January Retrospect, with pictures:

bloody winter...

I'm starting to feel some sort of anxiety; i figured there's one thing I really want - and that's spring. 

Just started my last semester here in Pécs, only four course seperate me from graduation, which is nice. There's a three weeks traineeship included in my syllabus, and it's happening right now, and I find the first day very enjoyable. I won't talk about that much, actually I won't talk about it at all.

There were some issues with the running story of mine, as I probably  run too much suddenly out of thin air a month ago. But it's just some muscle strain by my right tibia, and it's justkind of annoying, not very painful fortunately.

Even so, I managed to run an avarage 30-35k every week in january, finished the month with 125k. That's not that much, but there were some harsh winter (it's still out there) and a shitload of exams as well.

One thing I figured about my running, that I'm getting kind of faster, at least compared to my pervious performance. Oh, got a new shoe as weel: it's the latest edition of the Asics Fujitrabuco. Frankly, it really please me feet after 500k in a Saucony ( which eventually overdid my pervious expectation by good deal, I have to tell.) - Asics shoes got some serious cushioning, that I am almost obsessed with :)

I registrated to MB Trail; which gonna happen this year at the 18th of April. 56k with 2700m  D+, crossing the entire Mátra mountains, with a comfy cut-off time of 10 hours.  I'm not really a race-person, but I had to give some shape to this running-thing. 

Today I commited the first run of the month, and also the my first half-marathon for this year. There's a truckload of snow in the higher areas of the Mecsek, that I wasn't entirely aware of. I didn't meet a single person, there were long kilometers without a single human trail in the snow, which is nice! 

I have to tell, it was all joy till the 15th km, after that I got kind of leery, and finally, my legs did not liked the downhill-run for 6k continously, loosing almost 500 meters straight away at the end.

To draw the lesson, I should eat more than 200 calories next time till midday, if I want to run that much again in one go. And I have to practice the downhills, as it happens sometimes, I really can smash my thighs on steep tracks. In turn, I'm satisfied with my uphill performance, not just today, but in the past month as well: can manage to find a comfy pace, around 7-7,5 mins/km, up to a steepness of 100-120 meters/kilometer. As it turned out, there's no problem with that pace even in 5k/500m D+. Unfortunately there's not much longer uphill tracks around me at the moment with that steepness, but very likely I wouldn't be able to hold onto that pace much longer than 40 mins.

Finally, here's some picture, that I captured on the fly today: