Structured Training, Scenic Trail

With that fog, the scenery, was just different than what you would normally associate with ‘scenic’. You turn a corner, and out of the fog bubble surrounding you, a dozen horses appear out of nowhere. There are more effects of running in a bubble of fog for several hours: you cover a great distance, but your gaze cannot wander to distant summits yet to be reached. Instead, this bubble keeps you firmly focused on the here and now. Almost as powerfully as the cone of light cast by your headlamp when running at night, when running in places out of reach of illuminating street lamps. Your headlamp and you. Or, in this case, the fog bubble and you. Plus, occasionally, your fellow competitors.

The Scenic Trail race offers several courses, all starting from Tesserete. I chose the 54km loop, which comes with 3900m of elevation gain. Relentless uphills on the first half, and relentless downhills on the second half, with the middle section rolling up and down the ridge of the Denti della Vecchia along the border between Italy and Switzerland. Rocky paths uphill give way to leafy trails in the forest, followed by steep descents, first muddy than rocky. All topped off by a far too long asphalt section that makes it impossible to choose the right pair of shoes for all the terrain covered. That is the Scenic Trail.

Structured training, however, preceded the months ahead of the Scenic Trail race. Over the past nine months, I have been participating in an early version of the KoopAI. What’s that? Think: “a software clone of ultrarunning coach Jason Koop”. Or in his own words, “experience Koop’s proven ultrarunning coaching methodology through a sophisticated training system developed in direct collaboration with him” (https://koopai-endurance.com/welcome_letter). The software developers are working closely with both coaches and athletes, and I think that has a lot of potential, some of it already materialized. I can certainly say that it unlocked a bit more of my own potential.

I gradually transitioned from “chaotic, entirely unpredictable training” into “consistent, structured training” over the period of many years. In the past nine months of training deliberately with the help of the individualized, dynamically adjusted training plan from KoopAI, I took yet another step. At first, I was hesitant, but then I enjoyed the benefits of having some assistance in programming the training week-by-week, and periodizing training over the several months ahead of a race. Rather than doing that entirely on my own.

Unfortunately, I hurt my right foot somehow during training. This had nothing to do with the training program itself, but rather was likely a training error that I made myself. Fortunately, it seems only to have been a very mild injury. Likely from overloading my right foot on a steep downhill section with lots of high steps built into the trail. My left leg is more skilled and stronger than my right leg when it comes to landing. As a precaution, I took two weeks of from running, entirely. There were two weeks left prior to the race. But I figured, enough to remind the body of earlier training and maintain form.

Carefully, I ramped up training again after the two-week break. The foot improved from day to day, despite of slowly putting more load on it. After a three hour training run without any pain, I decided to actually do the race. Under one condition: walk all downhill sections, just to make sure that I don’t send the same overload signal again. That was a prudent choice, and I am quite proud that I managed to stick to the promise during the race.

Pushing hard uphill, and walking leisurely downhill is a bad race strategy, from a performance standpoint: you just lose so much time on the downhill, and so much energy on the uphill. I overtook the same trail runners on the uphill sections who overtook me on the downhill section. Until the second half, where the course went predominantly downhill, and I was left behind. After seeing me blaze past on the way up, only to walk down, one fellow runner aptly summarized this to me “if only you knew how to descent”… Which to be fair, I don’t even know how to do well when I’m not as cautious as I was on this race day. In any case, I probably lost more than an hour this way, and arrived after approximately nine-and-a-half hours at the finish line. But entirely in one piece, and that’s what really matters.

Grateful. That’s what I am. For the team (software developers and coaches) around KoopAI who have been awesome to collaborate with (the team gets some hobby athletes to give feedback, but the athletes get feedback on their training: a win-win), for the company from my running buddies from the trail-maniacs, and especially for the two trail-maniacs who hiked over 20 km for cheering from a cold & windy spot, fully equipped with cow bells (make some noise) and good mood.