Return of the lazy one part 1 of 999

Year 2015, or year of the goat as the chinese astrology tells.

How does my topic headline, or astrology has to do anything with blogs or sports you may ask? Well, to be honest I wasn't really sure how I would start to write again after almost nine (9) months of low-profile and no writing at all.

Major reason of this silence was due to being busy at work, but also because I kinda got leg injury and had to stay out of exercising for awhile. I got the OK to start running again some time ago, but I didn't know how to continue. I wasn't even sure where i had left off and how I would go on from here.

Earlier this year I started running in a "easymode" if you could call it that, 30 minutes to 60 minutes of jogging, just to get the feel of the excitement of running again. I've also done bicycling for 45-60 minutes few times a week also. It's sort of relaxing to watch for example womens football match and ride a bicycle indoors while watching TV. I haven't really watched womens football matches before, but it was entertaining for sure.

How did I end up in this lazy state of trying to find my way back to competitions? Well, if you ever start a running or jogging as hobby, make sure you go to a professionals to buy your shoes from. If the person selling the shoes to you just know the brand name and that they are superpopular and fit for everyone - run, just run and go to some other store. I fell for this and since i am not the sharpest pencil in the pen case, I sort of continue to use wrong shoes for awhile, even if my legs told me to stop - well, result was insane pain and the like.

In any case, my goal is to start to feel the world of running again and I've set my sight on Helsinki City Run (half marathon) and Helsinki City Marathon (full-lenght marathon). If I participate and complete both runs on time, it is going to be my 3rd time participating in both (and managing to cross the finish line)!

My current employee has paid for my entry to participate in HCR. It was kind for them to support me, even if im not at the best running shape ever. Will be a honor to carry our schools name on this t-shirt I got from them. Oh, I probably haven't told this - but my contract was made permanent and my employee, is Stadin ammattiopisto, which belongs to city of Helsinki and is part of Bureau of Education. I've been working there for a year now and I couldn't be happier. I love the work community and nearly everything there. I can happily say I love my work. How many can say they can share thoughts and ideas and develop new ways to improve the working grounds they do? Not many, but everyone is treated equally and I have gotten the feel that superiors care for their workers.

It was refreshing to write this blog, after some time since last post. My teacher at university said to me, that the most difficult part of writing, is the start, you just have to let go and go with the flow. Words will come as you write. She was correct. This was my first blog post in year 2015 and I hope there will be many more to come as I hope I am now back permanently, in the world of running. Happy year 2015, as it is the year of goat!

Ps. I personally have born in the year of rat - do you know what chinese animal year you have been born in?

Busy year 2014!

Year 2014 is the year of sports themed events for couch-athletes or amateur-atheletes!

Couch-athletes have been enjoying themselves already with Olympics at Sochi, under20 icehockey world championship tournament, or if you like badminton, you might have the luxury to watch badminton country championship tournaments this year.

For fun-loving, amateur-athletes that I like to call myself, the fun is however just about to start. Year 2014 brings hundreads of intresting sport events. While it may be close to impossible, or super hard to fit all of these fun events to your calendar - I'm going to write down few of the events I'm going to participate at. Let me introduce to you "Year 2014 Dream Calendar":

Month	Competition
March	-
April	Länsiväyläjuoksu
May	Helsinki City Run (21km)
June	Helsinki Half Marathon (21km)
July
August	Helsinki City Marathon (42km)	Midnightrun	Helsinki City Triathlon
September	Pääkaupunkijuoksu (21km)
October	-
November	-
December	Messukeskusjuoksu

Almost every month has some intresting competition I'm attending at. In September there is tons of other activies also, like: Vantaa Marathon, Espoo beachmarathon, Stockholm (Sweden) Marathon and many others. That is one of the reasons I haven't finalized my plans as of yet. Also since July is quite open for events to attend to, I have to search up for intresting competitions. Which possibly will be held abroad. I'm taking suggestions, if you know good places to competite at!

Most important competitions

Truth to be told, while I may say "competitions", these all are events to keep myself in shape. As I'm not doing these to win, but to keep myself motivated to go forward toward my dream. I like to call them competitions though, I like the sound of it.

From half marathons, the most important ones for me are: Helsinki City Run, which I'm attempting to break my record by finishing faster than 1hour45minutes and the second intresting half marathon is this newly organized event Helsinki Half Marathon. Will be intresting to see how they cope up with the popularity City Run has.

From full-lenght marathons I have to nominate Helsinki City Marathon as my most important one this year. I'm looking for options to compete abroad in one other full-lenght marathon this year, which July seems to be the best option, as my Dream Calendar slot for July is rather empty.

Most of these events are familiar to me and I trust them as working running events. My first triathlon will be Helsinki City Triathlon held in August. While it's not super hard event, but more of a fun thing to attend to, I get to see what it's all about. Wish me luck!

A lil' bit of Training in my life, a lil' bit of Running by my side, a lil' bit of Sweat is what I need...

Lou Bega's mambo number 5. set aside, my set goals don't finish without training, so let's put tv-remote set aside for awhile and Olympics in Sochi can wait untill I finish running a bit!

Friend of mine asked me to accompany her for a running session (you can't believe how happy one can be when someone asks you out to run), which I gladly accepted. We set up a meeting place&time, where I arrived too early. Well, luckily I found this amazing thing I kept running up and down while waiting for her to arrive:

Friend of mine arrived on time (amazing character on females, especially since I'm always late! :D) and I had warmed up for our running training. I wish all gyms would have stepmaster as their gym equipment selection...

Running varies always when you do it solo, or as a group.

Running solo can be boring. Luckily you have your trusted Ipod, or other Mp3 player with you, so you can listen to your favourite track while running.

Running with a friend or as a group brings a whole new level to running. It's refreshing and brings more fun, as you can talk with your friends about tv-programs, olympics etc. Or Victorias Secret models if you like them. Miranda Kerr is awesome. Everyone should try to attend some group running practice, if they can. Most Marathons try to give a chance to participate on a training session one or two times prior to the event they are holding.

It might be a cultureshock to some, to actually having to have conversation while training, instead of just having a monologue from your music player... ;)

Tired dog, permission to use on blog approval by Creative Commons 2.0 on Flickr
All credits goes to photographer Pamela Stocks, original url:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tenerife/240325046/in/photostream/

Training with friend end and no, I didn't end up like that doggy above. It was nice, fast paced round of sweat!

I had a energy to spare still, so I went solo for a quick jogging round outside that very evening. With my trusted TomTom Multi-Sport GPS watch with me

The feeling after workout is always great. Mind works always better when you've given some sweat while doing sports. It was a nice slow-paced jog to finish a great day. I should have ran around the block to get that last 300 meters though, so it would have shown 5 kilometers... ;)

Love the TomTom watch though! That reminds me, I need to make a review of it here, hopefuly soon.

See you all soon!

New year 2014 promises

The promises of a new year and the progress how it's going so far.

 

Almost everyone makes new year promises, at least once in their lifetime. But how many how those promises are actually being kept and what is the reason people make them? Why is it that hard to keep up on promises of something that is good to you in long terms, like healthy lifestyle?

Well let's face it, making promises is easy - Keeping them isn't. That's the basic concept which I came up with (aren't I a smart  one :D ). Too high goals, without ambition and drive to complete them isn't the best mix. That is the very reason one should make decisions, or in this case promises, to have long term goals that benefit you. It doesn't matter if you have the ambition to drop eating candies, or starting to go gym regularly, if you are just going to drop it once you slip from your goal. Missing going to gym once isn't the end of the world, the choice to not go at all because of that one slip is though.

This exactly why I have made a counterattack to my lazyness(!) Instead of just one or two difficult promises, I made fifteen (15) promises! Yes you read that correctly. I made fifteen promises, so breaking few doesn't still sink my boat of awesomeness. I even put all of them on my Facebook cover, so they reminds me of their existence. However, the person I am, I'm trying my utmost best to keep them all happening. This is something a rap artist would response "keep it real", but I am keeping it real - at least I dream of making all those goals once in my lifetime.

Promises to do in year 2014

I'll adress here few of my promises I intend to keep (or at least try to):

• run a full-lenght marathon (42km) in under 4 hours
• run half-marathon in under 1 hour 45 minutes
• no alcohol, candies or chocolate
• participate on ironman competition
• learn to dance

and 10 other very intresting promises, like getting a girlfriend (":D"), but some promises are just meant to be broken. I however wish the dream to compete on ironman would happen. The investment for the bicycle might be a bit too much though, we will see.

I'm especially proud of the no alcohol/candies/chocolate promise, it's been 18 days already, so this is now counted in weeks, soon to be counted in months. Just to test my ironwill, I purchased a candy box before I started this diet. Later on I found out Fazer Amica (a factory in Finland, makes sweets, doughs, food etc. )  remembered me with a some brand new sweets. My will of pure iron is on test here, but I will stay strong.

On other note, my Christmas holidays were a blast, ate too much and got some sweet, sweet gifts (which I purchased myself, but hey!). 

 

These included:

•  a brand new pair of Asics Gel Nimbus 19 

• new gps-multisports watch from TomTom

Just married Janne and Asics (shoes), my new equipment for keeping it strong!

So at least my equipment for new year is in good shape. Hopefuly I stay healthy and my motivation is as high as it was last year.

What promises/gifts you guys got or made? Did the promises get forgotten right off, or are you still keeping it strong like a strong athelete you are?

My treasure box

My precioussss... 

Lord of the Rings quotes aside, I said I show you my competition medals (well, they are finishing prizes really). Here they are:

 

My preciouss... Year 2013 finished medals/diplom & competition number tags

The finishing prizes/medals are (not in order):

• Helsinki City Run (21km)
• Helsinki City Marathon (42km)
• Pääkaupunkijuoksu (21km)
• Espoo Rantamarathon (21km)
• Kaisaniemijuoksu (21km)
• Midnightrun Helsinki (10km, it's the certificate/diploma)

I even came up with fixing them a treasurebox to store them into. Hopefuly I don't end up throwing them into garbage bin because of the box. I should decorate the box, any ideas how to make it cute? Or athelete type? Lots of sweat and blood and it's finished? Good idea, maybe I visit some hobby crafts shop for items to make it look better.

Once the photosession was over, here how the prizes ended up like. Maybe I should invest in a trophy cabinet. Time will tell, maybe in year 2014...

 

In the treasurebox they all went, waiting for new friends to arrive from their journey...

Finishing prizes

How is your trophy cabinet/ where ever you store your medals looking like? Or do you even keep them in store anymore?

First post!

 Introduction

Doesn't everything great start with a introduction? In this case, that probably won't be true, but a "first post" is always a great way to start your own blog.

Little bit about me: I'm a 28-year old male, living in Helsinki, Finland. My english is horrible, but maintaining this blog, I hopefuly improve it a little bit. Let's see how often I need to use Google translator. I've never been in to sports, apart from occasional game sessions with friends back in my childhood, which was ages ago. I've also been "slightly" overweight (maybe I'll add a before and after photos at some point), which probably is the reason why I'm now so intrested in doing training - you fit in to all these cute clothes, you can be as much random as you want and nobody cares and the best part is sports are fun!

If you read the blog channel description "achieving your goals", you pretty much know what this blog contains. It's about achieving your goals, getting better and being able to push to your limits. Yes it can mean sports, but can also mean something else, like eating your vegteables.

In my case, this is, indeed a sports training blog. The purpose is to keep me motivated to train, keep pushing forward, improving and ultimately enter a ironman competition.

If by any chance someone ends up reading this and is motivated to start healthy lifestyle with sports, then it has done even more than I hoped for!

I'm a complete beginner when it comes to sports, eating healthy and stuff. I've only entered few endurance tests this year (a half- and full marathon), which I somehow managed to complete with decent times.

I've looked into possible ironman triathlon completitions and the most reasonable place to compete in it, is in Sweden. I would also have a year to train for it also. A year for a beginner to enter a ironman triathlon? Sounds like a dream doesn't it? - But like Nike says: Just do it. - I'm going to follow that example and train for it, see where it leads and if I think I have a shot at completing the ironman challenge under 17 hours, I will enter the competition.

What is Ironman?

Oh what is a Ironman triathlon? It's probably one of the hardest endurance tests there are, pushing your body to the limits and those who have finished it under 17 hours have the bragging rights for life.

Hey you want to be ironman too, what you need to do? In the competition you have to:
1) swim 3.86 kilometers/ 2.4-miles (this is going to be really, really hard)
2) bicycle ride 180.25 kilometer/ 112-miles (I need to buy a proper bike for this)
3) run a full marathon (42.2 kilometers/ 26.2-miles)
You have 17 hours to do them all...

I've read you need to train around 15 hours a week... sounds easy!

You can find more information at www.ironman.com

In any case, this is the first post of hopefuly many to come and I will keep posting about stuff I do, like training, eating, marathons I enter and so forth.

 Oh and what did I do today? I was at the gym:

- Cross trainer for 30 minutes (15 minutes at level 10, 10 minutes in level 12 and 5 minutes at level 15) for warm-up,
- Did some back and chest training, abs training,
- Finished it with running for 15 minutes at high pace.

 No pictures, but there will be in the future.

 Thanks for reading!

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