living the korol dream: Fitness from the Road: Running in Ventiane, Laos

During these travels, we have run in a lot of country capitals and somewhat surprisingly, running in Ventiane has to be among the most pleasant. Other capital contenders of pleasant runs that we have had, include our own (D.C.), London, Vienna, and Tel Aviv. But most of our runs in other capitals across the globe have paled in comparison to Ventiane.

The thing about the pleasantness of running in Ventiane was not so much the scenery that we encountered, rather it was the calmness. Usually running in any give country's capital, or really any big city, entails fighting crowds, dogs (oh the wretched street dogs), hollering people, and trying not to inhale that 1963 truck's exhaust too deeply.
In contrast to this chaos, Ventiane has created a lovely river walk that stretches for miles upon calm miles along the Mekong River. Even better, the river walk is more like three river walks. One river walk is a pleasant paved traditional walk about 15 feet above the river. The second river walk is a wide dirt path down in the river bed close to the river and perfect for running. The third river walk occurs at dusk when the road along the traditional promenade is closed to traffic and Laotian exercisers with rollerblades, bikes, and of course, running shoes abound. This third river walk is delightful for the company as well as the fact that it accompanies an amazing sunset over the river.

The Ventiane running happiness comes at an auspicious moment, as I have just decided to try to run a fast (for me) 10k at the beginning of February. I have 10 weeks to train. My training schedule tries to incorporate the things that I have heard are best for getting faster for this race: threshold training, plyometrics, and a weekly endurance run. I will attempt to do all this while also trying my best not to injure myself.
The focus on being injury free means that I have to be careful about mileage. For the past year, I estimate that I've averaged only 15-25 miles running per week. It is a low number but if you add walking and hiking, then there are some weeks when I have gotten north of 100 total miles. That said, running is a different animal and thus the hesitancy about too large a mileage increase. So my 10 week training plan increases the mileage in intervals and gradually:

Week 1: 23 miles

Week 2: 25

Week 3: 23.5

Week 4: 25

Week 5: 27.5

Week 6: 25.5

Week 7: 28

Week 8: 24

Week 9: 22

Week 10: 16

Week 10 is a low mileage week to minimize the injury risk and hopefully allow a big push on the day of the 10K. Pulling off this training will be tricky in the middle of our traveling motion as I have blogged about before. But so far in Asia, it seems doable -- especially in places like Ventiane.