• 05 Nov, 2025 *

Intro

This is an ongoing series of how I’m preparing for the marathon of Valencia, taking place on Dec 7th. I’m using Stryd to train for this event based on running power, a metric I have found very useful for the past years.

I’m ramping up my fitness, hope to finish somewhere around 3h10 / 3h15.

Read my introduction post here or check out the full series.

Week 11 training schedule

• Mon: Rest
• Tue: 65min 4x7min intervals
• Wed: 45min recovery
• Thu: 65min 2x17min30 intervals
• Fri: 45min recovery
• Sat: 50min recovery with strides
• Sun: 170min long run

Distance: 16km

Week 11 review

Overall feeling: Slightly Sick (again)🤒

I really thought I took enough rest in the week before to get back into my regular training flow. And I did feel great on Tuesday. I did an easy recovery run that day and it felt quite good. The data was perfect. I did a similar run on Wednesday and had a good feeling. However, a few hours later, I started to feel the same discomfort as the weeks before. Headache, tiredness, sore throat. It all came back.

By the evening, I was called by my parents to pick up Nelson as he had a fever and stomach pains. Seems we were still not free of that viral infection spreading through the family in the past weeks.

As this was my fourth week of interrupted training, I decided it was time to visit my doctor. A checkup was done, but just as my data, nothing out of the ordinary was found. Some blood samples were taken, but these also turned out inconclusive.

I was advised to take it easy for the rest of the weekend, and if feeling good, to restart slowly with running again. Yesterday, I did my first run after a week of resting, a short, and slow 5km, which went ok.

Let’s hope that this week is the week I return to my regular schedule 🤞.

I’m happy I didn’t completely neglect my running as the weeks before, so I did some breathing exercises, mainly focusing on box breathing.

One thing that also became clear after the past interrupted weeks is that even though I would want to get back into my old plan again, I shouldn’t. I feel now that it’s more important to focus on the long runs and get my legs accustomed to them, instead of all exercises that could increase my fitness.

Valencia will not be the year I’ll set a Person Best, and that’s ok. I rather run the event instead of not running it at all.

This week

I’m pasting the schedule of last week as guidance, but will adapt each session to not overdo it.

• Mon: Rest
• Tue: 65min 4x7min intervals
• Wed: 45min recovery
• Thu: 65min 2x17min30 intervals
• Fri: 45min recovery
• Sat: 50min recovery with strides
• Sun: 170min long run

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

If you liked this post, follow my feeds for more updates, or leave me a reply via mail, my socials ( or ) or my guestbook.

#2025 #2025-11 #article #road-to-valencia #running