Cycling to the Venice

2025-06-05

I have quite a „sporty“ summer coming up.

First, I will run another 10k in July. The plan is to be a bit faster than in January - where I finished after 59min, achieving my goal to be faster than one hour.

Training progress so far: almost 0.

It will be fun.

Good thing is, that I am not very invested in this. If I will be slower I will be less satisfied but nevertheless be proud to have finished at all.

My running training falls short, because at the same time I am preparing for a big cycling tour. Together with my brother in law, I plan to cycle from my home to Venice, Italy.

Venice itself is not the goal - with the bikes we probably won‘t go to the city at all - we want to have a trip together across the alps.

Naive as ever, we spoke about it, booked some hotels and forgot about it. When we met over the Easter holidays, we fine tuned the route, resulting in this:

• Day 0: roughly 130km, for me, cycling to where my brother in law lives.
• Day 1: 95km and 1.000Hm
• Day 2: 95km and 1.700Hm
• Day 3: 65km and 1.300Hm
• Day 4: 82km and 1.300Hm
• Day 5: 130km and 1.000Hm
• Day 6: 65km and 100Hm

In total: roughly 530km (days 1 to 6) and 6.500Hm

I am not particularly afraid of the 100km per day but the distance in total and the uphill part, especially on day 2.

I think about how to best prepare for both events. My Garmin Watch doesn’t provide a training plan for this out of the box. I talked to a friend and he recommended using ChatGPT. Which I did.

I am „ok“ satisfied with the result. The proposal basically was:

• 1 „long-run“ per week
• 2 shorter „runs“
• 2 „relaxing runs“
• 1 or 2 resting days

And shifting the focus from running to cycling the closer we come to July.

As always, I find it hard to free-up regular slots in the calendar for 4 or 5 training events per week. What was working best in the past, was directly putting on sport cloths in the morning and directly after dropping the little one at childcare start the training session. This worked fine for sessions up to an hour, but a „long run“ for cycling should be 50-75km as per the recommended training plan - which is rather 4 to 5 hours. I hope that I will find time and motivation in the afternoons or on the weekend.