Run Like a Champ: Tip 1 from Olympic Marathoner Hendrik Pfeiffer
German Marathon champion Hendrik Pfeiffer, known for his participation in the Olympic Games in Tokyo (among many other running achievements), is gearing up for the prestigious Berlin Marathon and the New York City Marathon, where he'll be sporting the Amazfit Cheetah Pro. In this blog series, Hendrik will share seven tips for runners looking to start Breaking Limits.
By Hendrik Pfeiffer
1. Get some variety to your running loops.
The often invoked "loneliness of the long-distance runner" is so legendary that a well-known book by Alan Sillitoe has already been dedicated to it. It is both a curse and a blessing. On the one hand, something is calming and almost meditative about it. There are days when it creates an incomparable feeling of flow to run through the wind and rain and to rest entirely within yourself.
But the next day, the same route you know by heart over time can get on your nerves. My antidote: Changing routes! Training doesn't always have to start right outside your front door. It's worth training on varying routes and exploring new places continuously. With the new Amazfit Cheetah Pro, this can be done with little effort: With the navigation function, routes can be imported from the app to the watch so that you can precisely navigate in outdoor workout modes, and even offline maps can be synchronized with your own route. Thanks to the particularly powerful GPS antenna in the watch, which receives twice as many satellite signals as most smartwatches, this is also possible in complex locations between tall buildings and in forests.
Within a radius of 20 kilometers, I can choose from five different running loops. Some are very flat, asphalted, and especially suitable for brisk runs. Others are more profiled, have a soft surface, and are particularly scenic, making them ideal for relaxed long runs. I often decide spontaneously which route I am most in the mood for shortly before the upcoming training session. Especially for runners who run a high mileage, alternating routes with soft surfaces are an enormous help, and varying route profiles that are more or less hilly contribute to a good buildup training. Since my first stay in Iten, Kenya - the hilly runner's El Dorado and home to numerous world-class athletes - I deliberately built as much elevation into my runs as possible.
