Badische Meile

Today is the day of the Badische Meile in Karlsruhe. This is an 8.88889 km run throughout the city of Karlsruhe. The distance is quite manageable; I haven’t run in some time but I have been on the bicycle a few times lately so I hope that I will be fit enough to do well enough. My goal is to complete this in under 45 minutes, which I suspect is very attainable.

In the physical shape that I am in now it is very clear to me how unfit I was last year. As great as the motorcycle was, I think it also hindered my self-care in that I was not so anxious to ride my bicycle around the city. And, indeed, when the weather was nice my preference was to be out riding rather than running around. It will be interesting to see what happens next year.

I still have some way to go to reach my peak physical fitness, a mark that I would say I hit two years ago. It was much easier with squash in the lineup (and I’m not playing squash here), but it has never been more important than this summer. In only two months I will be departing for the Alpencross where we will have to endure 6 days of intense demands on our persons: travelling 60 km, 2000 metres of height, and carrying our bike for an hour every single day.

I’m sure I’ve said it a thousand times, but after Alpencross my focus will shift to endurance running with the Einstein marathon in September. As a warm-up I may also participate in a half-marathon in Ettlingen at the end of August, which should be no problem for me if I hope to make it to the end in Ulm.

Time is moving quickly.

Update: The bad news is, my time for the run was not great. I think it was about 46 minutes. There are two factors that I think contributed to this: the weather, and my transport to the beginning of the race. The weather was a beautiful day to sit outside, but not to run. It was/is +25 and sunny, and there were no water stations on route.

The good news is, I went to the race by bicycle, returned from the end of the race to the start by running, and then bicycled back home. So overall I feel like it was a good day of exercise. Now it’s time to relax a little bit with a trip to Vogelbrau.

Update 2: According to results I finished about 500th out of 3300 total runners. Not too bad, I guess, considering that I biked there. Still, I need to do some hot-weather training.