Mission 40 before 40 (Part-1)

  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:   

1. Cardio fitness and increasing VO2 max
2. 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. 

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. 

Running in Tokyo city in 2023