To my mind, Vilvoorde is best known as the locality that provides the third letter in the Belgian political issue known as BHV - Brussel/Hal/Vilvoorde. It's an extremely complicated regional argument involving court jurisdictions, linguistic rights, and whether you have the right to vote to Flemish or Francophonic parties. In real life, it's a suburb lying to the north of Brussels, and today I discovered it lies underneath the high-level overpass that is part of the northern section of the Brussels ring road.
They have a sports centre named Sparta Vilvoorde at the outskirts of the locality, right next to the river that flows into Brussels. It's a well-kept football pitch with running track at the edge of a rather extensive park, and this is where the Sparta Parkloop was held.
There was a notice close to the registration that gave very accurate data about the course - 411 metres + two loops of 5700 metres + 112 metres for a total distance of 11.923 km - although it's very likely that in this case theory and practise to not exactly coincide, as I'll explain further on... There was also an altitude chart, where it was clearly shown that here, too, runners would need to climb a good bit, come back down and go back up for the second loop.
The run was as tough as expected. I adopted the same race strategy as the previous week at the Tervuren Furaloop 16 km - a moderate pace in the first half followed by a stronger second half where I would overtake as many rivals as possible. I was quite anxious about how my leg muscles, especially my not-yet-healed left hamstring, would react to two strong efforts in the space of one week. During the race it felt as normal as I've become used to expect, and in fact in the second loop my main problem was that I felt tired due to the previous week's strong effort, not because of any recurring injury. In the final downhill, when I was trying to go really fast, I still ended up being overtaken by several others. Too bad. I'm not doing any fast interval training, so I'm still unable to push hard and sprint at the end of a race. Besides, it certainly wasn't worth the while to risk getting injured again. Running fast down a twisting narrow path would be simply asking for trouble.
For the time being, I'm more than satisfied with having achieved two races, with seemingly no lasting harmful effect, at a respectable though still substandard (compared to my standard) pace. There's still a lot of time to achieve a better pace. Here I ran the "11923 metres" in 0:55:40. Quite OK, and slightly faster than the previous week... except that I have strong doubts about the distance. In some sections the painted arrows followed zigzagged gravel paths, but everyone was running straight on the grass cutting across the zigzags. I would have been a fool not to follow suit!
They have a sports centre named Sparta Vilvoorde at the outskirts of the locality, right next to the river that flows into Brussels. It's a well-kept football pitch with running track at the edge of a rather extensive park, and this is where the Sparta Parkloop was held.
There was a notice close to the registration that gave very accurate data about the course - 411 metres + two loops of 5700 metres + 112 metres for a total distance of 11.923 km - although it's very likely that in this case theory and practise to not exactly coincide, as I'll explain further on... There was also an altitude chart, where it was clearly shown that here, too, runners would need to climb a good bit, come back down and go back up for the second loop.
The run was as tough as expected. I adopted the same race strategy as the previous week at the Tervuren Furaloop 16 km - a moderate pace in the first half followed by a stronger second half where I would overtake as many rivals as possible. I was quite anxious about how my leg muscles, especially my not-yet-healed left hamstring, would react to two strong efforts in the space of one week. During the race it felt as normal as I've become used to expect, and in fact in the second loop my main problem was that I felt tired due to the previous week's strong effort, not because of any recurring injury. In the final downhill, when I was trying to go really fast, I still ended up being overtaken by several others. Too bad. I'm not doing any fast interval training, so I'm still unable to push hard and sprint at the end of a race. Besides, it certainly wasn't worth the while to risk getting injured again. Running fast down a twisting narrow path would be simply asking for trouble.
For the time being, I'm more than satisfied with having achieved two races, with seemingly no lasting harmful effect, at a respectable though still substandard (compared to my standard) pace. There's still a lot of time to achieve a better pace. Here I ran the "11923 metres" in 0:55:40. Quite OK, and slightly faster than the previous week... except that I have strong doubts about the distance. In some sections the painted arrows followed zigzagged gravel paths, but everyone was running straight on the grass cutting across the zigzags. I would have been a fool not to follow suit!
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