Pääkaupunki juoksu (½marathon)

Yet another marathon, is this the same though?

No, sometimes you make a bad decision and that is doing sports when you're not 100% health. Cold seems to have taken over me, yet I decided to go try break my personal record of 1.50h in a half-marathon.

I prepared well for the event, bought energy gels, printed a paper that told me how fast I would need to run per kilometer (which by the way is 5.13 minutes/km, for 1.50h time). I was certain I would go under magical 1.50!

But no, no broken record of 1.50h, but instead I broke the myth "dumb people don't get sick". Hehe.

I did break my old record though, but for some reason, this didn't bring me any joy. Well, there is always another day, another race, another given chance to break records! Just need to go forward, never look back!

Disapointed

Personal record was broken, but it didn't bring any joy. But there is always a new day - NEVER look back!

 

Thumbs up for winning yourself

1.56.12 is still ok

 

Few words about pääkaupunkiseutu marathon

The whole run was tons harder than I thought it would be. While I was running, I made a nickname for the race: "All uphill marathon". No seriously, it felt like the race was going uphill all the time and then few super radical downhills. Very exhausting.

Also I did not like the sports drinks they were serving to us runners. The taste was horrible. I think it was supposed to be mandarin flavour, but it tasted like socks. I don't even want to know what energy drinks they were. Actually yes I do want to know, so I don't buy those myself... Ugh.

Also the drinking stations... They were horribly placed. The first came when we already had ran for over 6 to 7 kilometers of the trip. Seriously what's with that? It's probably handy for the organization, but as a runner, I didn't enjoy the distance.

Positive side (which is a major big one) is that the people cheering at us runners were fabulous! It really matters in endurance tests like these, when people cheer for you, even if they are complete strangers to you.

Some kid had climbed up on the tree for better view

Last race for awhile

This was also my last race for this year probably, not sure if there are any intresting running events coming in Finland anymore, until next year. Or maybe I go try running on different country, see how it feels.

There is one new consept of a run though, that I might want to try, but will tell about it later on.

Congratulations on new world time record on marathon

Yes, it's true. Wilson Kipkang broke the world record and set a new time of 2.03.23. Now that is some sweet running. Around 20km/hour. Could you do that? I certainly would want to! Big heads up to Wilson! Oh I wish I would have been there, at Berling Marathon to see it happen...

Congratulations mr. Wilson, I shall be trying to best you some day!

When the run gets tough, the tough gets you to gym!

 Hitting the gym like boss

 

 Break from running

Have you ever been at a gym? Well most people have at least visited gym once, or at least seen one on tv. But how many of you can say, that you can attend school with as great gym as I do. The gym even has a name apparently, called "The Helmi Center" - sounds like something from a ice hockey stadium doesn't it?

Helmi means pearl by the way, and while we use the Helmi Center, we're like pearls rolling around the floors. Pretty awesome if you ask from me. Like my good friend once said, "a rolling rock doesn't gain moss" - that's my motto aswell. Keep on rolling with sports!

One room of Helmi Center's Gym

If you're on a diet, or on a campaign to lose weight running is the way to go - but so is hitting gym also. Best results come if you can mix the two up in some 3 to 5 day training program.

I also noticed (yes I'm smart like this) that when you train at gym and do endurance races like marathons, you less likely get stiff arms or shoulders while running.

It was rather intresting on my first half marathon ever, to notice that my shoulders got stiff and I had to stretch them while running... Not fun at all.

Well one learns from mistakes and now I do pretty decently gym and cardio in a mixed balance. When before I didn't do gym at all, just practiced running all day long. Again I have to thank one of my friend for getting me hooked on lifting those weights. Breaking your own records at gym is almost as satisfying as breaking your own running records... Also, like while doing marathons, the plus is that there are quite often very atractive and beautiful women training also. The red haired ones are especially cute!

Other room with treadmills (I love treadmills on winter time!!!), rowing boat... thingy, stationary bikes etc.

Anyways do you have a gym at your school, work place, or do you get free vouchers to go use gym from your work place? Comment if you train at gyms, share this blog post if you run marathons!

Maybe year 2021 I look handsome with some muscles!

Thanks for reading!

Espoo BeachMarathon

My first ½marathon as a rabbit!

It's been a week since last run, but I got the chance to participate as a rabbit on Espoo BeachMarathon. Free run as rabbit, fame & glory so why not!

That and from last run (Kaisaniemi marathon) there was no signs of injuries or anything. I was good to go and try being a rabbit.

Rabbit... hopefuly I don't end up laying on the floor chilling like this bunny does

Espoo and my way making it to the running location

Espoo (area in Finland) isn't that familiar to me, as a place, so I had to leave early from my home so I could make sure I wouldn't be late from anything important. Though we had a rabbit-meeting the day before, where all the relevant information was told to us. So I had a hinch where I should be and at what time. But it's never bad to be 110% sure, that everything goes according to plan.

I got on to a bus from Centre of Helsinki, that was heading towards the running place and started making my way to the next best experience ever.

Lot's of other runners took the same bus as I did, so I didn't have to worry about where was I needed to get off from the bus. That's probably one of the many great things in running events, lots of people wearing sport clothing packed in same place, headed the same way as you are.

I got to the running place and took quick sneak peek at the place. I found all the important places (like the officials cafe... free food and coffee, yum), got my staff access card, then proceeding to swap my clothes to my running outfit at the officials changing rooms.

Officials access-card

 I was one hour too early, but it's fine, since I had my smartphone with me and there was connection to internet. My trusted Samsung S2... Great phone, need to upgrade it later on to S4.

I didn't need to wait too long, before other rabbits started pouring in to the changing rooms and I met my other team mates, that would ran with me as rabbits.

Lucky for me they were pro's and veterans in running Espoo BeachMaraton. So I could take it easy and just follow their lead. I'm such a lazy guy it makes me blush sometimes...

We took a balloon with our estimated net time on it and took few photos to post on Facebook. After that we proceeded to go where the warming up exercises were held by Fressi (fitness company, gym etc.). Some of the moves they did looked so silly, that I didn't quite follow their warming up session, but the audience seemed to be 110% into it. Good job Fressi!

Me with the 2.05 estimated running-time balloon

Fressi warming people up!

Some people were brave enough to start moving the way pro as girls from Fressi were doing

After warming excercise, we headed to the starting line where we would start our journey to the unknow. Or at least around Espoo. Whichever comes first.

Starting line

AND THE RACE STARTS!

No big surprises here, ran went smoothly, beautiful view of landscape, beaches, yachts, boats... and stuff. Really good journey to the unknown.

I'm not sure was the race itself really hard or were people just trying too good times, because there were many injured people/ ambulancess called and even one helicopter was ordered to pick up person who was being cpr on. I really, really hope he gets better... Also there was one person who apparently gave up few kilometers (~1 mile) before the finishing line... I wanted to go shout at her "YOU AREN'T GIVING UP HERE, GET UP AND START WALKING!", but she probably had told the staff members about she quitting already... Which is really, really shame. Good luck to you next time miss!

The funny part about the race was that the end of it would be running uphill road for a while, which the other rabbit team member told me about. Well, I didn't really think the uphill would be that tiring... But it was quite interesting to notice how before the uphill, there was lots of people behind us and after the uphill there were just few running with us, going for our estimated time...

Well, after the uphill there is always downhill (even in life, sadly), which made the last hundread of meters seem peace of cake.

Hi!
(Our balloon broke @Hansasilta)

LOOK AT ME IM A BUNNY, I HOP *hops*

Hopping is surprisingly tiring...

aaaaaand we finished the race in time! Yay, way to go team 2.05 rabbits!

 

Team Rabbit!

Medal <3 I'm like a kid on x-mas eve, when it comes getting medals :D

All in all my first experience as a rabbit was very good. I'm happy I joined the Espoo Beachmarathon Rabbit team. and definetly will come here again next year. Even if the rabbit spots are full, I'm most definetly wanting to join us a regular runner (and beat my earlier records, hehe).

 Random stuff

Lots of people particapated!

Thanks for reading! next blog post will be something else than running!

Kaisaniemi half marathon

BOOM

I participated to my second half-marathon today, sunday 15th of September.

I was sort of excited to see how my training has been doing, ever since I did my first half-marathon (the Helsinki city run). On my first half-marathon ever, my time was 2.13.25.,  which was 4 months ago. The time seems to fly very fast, when you're having fun.

I picked up my running number and shirt day before, on saturday, so I wasn't in a hurry to go to the running site. I left my apartment around 11.50 o´clock, just to realise today was sunday and the public transportation time schedules run slower  than normally. The start of the half-marathon was at 12.45 o´clock.

So I went into slight panic, and ran all the way to the train station, just to notice the train was running late by 6 minutes and would arrive quickly. Luckyyyyy me! VR, oh how I love you so (VR=goverment railroads)

I arrived at center of station around 12.15, where I headed off to the running area. Since it was near the train-station, it didn't take more than just couple of minutes.

I quickly noticed the event is quite small, but I liked the atmosphere. Very friendly and smiling people everywhere. Some of the people were young, some old, so this race would become very intresting.

The run was designed to start at 12.45 and the runners were announced to go to the starting like 5 minutes before the start.

15 seconds before the starting, they announced some very famous runner would send us off with his start pistol. But I don't think he understood finnish, because the announcer said "paikoillenne! (means get ready!) and after that the pistol fired... everyone was quite confused but we started to run anyways.

The run was quite smooth, no bigger problems and it had really beautiful scenery. We ran past parks and stuff in the middle of the city. Very relaxing and great atmosphere.

I noticed there wasn't any toilets though... Would have been unlucky to get the urges to go pee or poop while running!

But like always, everything fun comes to an end and the 21+ km run started to getting closer to the finishing line. I was going to pick up my pace around 1km before the finishing line, but decided I'll just go with the flow and enjoy scenerys.

Last few hundred meters, I could see the finishing line getting closer and closer and BOOM! My second half-marathon was completed!

TIME WAS 1.57.50 !!! That means I ran my second half-marathon 15 minutes faster than my first! WOW. This if what is when you can see results of your hard work (though i'm quite lazy - infact if I were a Pokemon, I would probably be a Snorlax...)

I was quite happy with the outcome and clearly my motivation and the bar to train even further and get better times just got raised up quite a bit!

The whole day was fun! I definetly go to Kaisaniemi run next year also!
(you can find more information about Kaisaniemi juoksu here:)



And since pictures tell more than a thousand words here are some:

                                       It's me, it's me !!! LOOK I'm on TV... Err, on picture!!

                                        10 km to go, or was I trying to wave at someone?

 

                                                                     Eye of the tiger...

                                                                          Last spurt!

                                         AND HE FINISHES THE RACE TIME 1.57.50!

                                                                    Victory pose! 

                                           Attempting to eat the medal... I was hungry!

                                                         YEAAAH, sports are fun!
                                          15 minutes better time than last half marathon!!!




                                                     

                               Wait, if I'm a clown, does that mean I'm a clown marathonist?!



                                                            Thanks for reading!

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Midnight run 2013

Midnight run 2013 Helsinki

Boom! I ran my first midnight run event yesterday, saturday 31th of August (time to finish was 0:58:06) and all I can say is, that the event is insane! Lots of sideshows like samba, cheerleaders, music etc. corners are present at the event and around the running track, which went around the center of the city of Helsinki. 

The distance was 10 km, which after running a full lenght marathon (42 km) didn't seem hard at all. On the contrary, it felt like a trip at the park. Only problem was, that I didn't really think I could run it on the time I did, so I placed myself in the group 6A (estimated finishing time 1:30 hour), where I should have been in the groups 3A or 4A, because I ran it under 1 hour (58 minutes) and I got stuck behind the slower runners, which cost me many, many precious minutes.

But well, now that I'm one experience richer, I now know I should enter straight off to the faster groups.

 Midnight run is also organized in different countries, like for example in Sweden. So if you miss one event, you can still participate on the other and this year there was runners all over the world!

 Here are few pictures of the event:

 

 AND THE RUN HAS STARTED (at least for the first group)!
Flame, fire, destruction! Ragnaros (wait, what?)!

 Lots of people was enjoying the event and cheering for the runners. I personally found it intresting, that around 70 percent of the participant were female! - and oh some of them were so beautiful <3 - Definetly coming next year also!

 Me (on the right) and my rabbit Timo (on the left) which kept me going and attempting the best possible run record. Next year under 50 minute on the elite groups, eh, Timbe?!
(thanks to the random beautiful group of women who took the time to take this picture of us)

                                       Yeah victory pose!

     Is it a spiderman or who, climbing up the starting/finishing area?

            My starting group 6A! Next year hopefuly 3A!

All in all the whole running event was absolutely amazingly organized and I personally had great time.

See you all next year @Midnight run 2014!

If you're intrested to know more about Midnight run, you can find more information on their website: http://www.midnattsloppet.com/en/