Field Notes · Training

My 21-kilometre run said I was ready. My airport jog said slow down. I listened to the first voice and almost missed the second.

Two weeks before Istanbul, I completed my final long run before the race. Twenty-one kilometres. Heart rate controlled, legs feeling solid, finished with something left in the tank. It was exactly the kind of run that builds confidence going into a target race. I treated it as confirmation that the Zone 2 work of the previous months had been the right approach.

Days later, on a business trip in Munich, I went out for a jog around the airport. Nothing structured. Just movement to offset a full day of meetings and sitting. It should have felt easy. It did not. My heart rate climbed faster than it had any reason to. The effort felt harder than it looked on paper. I noted it and pressed on. I put it down to travel stress and told myself I would be fine by race day.

When easy runs feel hard, the honest reading is not travel stress. It is a signal worth taking seriously.

On race day, I understood what that jog had been trying to tell me. The confidence from the long run was real — the training base was solid. But the airport jog was pointing at something else: cumulative fatigue that the long run had not yet revealed. The long run showed the ceiling. The easy run showed the floor. I had only been paying attention to the ceiling.

This is something coaches emphasise and athletes routinely dismiss. Training adaptations do not happen during the hard sessions. They happen in recovery. When easy efforts start feeling hard, the body is not being dramatic. It is reporting honestly on what is left in the system. The signal is small precisely because the warning comes early — before the bigger problem arrives.

In hindsight, I should have added a recovery day between Munich and Istanbul. Not because the race was going to be ruined — it was not — but because that small adjustment would have given me a cleaner platform to work from. Listening to the small signals is often the difference between performing at 90 percent and performing at 80.