Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Question to those who experience cold climates more often than I do: if you use a Camelback or similar in temperature below 0C, how do you stop the water in the outside tube from freezing? (It wasn't quite cold enough for this to affect me today, but wasn't far away - certainly noticed the difference once I'd been drinking for long enough to be drawing on the water from the main pack).

C • you can get a thermal tube ... 6

I need to get at least a couple of good long runs under my belt in the lead-up to Six Foot. The first full day after arriving wouldn't necessarily have been my first choice for this, especially after a not-brilliant week of running, but I'm starting to run out of weekends so decided I needed to go for it, with an initial target of 2.30 and then see how things were going.

Chilly and windy but just above freezing (somewhat against my usual instincts, I wore a long-sleeved top which I was to appreciate afterwards). Started out northeast into the wind (along a main drag which was quiet on a Sunday morning), then turned uphill away from the lake at Versoix, with my target an area of forest on the northwest side of the motorway. I was struggling through this section but in a sense of not being great now, not a sense that it was falling apart. Picked up a bit once in the forest and tracking southwest, with snow an increasing presence off the track/road on the higher ground (though never on the track/road itself), crossing the border into France at around 14k. The French section was quite reasonable; thought at one point I might be stuck on a main road for a while but found a decent alternative. (A certain amount of main-road running is inevitable on this route because of the limited number of ways to get around the airport, but most have footpaths/bike paths of sorts). Took a second gel at the two-hour mark just after crossing back into Switzerland, but from there the run started to drop away a bit with the left Achilles starting to give trouble. Decided that I'd already achieved a reasonable amount and that 2.30 would be a reasonable day's work (and thought that going all the way back to the hotel would be beyond 3 hours; it turned out I was a bit closer than I'd thought and it probably would have been 2.55 or so), and pulled up at the first tram stop after passing the 2.30 mark.

Going home via the main station did solve the picking-up-lunch problem - the area I'm staying in has virtually nothing open on Sundays. Started to cool down and definitely felt the cold in the couple of hundred metres from the bus stop to the hotel.

This run never sparkled, and I'll need to go for close to twice as long in March, but I was pleased that this distance didn't feel as intimidating as it has at times lately and that I was able to get into a mode where 90 or 120 minutes felt again like a staging post (I tend to think of long runs in half-hour blocks).

Not very energetic in the rest of the afternoon.