The first week in Kenya

The first week in Eldoret in Kenya has been nice. I am staying together with Anders Carlsson and Elin Carlsson from my club Lidingö, Erik Liljequist and Niklas Serrander from Södertälje and Oscar Vångell from Ärla. The Swedish runner Henry Gross is also staying in the same house as us.

The training has gone well, and the first days we started with easy runs on 40 – 90 minutes two times a day to acclimatise to the high altitude, 2150 m.a.s.l. In addition I did some running exercises, strength training and stretching.

The longest session so far is the morning run on Saturday, which ended up being 3 hours (and 36 km) long. We started at 6 pm and the plan was to run 75 min before breakfast. But on the way home I and Oscar ran in the wrong direction, and after more then two hours we finally came out on the main road 12 km south of Eldoret.

Sunday some other Swedish runners (and also orienteer’s, among them Jerker Lysell and Erik and Kalle Johansson) who are staying in Iten joined us for a long run. Iten is a popular training place for runners, 40 km from Eldoret, and we will go there to visit them later this week.

Today I had the first intensive session, when I joined Isabellah Andersson for her track intervals. We were running 5 series of 7 x 200 meter on 35 – 36 seconds (a speed just under 3.00 min/km). The break between each 200 m was 18 seconds. The session was perfect as the first with higher intensity, since it was not too tough, and it was nice to get some speed after a week with only easy running.

In total I have been running 190 km the first week, and it now feels easy to run on the speed 4.30 – 5.00 min/km. I have updated my picture gallery with photos from the last days.

Tomorrow we are having an easy training day, and are going to the Kakamega rainforest. We have also planed some other places we want to visit the coming weeks.