{"id":231,"date":"2008-06-01T20:14:26","date_gmt":"2008-06-02T01:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucog.org\/blog\/?p=230"},"modified":"2008-06-01T20:14:26","modified_gmt":"2008-06-02T01:14:26","slug":"20031-an-executive-decision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/06\/01\/20031-an-executive-decision\/","title":{"rendered":"2:00:31 & an executive decision"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s half marathon in Duisburg, Germany was a real challenge.<\/p>\n

This was my third half marathon \"Duisburg and the hardest one yet. Of my three half marathons so far, my time today was the slowest. The only slower half marathon I ran was the first half of the Bonn marathon last year, and I was only 28 seconds slower for that. The humidity was fairly high today – around 70 percent at the start of the race at 9 a.m. After only three miles I was already drenched in sweat. I had my "Camelpak" strapped on my back with 1.2 liters of an isotonic beverage, but nothing seemed to help. I also had a bit of a stomach condition just prior to the race, and my trip back across the Atlantic some 9 days earlier probably did not help much, either. At the halfway mark I had a pace to finish in about 1:48, but I felt totally drained. As a matter of fact, I felt like dropping out. I wondered where I was on the course and how long it would take me to get back to the start area. Then I remembered something I had read either in a book on distance running or in a magazine. The topic was the situation I was now in – what do you do, try to keep running or take a break and walk a couple of minutes? The answer was that walking might help you finish since you would use a slightly different muscle combination, letting you rest a bit. If you are walking you are still getting closer to the finish line. So I walked about 3 minutes and ran another 15 minutes. I took two more short walk breaks and still finished in 2:00:31. Now I am glad I stuck with it. And I made an executive decision not to run long distances on very humid days. My next half marathon will be in early October in Cologne – it should be cooler by then. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s half marathon in Duisburg, Germany was a real challenge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-in-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}