Slow Runs Around Hoan Kiem Lake

I always enjoy running around Hoan Kiem Lake at the weekends. The whole area is pedestrianised, providing a nice atmosphere for a run. Unfortunately, the lake is 4.5 km away from my house. So last Sunday and this Saturday included two 9 km out-and-back trips through the traffic to the lake, just to get 7.5 km of running around the lake.

I recorded both runs, and the first one has turned out well. Hopefully, we’ll get the YouTube video out when I’m back from holiday on the 28th. But I feel that things are coming along well with the training, filming and editing, so the long slow runs were definitely worth it.

Training Summary

This week’s training was a bit mixed. I suggested last week that I’d train Monday through Saturday and take Sunday off. This did not happen. In fact, the plan thoroughly fell apart on Monday. I felt tired following Sunday’s 13.75 km run, and I had work that needed doing, so I completely failed to do any training.

Tuesday and Wednesday runs happened as scheduled. Thursday my hamstrings were feeling rubbish, making it an enforced rest day. Friday was an awful running day on sore hamstrings. But on the bright side, I managed to do both a slow 5 km run and a strength training session. Then, feeling a little recovered on Saturday and had a great late-night run to take my weekly distance up to 32 km. I’m happy with that output.

The Week Ahead…

Training will take a bit of a dip this week. That’s intentional. Three weeks of ramping up, one week of letting my body recover a bit. I’m out in Chiang Mai this week, hopefully, there will be a "Running around Chiang Mai” YouTube video coming out early in May.

There’s plenty of organising work that I could be doing this week - but I might just go see elephants and spend my time eating Thai food instead.

In Case You Missed It…

I wrote this blog post with a rough draft of the 3,500km route through Japan.

We also uploaded another short YouTube video this week. This one’s from the Brighton to London ultramarathon that I completed almost exactly a year ago. It was my first ultramarathon in 20 months, and one of only three I completed in 2024. One of the other ultras is up as a reel on Instagram - so we’re two-thirds of the way through the 2024 backlog!

Anyway, I’ve left it late again… one day I will get these newsletters out earlier, but today is not that day. For the second week running it’s technically after midnight, so it's already next week.

Thank you for reading and for your support.

That’s all folks.

Phill