Important factor in running - how you feel about it, HCR 2014

Specsavers Helsinki City Run 10.5.2014

 

The most favourite half marathon event in Finland, the Helsinki City Run has been held once again. I had big hopes and major goals for this years HCR-run, how did it go?

There are bad news and there are good news. In the movies and tv-series, they always start with the good news. This year HCR was so surprisingly positive as a event, so let's leave the good news as last and start off with the bad news.

Bad news...

There are many factors that affect your running: Training, eating properly, sleeping enough, your set goals, how fit you are, avoiding injuries, correctrunning techniques and what matters the most - how you feel about it. If you don't have great feeling "everything will go perfectly 110% today!", then you can expect everything to go as planned.

I haven't had feeling like that for awhile, well particularly for HCR. That might have affected the outcome of my run. Last year, around December, I was high in spirits and was looking forward to breaking my personal records big time. I even dared to challenge one of my former schools teachers and a good friend of mine to participate in the run. Both of them initially accepted the challenge and I decided to train faster harder better, so I would beat them 10-0.

Closing in on year 2014 start of the Helsinki City Run, it came clear to me, that neither of them was going to take part of this challenge after all. This might have affected on my feelings for the run, but there were other reasons aswell. Bad preparing, eating badly and not enough proper training. Excuses one could find endlesly, but in the end you have to man up and look into the mirror and find the reason why the race went as it did. No excuses. Let's leave them to the policians.

Year 2014 Helsinki City run ½marathon time for me was 2hours,04minutes. Far, far from my goal of 1hour45minutes.  As I laid there on the Olympic Stadiums grassfield, I just thought of many things. Many things. Some of them aren't fit enough to be written on a blog with all age people reading

The sight as I was laying on the field...

Luckily for me, human learn from mistakes. That should hold true for me aswell. Learning for this, I need to start working towards the next marathon and make it even better. No excuses. That's my new motto. Run like you've never ran before. The most important thing is that you finish what you start. The worst thing possible you could do, is to quit without proper reason (like injury)!

Thumbs up for next years City Run!

 I have around one month for my next marathon. Let's see how I do there.

My socks unsigned their contract.

 Then the good, positive sides of Specsavers Helsinki City Run 2014

Ok, so I wanted to leave the good side of the event as last. There were many, many good things about the running event to tell about.

The starting groups: HCR took advices from other internation running events and organized more starting groups for this year HCR. There were more than ten thousand runners expected to participate on this event, so the smooth start of the run was needed. This was done very good this year. Everyone seemed to think so. Even I enjoyed this years start.

Helsinki Cityrun 2014 official race shirt was orange-coloured.

 The race route was correct lenght this year. At least it felt a bit longer :D - last year it was missing a good few hundread meters. So techniculy I ran my full-lenght first HCR half marathon this year. The route was challenging enough, beautiful landscapes. The last few kilometer uphills were quite pain for the legs though...

The supporters along the running route was magnificent as always. The weather wasn't the best, but people were cheering like it was a hot summer day. This is veryimportant factor for runners to keep going.

Finishing line and last service point after finishing was organized differently this year. It's good to see the organizes listen to feedback and do properly things. The servicepoint in the goal was working like a dream and no major queues for the bananas etc. was in sight this year - unlike last year, which took 15 minutes to get your final drinks/foods.

My item storage bag and goodies I received after finishing the race.

 The item storage was done differently this year also. We were handed out green sailor bags, which we just put our running number sticker and put our stuff inside the bag. Then we gave the bags to a certain fenced area. There was security to keep the bags in place and it worked really well. Previously we just  have had to leave our stuff laying on the benches inside olympic stadium, which did give some excitement, as would you get your stuff back. So this years fenced solution worked really, really good.

Item storage place. Items were put in bags, which was given to the officials.

 This blog post was a bit lenghty, going from emotional whining to happiness of enjoyable running event, but that's how it goes sometimes. Now I just need to get my focus back and continue to train. Next year I will get under 1hour 45minutes in HCR!

This year Helsinki City Run was 10/10. I recommend to participate if you haven't before.

Helsinki City Run 2014 Medal

Kulta Katriina offered free coffee! Yes!

 What about my lovelyreaders, have you participated in HCR before? Was this your first time, How did your run go?

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!

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!

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/