Summer vacation training

It has been quiet here at the blog as I have been on a two week vacation with my family in Antibes in southern France along the Mediterranean coast. I thought it would be a repeat of the tapering/recovery vacation I had last year in Sicily in Italy where my legs got a well needed rest as I only spent limited time on the hotel treadmilland also did some water running. However, it was not to be as we found an excellent 800 meter long uphill road on Cap d’Antibes with just the perfect slope and inclince grade to enable speed aerobic repeat hill training. It was certainly not like running in the technical steep hills further inland, but felt great to get some speed in the legs after a summer of long slow distance training mixed with slower much steeper hill repeats. So, in the end we spent almost every morning on this road before going to the beach or doing excursions in the area.



The slope looks gentle, but really hurt both lungs and legs

On the beach I got plenty of time to read books and also mentally train and prepare further for Petite Trotté a Leon (PTL). Naturally, with the mountain run adventure PTL less than a month away I was drawn to books about mountains. It was quite surrealistic laying down in the warm pleasant sun hearing the waves meet the sandy shore and read about things going terribly wrong in cold snowy harsh conditions in the Alps, the Colorado 14ers and other mountains. However, I hope it will be valuable to mentally prepare for both the objective and subjective dangers of the mountains – it would of course have been better to learn by being in the mountains to experience difficulties first hand, but without the time this is better than nothing. And, as most of the disastrous mistakes I read about was fatal I rather learn about them second hand by reading about them than experiencing them myself. I am now really longing to Chamonix, only 20 days now until the start of PTL.

 

Screenshot of some of my summer Kindle reading on my iPhone