Iwona Trains: Running in Mazury

We've spent this past weekend in Mazury. The main purpose of the trip was to celebrate our anniversary (2 years!!) but then we were also hoping to do some decent hilly training. And our prayers to the weather gods were answered! On Friday when we arrived we took bikes from the hotel and went for a ride around a lake. Overall it was an exremely slow 25 km, but about half of it was walking the bikes up and down hills - still very muddy and snowy. Nevertheless, it was a nice way to welcome spring.

Yesterday, the hotel reception told us a place to go for some running. And we did, thinking that we'd do some nice hill training. Here I am happily starting our run:

It really felt great - temperature was just right, no wind anywhere, no cars, no other people. We managed to see a few deers (too fast for us to snap photos of). And just kept on going. We eventually reached a national reserve, and still kept on going. I go back to my original thesis - when the terrain is interesting the run seems much faster. Suprisingly, I didn't have as much trouble on the hills as I thought I would have. I guess the downhills made up for that as I got some rest.

With this new found strenght we kept on going and going. Then eventually the side road ended and we hit a busier road - that was the time when we decided to turn around. BUT, when I looked at my Garmin already had almost 9km on the clock, and this meant that I had at least another 9km to go. But the way back seemed a lot easier and a lot faster. All of a sudden the hills didn't bother me at all, didn't stop to take any walking breaks, and somewhere in the middle I've decided to finish the training properly and run up to 20km. And I did, was kinda tired at the end, but my level of self-confidence really went up. We've just checked how much we've climbed during the run and it amounted to about 1000m!!! Really wish we had more hills in Warsaw so that these trainings could be done more often.