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Finish time: 2h 56min 32sec “Performance is directly related to one’s willingness to experience pain and cope with it” – I don’t know if I heard this somewhere else or my brain became too philosophical during the marathon, but it ran in my mind continuously during the race. And it’s so true. The faster you are, the more pain you will have to deal with and your brain will try to convince you to slow down by all means possible. And in the end performance is all about how you cope with all this. I started to train at the beginning of the summer andRead More →

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Remember my rules of running better races and mistakes I no longer make? Well, I did two of those in beautiful Stockholm 🙂 Finish time: 1h 21m 42sec Elevation First, it was the course elevation profile. For some reason, my early research on Strava about the Stockholm Half Marathon only revealed about 70m of elevation overall. I still don’t understand how can the same course ran at the same time can reveal such different elevation results? 70m was nothing, so I viewed this race as an easy one. No longer felt easy when I read the official race leaflets which revealed no less than 370mRead More →

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As a minimalist, I’m committed to only making purchases when I really need them and not when there are clearances, or the products look nice or when a new version is out for sale. But it hasn’t always been like this. A tale of two pairs Back in 2015, both myself and Andreea started to train with our buddies at the Marathon Store in Bishopsgate. They had a running club there sponsored by adidas. One of the nicest offerings was the fact that they were giving free running trainers to try during group runs. The trainers were top of line adidas Ultra Boost and IRead More →

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My weight goes up 3-5 pounds every now and then depending on many factors – life changes like moving home, how stressed I am, injury or illness that prevents me from exercising or how well I sleep. But there are 3 things that for me are a sure thing when it comes to gaining weight. 1. Boredom This is not much of a problem if I’m at home, there is always something to do. But if I’m at work and for some reason I don’t have an immediate task at hand, the first thing I think about is food. I lie to myself and sayRead More →

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Two years ago I discovered that I could run a lot faster. But the kick was actually the fact that I spent the first months of 2015 not running but training to improve my fitness. Well, if you have to know, it was also to lose my belly fat and man boobs :). So I found myself being able to run a 10k in just under 50 minutes, whereas previously, I could squeeze a 7k in 40 minutes with the cost of a couple of day’s worth of leg pain. Like any runner who went up a level, you start reading about how to train.Read More →

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In: Budgeting, Fitness, Health, Life, Lifestyle, London, Running
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If you’re not among the few lucky people that get to work from home on a regular basis, it means you have to spend a reasonable amount of time commuting. The average commute for a Londoner is 45 minutes to 1h one way, but there are many people (like us) who decide that their living standards are more important than the distance to the workplace and live much further away. I spend 3 hours commuting on every day I go to London, so doing something useful with those 3 hours is pretty important. Otherwise they just go to waste. When we were living in London,Read More →

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Last year was our first year of serious racing. We did 3 halves and one full marathon. Of course, most of them were PBs because we didn’t have any previous races to compare to. Just running those races wasn’t enough for me. I didn’t get to the bottom of “why” I’m trying to be faster, I’m not asking questions, I just do it. So I started to read a lot of literature, train more and the results improved. Although my efforts started during the autumn of 2015, I broke the sub 20 minutes parkrun 5 days after the London Marathon in April 2016. And thenRead More →

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Every October, the running community follows a trend called “run every day”. Back in 2015 when I started to run again after a few months of intense weight loss and fitness activities, I ran for a mile every day of October. Last year, 2016, I found myself in a much better position, so I did a little experiment called “run 10k every day“. People asked me about going from 1 mile to 10k in just a year and “why not just 5k?”. Well, 5k is a fairly short distance for me. Even when running below the lactating threshold, the time I spend for that 5kRead More →

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Everybody makes mistakes in all areas of life. When it comes to running, I made quite a few during my first marathon, half marathons, parkruns, club league, or whatever races I did. But the most important achievement was learning from these mistakes, as I pointed out in my Great North Run and London North Half reviews. Starting off too fast Probably the most common mistake is going too fast. For me, this is caused mostly by bad or no planning. If I don’t know what pace I’m going to run at, “too fast” loses its full meaning. You know you started too fast when you’reRead More →

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In: Fitness, Fitness class
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For the last 3 years I’ve been working out regularly, so I can’t say I’m a beginner. But still, Yoga and (mat based) Pilates require almost no equipment and most of my training sessions at the gym were personal training sessions, so all equipment was prepared for me and I didn’t have to do anything but use it. A few weeks ago we decided to get a gym membership at our local gym in Hertford. Even though we have some dumbbells at home, the gym is the only place close by with access to a pool, a sauna and of course classes and equipment. We registeredRead More →