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I stumble over quite a lot of interesting articles and some are worth sharing on this site. I plan to do this every 4 weeks (thus “4x7 Review”) and I will include my own posts, some training highlights and some of my nutrition. Enjoy!

As seen on runbikeco.de

Wow, four weeks already – and merely one posting, the Psychology of a Long Run. I can’t and won’t promise to improve, even though my goal is certainly a higher posting frequency than that. On the other hand, the blog is now featuring an imprint which took a while to research and write.

Notable past training

Up until last weekend I was on a really good training streak. I pretty much nailed all my important workouts and improved my endurance and speed considerably. Here are three highlights:

I combined this training session with a visit to my parents place. Helped my dad fix his computer and ran home. I’ll write about this particular route in the future, because it was very enjoyable and brought back a lot of memories. I embedded two 5km cruises in this one.

Being the time crunched athlete with a family and full-time job, I started to commute to or from work on my feet once in a while. There are different routes to chose from, the shortest being 13.7km, the most boring being 14.5km (right along a busy street) and I still experiment to find the nicest route. This run is a tad bit longer but features some trail and not so busy roads. I had to bite another snow bullet on this one, though.

At the time this was my best run I’ve ever had. It was the longest (I had planned to do 19km but somehow mismanaged the route during the run, thus ending it after 20km) and also quite a fast one. If you look at the Strava details you will notice there is a new PR for 10km. While this is not my real PR (my best time from October 2012 wasn’t recognized as 10km by Strava) it is still faster than a 10km race I did in October 2011. The bad news is that I somehow managed to strain a muscle in my right upper leg, which is having a serious impact on my training. I did two runs on Saturday and Sunday last week, and since that didn’t help to improve the situation I sidelined myself this week. I’m seeing my physiotherapist three times during the next days and hope to be able to run a bit next week in order to prepare for my first race this year.

Upcoming training

For the next few days my main focus will be on resting my injured leg and getting it healed up as quickly as possible. I’ll try to do some light interval training next Tuesday, followed by a short & easy run on Friday, before running my first ever half marathon on April 14th! Assuming I don’t injure myself any more during the race, I’ll be doing a recovery week afterwards and then try to keep the momentum of long runs until mid of May. Stay tuned!

Food consumed

I won’t bore you with everything I ate during the past four weeks, but there is always a meal or two that was special. This time, there’s only one to share, and that was the lamb I prepared for Easter.

The meat was of superior quality (thanks, Otto Gourmet!) and prepared according to a recipe by Jamie Oliver, involving fresh herbs as well as … bacon. Because everything's better with bacon!

Found elsewhere

Lastly, a more or less uncommented link-dump of the past 28 days.

Finally, two interesting reads by Joe Friel, endurance coach and founder of TrainingPeaks:

4x7 Review