It has been a long time since I wrote on this blog.
But, I love to read back what I wrote years ago. One of the posts that I am very happy to have written is this post about me going to Lieden Half-Marathon 2010 with only little practice. The result was me being half-dead at the finish line and unable to move without pain for the next several days.
That was more than 10 years ago. After that, I ran a better half marathon in Eindhoven in 2012. This time I had practiced well and finished in a respectable time of 1 hour 47 minutes. I did a lot of things right - including practicing long distances, and some intervals. I was really enjoying running in that period and I ran several events that year - Amsterdam 8km, and Nijmeghen seven hill runs.
Then I had a couple of injuries in 2012; Then I tried to change to front-foot running, and got injured again and completely stopped running. I told anyone who asked that running was actually not very healthy - because of the impact it can have on your knees and everything else. But I was wrong.
I started running briefly and went to a 10k event in Eindhoven Marathon in 2021 with a company team of IMEC. That was fun running with some colleagues and I finished the 10k in 53 minutes, which was slightly higher than the 50 minutes finish I was targeting - but in all fairness, I didn't practice enough to make that target. Then I didn't do much physical exercise again for next couple of years.
Then things changed in June of last year (2023). I read the book Outlive by Peter Attia and familiarised myself with the literature of longevity and long-term health. One thing was crystal clear - exercise was the biggest influence in long-term health. But, exercise is a broad subject and needs to be made more specific.
The key focus areas for me are:
- Cardio fitness and increasing VO2 max
- Resistance training for increasing muscle mass
My understanding of cardio fitness and how to improve is primarily derived form Peter Attia and the famous Tour-de-France coach - Inigo San Milan. The primary goal for me was to increase my VO2 max and baseline cardio fitness. This led me to following a mix of running, cycling and swimming for cardio. Running came back easy. Cycling is a lot of fun when outdoors - and especially because I started long cycling sessions with Vivaan to the Best mountainbiking trail (totaling 25-30km). Swimming was new for me - but I was able to build up breast-stroke laps up to 1km - and still trying to learn freestyle.
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| Cycling in mountainbiking trail in Best with Vivaan |
But, my love for running re-emerged and cycling and swimming have become secondary. Slowly, I have added resistance training - and still learning more on that to further improve my running. The beauty of running is that it is easy for me to set realistic and ambitious goals and make a plan to chase them down which keeps the motivation alive.
In Part-2 of this post - we will go into what mission 40 before 40 is about and the progress so far.
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| Running in Tokyo city in 2023 |
