Self Transcendence, Helsinki

Inherent in the nature of humans is the desire to improve and better ourselves. This process of going  beyond our current limitations is often referred to as “self transcendence.”  Self Transcendence can apply to any aspect of our being; the physical self transcendence of running faster; the mental self transcendence of going beyond our purely egoistic thinking.

(Self Transcendence.org, the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Club)

Well, I’m all for the former. When it comes to me however, not so sure about the latter. I mean participation in this 2-miler run every Tuesday evening at 7pm in the Helsinki Munkkiniemi park largely consists of still-ambitious seniors probably 20 - 40 years beyond their time of personal bests. What would you call it other than egoism, if one participates, who hasn’t even had a first bad wave of midlife crisis? Unfair - perhaps, cowardly - not really, narcissistic - hell yeah!

At least in the books of my ego there is some satisfaction in winning a race once a while. The good thing is, that this is not a given. There are always one or a couple of other really good runners in the field. And this 2-miler makes a great training session when adding a longer warm up and cool-down to it. Running from work to the Munkkiniemi park is just above 5km, doing an additional warm up lap with some other runners there, running the 2-miler and afterwards taking the 5km back to work for a shower. That adds up to almost 15k with some really fast part in the middle.

This middle part has been getting faster over the last weeks. With three participations the race times have improved quite a bit. Peanut butter, muffins, Coke and chips let me do a 11:40min (3:38min/km) in the beginning, some more discipline brought in an intermediate result of 11:21 min (3:32min/km) and finally, putting the racing shoes on again today, that got me a 10:57min (3:25min/km). Was a good feeling to reach such running pace again. Thanks to Rikhard who didn’t let go until right before the finish line. That pushed hard today. Next time you’ll make it under 11mins, too.

More on these Tuesday 2-miler runs and results at http://fi.srichinmoyraces.org/

Tags: Self Transcendence