First track race in 12 months, Memorial Rasschaert in Belgium, I do my last strides on the track and the heavy rain is pouring down on me, welcome back! Yesh, I considered for a second doing a stride with an umbrella in my hand, but then at times I like to pretend I’m a tough cookie and I can deal with these circumstances, just because everyone else does. I mean, look at it on the bright side.. it’s not every weekend you lose your bib a lap into the race because the rain gods thought it would be better off on the track and as a result you get to have a look at the finish photo and point out which runner you are. “Are you the blonde on the left or the right?” “Depends, which one had the faster time?...ha just kidding!”

In the past couple of years I’ve only ever been in good shape or injured. I was simply too fragile to deal with more racing on the track. But in this past year I’ve learned a lot about my body and now I’m finally starting to understand what I need to make my body robust enough to handle the track. I made changes in my running and overall strengthening program, calf exercise routine, my medical support and even my spikes don’t look the same anymore. In the long run all these changes should make the difference when trying to stay healthy, but the exciting part is that I’ve noticed improvements in training already, for example when I started to introduce spikes. Putting on your spikes shouldn’t ever be a worry, so one of the aims at the start of this build up was to be confident to be running in spikes at any time of the year. Having to listen to my body definitely tested my patience, but in return knowing that I haven’t skipped any steps along the way gave me a sense of peace when I finally got to race a full 1500m in spikes last night. There I was standing on the start line in this uncontrollable weather, but feeling more in control than ever.

The not so exciting part of this more conservative approach is that as of now I’m not as sharp as I need to be to break my PB. I haven’t done any speed work yet, which showed in my race yesterday as I was a bit one-paced and not quite able to respond to any moves. Totally plausible if you look at what stage of training I’m at, but ofcourse any athlete’s competitive spirit takes over when the gun goes off, so I wasn’t running for anything less than a win. Although I was all over the field throughout the race my splits were quite even, all around 68 seconds which resulted in a 4:16.25. At times I felt a bit lost when the others made a move and I wasn’t able to respond straight away, but I was satisfied I finished strong. In the end I think it’s races like these early on in the season and not quite at your peak that give you that mental edge you need once you get to big important ones. Lucky day for me as with the ridiculously stormy weather I scored double mental edge points, bonus!

No doubt in my mind after having done this race I will already see an improvement in my next 1500m at the Flanders Cup Meeting voor Mon this Saturday. After these two races I should have a better understanding of where I’m at so that my coach Scrivo and I know what we’re working with at the upcoming training camp in Sankt Moritz. Hopefully I’ll manage to get into a couple of competitive races afterwards to finish off the short (but sweet :)) season with a wave!