It took me about two weeks of living in San Francisco to realize that as much as I love roller skating, it just won’t work. I don’t mind going up the hills, but going down just didn’t seem that much fun or even safe for that matter. So I slowly started running again and learned to love all the hills around me.
As always, there were a few interesting lessons that I learned from exploring the new area:
- Google Earth is useless at telling you the height difference. You can plot a perfect running path and discover mid-way that there is a significant hill in-between.
- Memorizing possible paths prior to running is all great in theory, but once you’ve ran for 45 minutes you realize that all streets have similar names here: “San Something” or they sound Spanish and that you don’t know how to get home via your preferred route.
- This leads to doing stupid things like running 15km, which to my surprise wasn’t that hard. I did take a few days off after that, just to make sure I fully regenerate.
- Getting back to 100km/month wasn’t that hard and it took me only 3 runs/week. I’m hoping to raise it to 4 runs/week in next month.
That’s about it. This was my 11 month of running since I started last year and I can’t wait to see how my “last” month will go and to tally up the whole first year of running.
I’m also not sure about how I should proceed with my runs. I’m comfortable with my current pace and distance, but I’m not sure how much I can safely add into my training in terms of distance and number of runs.