GETTING TECHNICAL

Week 19/37 – Road to Routeburn 2025

It’s crazy to think that at the beginning of the year my “big goal” was to run a half marathon and here I am with two trail half marathons under my belt with a (very slow and hard earned) finish at the Trail Challenge Waihi to round out week 19 of training towards the Routeburn Classic next year.

You can read the full report HERE but in short – the trail was steep and pretty technical underfoot. One or the other I could have dealt with (although steep probably would have been my preference of the two) but having an event with both was hard going for a relative newbie like myself. At least I train on trails 24/7 – my coach mentioned that some of her clients who trained 100 percent on roads found Waihi to be rather eye opening!

However as you can imagine, training was pretty light this week so I could go into the event fresh. There was a time that two run sessions in a week seemed good, but these days I have double the number of running sessions so if you take away half of them I have a large expanse of .. well .. TV watching – although I do tend to use my downtime to do mobility work – cause I’m super old now and my body needs all the love I can give it.

Next week the sessions go back to normal, but the volume is still at “recovery” level. After running the Waihi trails, I’ve decided I’m going to spend at least one session a week in Riverhead – running more technical terrain can only make me a stronger and more confident trail runner.

Till next time