Trophies...

I got a nice medal in Lisbon, I'll have to take a picture of it some time.

And then I also got this.
No, I haven't started painting my nails. That's a black toenail. Nice souvenir. At least it doesn't hurt.

And I thought my shoes were "roomy"...

And the winner is... not

That's a misleading title.


Here's my bib!

The official results are out. My chip time was 2:02:58, which was more than one minute slower than my time last October in Brussels. The official time was 2:04:27 so in fact I've got a PB! Last October I made it in 2:05:16. :-)

Mixed feelings

Much to be told: I ran the 18th Lisbon Half-Marathon yesterday! The weather was great, the crowd was huge and crossing the 25 de Abril bridge on foot was something to remember.

There's a bit of good news and a bit of bad news too. The good news is, I ran my fastest 10k ever, managed to finish the race (really positive, huh?!) and from now on I can also tell that I raced Haile Gebrselassie! He won but that's just a detail! :-)

The bad news is, I thought I wasn't in great shape and that turned out to be true. I was afraid my foot would start hurting after a few hard kilometers but actually that wasn't the case at all. The problem was that, because of that dodgy foot, I had to skip most of the training in the past 2,5 weeks. Not having completed those 110 minutes long run workouts did make the difference. After 15km my legs simply stopped working.

A pity really, because I missed on my best time just fractionally. Had I been in a decent shape...

For the rest everything turned out all right. The course was indeed as fast as I imagined, if not the most attractive to the foreign tourist, must be said, and the weather was just about perfect for distance running.

I only disliked the animation along the course, poor or plain stupid: flamenco dancers at the Terreiro do Paço, what on earth went through their minds to come up with that?!...

Acclimatisation

After an absence of some days, here's the pre-race report from Lisbon!

I got my bib yesterday morning at the Museu da Electricidade, number 3825, along with the timing chip! Let's see how high or low that will be ranked this Sunday. They're expecting 30.000 people at the start line but I reckon most of that crowd will line up for the mini-marathon (7km) which won't even be timed.

Last time I posted I was struggling with some pain in my right foot. That really messed up the last two weeks of my build up to this race. I had to skip the last two long runs and I'm pretty sure that will make a big difference on Sunday. I made some shorter runs on softer ground and that helped a bit. I was hoping to improve on my best half-marathon time of 2:01 which seemed feasible as the course in Lisbon is really quick, but with my lack of endurance and that dodgy foot that's looking very unlikely. I'll try to go easy with a steady 5:45 min/km pace and see how it feels on the day. This race came too early but anyway I'll do my best.

By the way, thanks a lot for all those text messages on the past 13th! A bit more and I'll be in the veteran category! :-) Cheers.

Injuries suck...

Last week turned out to be a bit of a disaster, training wise. Normally I would have made at least three short sessions and a long 18k in the weekend. In total I ran a meager 3.5k and as it stands it had been better not to do it at all.

It's been a week since my foot started complaining. The 1h50 target is a mirage now, I'll be glad if I can stand at the start on the 16th, and get to the finish in one piece.

I hope tomorrow I succeed in doing a bit of running. I promise I'll go slow. Maybe even slower.