The last of the 10k test races before the Rotterdam Marathon on April 5th, again in Hakunila, Vantaa, north of Helsinki. The Aktia Cup’s last run of the winter series. The winter series consists of 5 runs starting from November. The conditions were good this time. Some wet and slushy patches at the start and finish but otherwise a dry street and temperatures around zero degrees Celsius. Also the field of participants was of high quality again. The winning time was around 30:20min. For my own part, well a lot of talk about aiming at the 35min mark, to keep the same 5k pace than last time (17:20min) and then be better on the way back. Well, much ado about nothing, Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 10k race
finally, what we’ve been waiting for, the running shirts (made of this “moisture-out, keeps-you dry-longer” fabric, one could think of a total different product commercial) have arrived. Just in time for today’s 10k race, the last of the Aktia Cup winter series. In case you spot it today or anytime later, just shout out “hei 400″ and a smiling face will meet your ways.
Tags: running shirt
as earlier promised, a compilation of racing flats. Since it’s quite tedious to skim through pictures and reviews and understand which ones are this years models and so on, the compilation is split into a couple of parts, this one being the first.
Racing flats (aka performance shoes or competitive running shoes) are mostly for neutral feet, i.e. with overpronation your choice is made much easier 
I myself have tried a couple of the pairs below and my personal favorite is the adizero adios. It provides a real good feel of the ground you run on and it’s upwards round shaped nose gives a effortless “rolling” movement to your running. Further, you find below approximate price information from different currency zones. Just to provide some transparency. The price information is taken from internet retailers that are found through a quick google search and has a rather short lifespan of course. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: race shoes
that’s how it turns out sometimes. I was running my recovery run, slow pace, good music in my ears - “Rock Star” of Ronn Chick, Dennis Winslow. Suddenly a swoosh from behind on my right side. I just spat that way and the guy might have run into it… I apologized.I noticed the black and yellow shoe colors, that’s this years Adidas coloring and the way this guy paces along, he’s up to something. Wanted to find out and accelerated.
After the roads forked and came together again, whereby I chose the shorter alternative, I got him again. I guess he was a bit surprised when being asked all those questons by a total stranger. But after a while it became more of a conversation than this initial question and anwer game.
Matti, as it turns out is studying at the Helsinki University of Technology in Otaniemi, Espoo and he’s on a marathon mission as well. Helsinki City Marathon and Vantaa Marathon and one of them in below 2:40h - not bad - and he made me feel that, tool. We sped along on the northern shoreline of Laajalahti in a 3:50min/km pace. With our route going up and down, left and right, it was a constant acceleration, deceleration game - a fartlek in it’s purest form. Matti doesn’t train in the afternoons, it’s the evening hours for him, he doesn’t overdo it either, with somewhere around 90km a week he reached his personal best of 2:41h last year. There’s still plenty of room for improvement for this young fellow.
My recommendations, Matti, keep it cool. Look after your speed capabilities with short (400m and 1000m) interval runs every now and then and change your race plans from Helsinki and Vantaa to Stockholm and Berlin Marathons (both places cheap to get to from Helsinki) and you might even shoot for a sub-2:35h this year.
today’s training: 6km slow, 6km fartlek, 2,5km slow, 14,5km altogether, route on the map, hr and what not
Tags: meeting people
somewhere I read that even a 4 hour marathon goal requires 8-9km running per day. We are now at 12km/day, is this enough for 2:40h in Rotterdam? 12 doesn’t really sound much more than 9, at least not equally much more than the results do. We’ll find out soon, it’s only 3 and half weeks away.
What has developed over the total time? With Polar’s heart rate monitor comes along a PC software that shows some nice graphs.
- Training Time: well yes, the more you run, the more time you’ll need, to compensate it with speed isn’t really feasible. Whereas weekly accumulted training times were around 5:40 - 6:30h they’re now between 8:15 and 9:30hours per week.
- Heart Rate Zones: Yes, a trend is visible. There was more training in the moderate, hard and even max area in the first 3 months. Now, there’s the majority of running done in the light and moderate zone.
- Average Heart Rate shows a trend downwards from 150-170bpm initially to now 135-150bpm
- Number of Exercises per week went slightly up from on average 5 to now 6, but as working family dad there’s a limit to that and it goes somewhere there where we are right now.
- Both Total weekly Exertion and Pace don’t show much change. Pace has even gone down a bit in recent weeks. I guess those are more dependent on the weather and season. It’s hard to run faster on snow.
Tags: progress, stats, winter training
had to change scenery today. In the Helsinki metropolitan area there are two indoor running tracks, the Esport Arena in Espoo and the Liikuntamylly (= “the sports mill”) in the eastern part of Helsinki. The Esport Arena has a 400m Mondo track which can be a bit hard on your muscles and especially fibers. Hence, the sports mill it was today. It’s only a 200m track there, but there’s more of a running-pro atmosphere to it, because all the athletics clubs are there. Coaches are shouting lap times, giving advice on running style, co-ordination or just plainly are spurring athletes on.
But people are friendly, after asking whether I could do my 400’s on the track as well, that was no problem to accomodate. 15 of those were on my program in somewhere around 76 seconds. Need for speed before the next 10k test race on Saturday, the last in the Aktia Cup winter series. This short distance interval training is again more to my liking. You accelerate once in the beginning and then let it roll. The majority went in 71 to 73 secs, and felt good.
Then this one guy came up who was supposed to run a 1000m run in 2:45min, i.e. 5 x 33sec laps. His coach suggested I could pull him on the last 200. Did so, I started to fly - at least it felt so - and pulled him in time to the finish line. Then, I continued for another lap and finished that run in 67 secs. A colleague of the coach came by later on and handed me a season ticket for the sports mill. Wow, I was impressed.
Haile's shoes at my feet!
Then along comes a guy with a huge black bag, he stops in the middle of the tracks northern bend and empties the contents of his bag right there. 30 or 40 pairs of shoes hit the ground. He later explained that he’s from the Finnish running magazine “Juoksijalehti“, they let people try a whole range of new training and racing shoes. Since we had the topic just two weeks ago and there’s a racing shoe post in the making, I tried the Adidas adizero adios and the Nike Lunar+. My choice is crystal clear, it’s the adizero adios. Although it weighs a bit more (211g) than the Nike Lunar+ (143g), it provides more guidance to the foot, provides a better touch to the running surface (the Nike is quite unprecise here, it feels like you have too thick a layer of soft rubber below your feet) and it’s round upwards shaped front part of the sole give a nice feeling of “rolling” when you’re in your racing pace. This is it, need to get this pair.
today’s training: 4km warm up, 12 x 400m in 73.5 on average, + a couple of accelerations, 3km warm down, 16.5km altogether
Tags: interval training, liikuntamylly, race shoes
I definitely could have done 3650m, I should have done 3600m, but my modest result wasn’t even 3550m, but rather 3510m… could have, should have - quite lame excuses. The 5000m world record holder Kenenisa Bekele ran the 5000m in 12:37,3. That translates to a Cooper distance of 4750m. There’s a reference point.
The Cooper test, here organized by KeKe (Kestävyysjuoksun Kehittämisyhdistys), is a 12min run on a track and the runners try to get as far as possible. Rather simple. It’s a test of physical fitness invented by Kenneth Cooper in 1968 for US military use. Cooper used the test result in meters to calculate VO2max, the maximal oxygen consumption, by using this formula:
VO2 max = (distance run - 505) / 45
[the result is in ml/kg/min]
This expression is then used to compare the performance of endurace sports athletes.
Back to the Cooper test. To see what’s good and what’s not, have a look at the below table. This is the one that’s mostly referred to.
I’d say this calls for a 400days organized Cooper session as soon as the snow is gone. In case your interested, let me know through a comment below.
Tags: Cooper test
… when it’s frozen of course. Otherwise you don’t really get very far. The winter in Helsinki has been a real one again after a couple of rather warm ones in recent years, thanks to global warming. Wondering when we’ll see palm trees growing on Helsinki’s city center strip park, the Esplanade.
It’s always an experience to go out and run on the frozen baltic sea bays that reach into the Finnish metropolitan area. The world (well, if this spot on the earth is the world for you) is seen from another view point. Noises vanish, it’s quiet and serene scenery opens up in front of you. You meet happily smiling people there. Got Maija, a colleague from work lured with me. And as you can see, she was smiling, too.
Lately, the communities came up with clearing the snow from the ice for a loop shaped km or two on the width of a motorway and provide people a superb skating route. On the sides of it there’s just enough snow and rougher surface to be able to run very well on it. Otherwise it’s quite tedious to run in the deeper snow on top of the ice.
It looks like it that we still can enjoy running on frozen water for at least another week. Temperatures will stay mainly below freezing. Hope it’ll stay dry, the next 10k race is coming up on week Saturday (14.03.).
Yesterday’s training: 14,5km active relaxation and enjoying the sunny views
Tags: running on ice
He’s always full of energy and a kind of Speedy Gonzales around here. He’s here in Helsinki, next minute he’s off to Brussels, where he likes to go most. Then some peace building and keeping meetings in Egypt and Etiopia. Some people have claimed to having seen him in two places the same time… (well perhaps on a Friday/Saturday evening, people claim a lot on those weekday evening). Always a media friendly smile and always on the run. Literally. Just spotted him 10 days ago at the Esport Arena, but I was too Finnish to doing a couple of laps with him. (Finnish people let other Finnish people be and everyone does his/her own thing.) Next time I’ll just join in.
Anyway, Alexander Stubb’s definitely often on the run as he shows on his blog. He went to Etiopia and did some good kilometers with “da god of running“. Respect.
today’s training: instead of doing intervals on the indoor track, I chose to prevent any further strain on the left knee’s fibers and did a 20km run outside in the slush, 1:33h for 20,3km
the knee’s much better again. yesterday’s last 5km were a bit painful, hence today’s basic run started out very carefully. Looked after the knee during the night and the whole day with a lot of Voltaren, that took away the swelling. Went to see the doc, but only got an appointment for tomorrow. Well let’s see what he/she says. My hunch is that Friday’s jumps in combination with Sunday’s longer+faster run and Monday’s long run all on this Mondo track were beyond the load that the knee fibers were certified for.
Now back on the road and in the snow. The tedious road conditions didn’t matter today, the 5+min/km pace was very much ok. And finally we re-discovered some long gone fun, chasing bicycles. You spot them somewhere in front of you or they overtook you on a downhill stretch. When still close enough (according to your own estimation), you take an acceleration and pass them with a nod and a smile. Especially on an uphill part, they don’t stand much a chance. Always good fun
Today they were a bit of an easy catch. Also they had their troubles ploughing their way through the 5-8cm deep snow on the bike and sideways.
today’s training: 11.5km basic run in 60min, route, hr and other
Tags: catching bikes, knee
