My SmartCoach training program is filled with this kind of weird expressions like ‘@11:58′ and ‘5mi@10:12′. Do they want me to run in 11:58 in the middle of the night? Finish your 5 mile run in 10 min 12 secs? Say what???
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This autumn I’m going to participate in a running event called Pirkan Hölkkä. The route is 33 km long, so it isn’t as long as marathon. It’s good practise for marathon and it also serves as a trial for my “running motivation”. To be better prepared than for Pirkan Hiihto, this time I’ll train for the event… I used the SmartCoach service on Runner’s World site and got myself a training program. Tomorrow I’ll start with the program and begin by resting. Nice and easy exercise. Think I still go to the gym…
About this post’s title: Pirkan Hölkkä is 16 weeks from now, I’m going to run the 33 km and also break the 3000 meter limit in Cooper test. This year should be better than the previous 
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OK, here’s a monkey off my back. In March I participated in Pirkan Hiihto and there were things I wanted to write a post about. So, after 3,5 months I finally finished this post - the 5 lessons I learned in 90 kilometers.
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When I was a teenager I had a skateboard ramp at our parent’s backyard. The first version of the ramp was huge, at least for my purposes. I insisted that my ramp would have 40 cm vertical part, so I could make big airs and other crazy stuff. When the ramp was ready, I realised I didn’t have the guts to ride it :
A year later we cut down the ramp’s height to something like 1 meter. It didn’t block the view anymore and the artistic “skateboarding is not crime” graffiti was gone, so my parents/neighbors were happy. And so was I, since I could do some tricks instead of just turning around.
OK, so that was my story. Here’s a clip I found from YouTube. This guy Bob Burnquist, pro skateboarder and X-Games gold medalist, has the world’s largest ramp in his backyard. The ramp is incredible: 8 stories high, has a safety net and costs of $280,000. Enjoy!
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Last Sunday I participated Pirkan Hiihto, the longest one-day skiing race in Finland. After 12 hours, 22 minutes and 27 seconds I finished the 90km race. And they also gave me a nice medal
More about the race in the next posts.
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Good intensions are sometimes hard to convert to action. Take for example gym training. It’s the most common training I usually skip. Whenever I’m busy at work or just feel tired, gym can be skipped with a half-of-a-second decision/promise (“I won’t go there today, tomorrow is better for me”). Then tomorrow comes, I get a sudden meeting request and there’s stuff to do, so I make the same decision/promise to myself. Then weeks later I notice I haven’t been doing weight training for ages!
One way to hang on to the training plan is to train with a friend. I go to the gym with my colleagues as often as I can, but since we all have different daily routines, we have been switching the training days according to our changing schedules. And as there’s no specific gym day, it’s been easy to skip training if the others weren’t coming either.
One day I was at the gym with two of my colleagues and we were talking about that we should come there more often to get in shape before the summer. We were choosing which days we would dedicate for training and how could we motivate ourselves . Then the other colleague came up with an idea.
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In a previous post How To Ski 90 km In Just One Day I listed weight loss as one of the tasks to do before the race. I was weighing 104 kg at that time and now I’m at 99 kg, after one month. The weight loss didn’t happen accidentally, there were three things I did differently in January: I started exercising 3-4 times a week, I ate small portions during the day (I even started eating breakfast!) and I only ate sweets on weekends. After losing 5 kg I felt good!
Two weeks ago, I was googling for losing weight and I came across Tom Venuto’s site called BurnTheFat. I signed up for the free report called Big Fat Lies just to get more information about losing weight. Although I think I knew a thing or two about exercising, this report presented me something I hadn’t thought about - at least enough…
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You know onions. You peel one layer off, there’s another one waiting below. Peel that off, there’s another and so on. OK, this layer metaphore has been used for everything under the sun, but here’s one more (*grin*). I like to call this “The secret of the three layers”. It’s a secret just because I didn’t know it before (another *grin*).
Winter sports, now there’s a challenge. Sports usually involve sweating and lots of it. On the other hand, winter equals cold and sweating in cold is not good. You might get ill or if you’re lucky, you only feel uncomfortable. Luckily there are companies in the winter sports industry which developing better equipment for the winter hobbyist. And they have unlocked “The secret of the three layers”…
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OK, this post is late I mean late-late. When I started this blog I thought I could easily write a weekly wrap up every week, but somehow it has been a tedious task to get done. But even though the the wrap up is late, I’m happy to say I have been able to exercise during this “era of silence”.
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I didn’t like steppers until last Thursday. I discovered something on that day, but I’ll come back to that later in this post. Before this “discovery” I didn’t like steppers for many reasons. Mainly I didn’t like them because I think stair stepping is boring if you have to climb them more than half a minute. Also the image of a blond hair dude with solarium tanning on a fitness commercial using the stair stepper is the stereotype which I don’t want to relate to.
And last but not least there are the physical reasons. My knees start aching, the stepper frame (the bar which you grab during the stepping) is always too low and I feel like I’m breaking the stepper with my weight. OK, there are couple of more reasons but I don’t like to concentrate too much on the negatives. I want to tell you about this positive discovery that totally changed my attitude towards steppers.
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