in February for the half marathon of Leiden on the 26th of May, I reckoned that I would have enough time to prepare the the 21km and 97meter that would be ahead of me. Having had my fair share of running injuries, all of them by thinking that I could do this easily, I found out soon that taking things slow and building it up was for the better. So even before the half marathon I did the 10km in Rotterdam as a first test run. I was fully up and running by then and had put in some nice 17 and 18km runs... But then the week before Queensday disaster struck! (a month before the half marathon). I hit my knee while biking on a steel cast pole, might have been a bit of karma biting me because I was cycling through ...

Late last year I decided that I wanted to run a marathon in 2013, I picked the marathon of Amsterdam (20th of October 2013). So I started to run a bit and found out I actually had quite a good condition, with cycling to work and back each day, 22km a day. My first training run was a bit too enthusiastic where I severely sprained my ankle, so after some recuperation time, 6 weeks of down-time, I finally could pick up the training again.  I did want to get to know how such an event felt like so I signed up for a 10km run in Rotterdam (14th of April 2013) and the half-marathon in Leiden (26th of May 2013).  My training schedule aimed for prepping for the 10km I already had some nice runs and decided to take the timeframe of running it between 45 and 55 minutes. There was another one in the 10km run that was 55+ minutes.  And today was the day. Looking back on the run itself I must say that eventhough I can easily run the 10km, this was different. Were it the nerves? I ...