Somehow it just doesn’t surprise me that this happened to me on a Saturday afternoon in the Finnish summer. I was just about to leave the athletics stadium in Nastola, a 15.000 soul community just east of Lahti (southern Finland), as two taxis shot into the large and abandoned car park, a bunch of rounder shaped men all about in their 30’s, early 40’s squeezed themselves out of the cars and came visibly alcoholized dangling towards me, “hey, we have a bet going that this one friend of ours here won’t be able to run 100m below 22 seconds…”
“… could you time his run?” they came asking me. I guessed it was worth the show and agreed to not only time him but also serve as a pace maker and run next to him. After quite some bellowing and loud discussion on what starting and finishing points on the track should be chosen for these 100m, the lonely hero trotted down to the normal 100m sprint starting line.
The result was pretty obvious. He started surprisingly fast on the first 20-30 meters, I was fiddling around with the watch and had to see to do the pace making job properly. At 60m things calmed down, 5 to 8 seconds of cheering up followed and he crossed the finish line in 17.2 seconds. His friends were all “no way” and “can you beliebe that” etc.
Don’t know what the betting stakes were actually but pretty obviously did the alcohol more damage to the friends brain cells than to the hero’s running muscles. 22 seconds on 100m, every schoolboy is faster than that. Alcohol consumption in Finland is on similar levels with the rest of Europe, the state looks after that by applying horrendous taxes on it. However the distribution of alcohol consumption over time differs somewhat. No bottle is touch during the week, whereas in Central and Southern European countries you see beer and wine as part of the daily meals. But on the weekends there’s quite a catch-up game going on. People tend to be larger sized around here anyways and there’s a lot of beer needed to fill those stomachs. Cheers, Prost, Kippis, Skål, A votre santé
Tags: drunk guy running
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.