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???
The Explanation
There’s an explanation on the bottom of the program saying 9mi @ 9:11 means Run 9 miles at 9:11 pace. OK, I was still confused what 9:11 pace means, but I think it means you need to run 1 mile in 9 minutes 11 seconds. That’s pretty accurately said, I should be a robot to have such a steady pace. Anyways, it’s good the program is filled with this expressions, I’ll know how fast I should run. SmartCoach is smart!
The Conversion
Back to me and my metric limitations. Since I understand kilometers better than miles, I needed to do some conversions. One mile equals 1,609344 kilometers, so 5mi@10:12 converts to 8km@6:20. Now it says that I need to run 8 kilometers with the speed of 1 kilometer in 6 minutes 20 seconds (roughly 9,5 km/h). This makes more sense to me and 10 km/h looks like a decent running speed.
The Life Of An Under-Equipped Engineer
There’s still a problem: how do I know how fast I’m running? There is equipment available for that purpose, but there’s no way I would get it by Tuesday, my first training day. The solution: I measure the length of my running routes and set time targets. I usually run the same routes, so I only need to make the measurements couple of times. I have a training log created in runnersworld.com and I used the routes section to measure the length of a route. It happened so nicely that one of my usual routes was 3,15 km (approx. 2 miles) long. I saved it to my routes list, so I can use it later e.g. when I change the running speed and need to set new time targets.
With all this information available (and a handy Excel sheet) I had a look of my first training: 2mi@11:58. First the conversion to 3,2km@7:26. Roughly this means the exercise will last for 24 minutes. Then I look at the route I saved to my runnersworld.com profile. The map has an excellent feature (Google kicks butt!), it shows the kilometer marks on top of the route. This way I can easily see that the first kilometer ends next to a bus stop, so that’s my first time target is to reach the bus stop in 7 min 30 secs (7,5 minutes is easier to remember than 7 min 26 secs). In next 7,5 min I need to reach a T-crossing and finally get home before the total exercise time, 24 min, is exceeded.
Ok, this was a lot of work just to set the running speed to the correct level, but I’m an engineer, I love this stuff 
This autumn I’m going to participate in a running event called Pirkan H??lkk??. 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 H??lkk?? 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
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.
1. When you’re on the edge of giving up - don’t!
This is a line I have read from ProBlogger and now it came a reality for me. During the race I was about to give up three times.
- First time was at 44 km pit stop. I was totally exhausted, since my skis had been slipping from the start. There were helpful people on the maintenance points and they waxed my skis. They were so helpful, that I just couldn’t give up now, so I decided to ski to the next maintenance point.
- The skis were now better, but I decided to call my wife to pick me up from the 52 km maintenance point. That was the point were the lunch was served, so it would be better to eat first. I had the soup, sat a while and then went to call my wife. I told her I was already in 52 km, strenghtened by the soup, so I would continue for a while.
- It’s amazing how the soup worked. It gave me strength to ski again and the next 14 km went quite easily. When I got to the 66 km maintenance point I knew there was a 3 km uphill coming around the corner. The soup was losing its effect, so again I started thinking about calling my wife. But since there was a nice downhill, couple of hundred of meters long, I thought I could ski to the next maintenance point and ask my wife to pick me up from there.
When I got to next maintenance point, the 3 km uphill was only a memory and I was only 16 km away from the finish line, so there was no point giving up! I learned that my decisions are easily changed, if the going gets tough…
2. Break Huge Challenges Into Smaller Pieces
It’s just like eating an elephant. You need to eat it in small pieces. There were 10 maintenance points on the way, but I realised I needed to think even in smaller pieces. Whenever there was a huge hill, I would look for a mark in the ground or a tree in the next 10-15 meters. When I would reach the mark, I chose another. This way even the hardest uphills were more like a picnic in the park.
3. The Patience of a Lamb
When you’re doing long lasting sports you need patience - and I mean lots of it. It’s like measuring a football field with a tooth pick. There were times when I saw the long trail in front of me. The end of the trail seemed to be close, so I started to ski faster. I don’t know why, but this happens also when I’m riding my bike. If there are no curves on the road, I try to cycle as fast as I can to the end of the straight part.
Skiing 90 km with this tactic was exhausting. I kept saying to myself: patience of a lamb, patience of a lamb. I set my brain off and just skied without a rush.
4. Focus On Yourself
I hadn’t practised a lot before the race, I had only skied something like 20 kilometers during Xmas holidays. I knew there would be lots of other skiers going pass me, but I needed to stay focused to keep my speed on the level I could cope with. Distance doesn’t kill you, speed does.
5. There Will Be Pain - Learn To Live With It
Sore arms, cramping thighs and aching calves - I had it all before the 44 km maintenance point. I had them all when I crossed the finish line. The day after I only had sore thighs. Pain is only temporary, the achievement is forever
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!
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.
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!
Nobody Wants To Skip Gym But We All Do It
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.
Show Up And Collect Money From Others Who Didn’t Show Up
He suggested that we would start coming to the gym twice a week and if you would skip a session, you’d need to pay the other guy 5 euros.
The guy’s a genious!
At first, I was a bit sceptic about the idea. With my current “commitment level” I would lose money every week and finally be in debt forever! Would I my kids ever get a new pair of shoes again???
After giving it another thought I realised how excellent this idea is. Hit it where it hurts, as the old saying goes. Can you name a more sensitive spot than a guy’s wallet?
It was time to convert this idea to action.
Convert Talk To Action - Schedule Time For Training And Keep Track Of The Money
Couple of hours later as we had left the gym, I made a recurring meeting request to our Outlook calendars. To test drive the idea and to be in shape before summer the meeting request was set until June 1st for each Tuesday and Friday. Since the training time is now reserved from our calendars, it’s easier to schedule other tasks and make it to the gym.
After the request was sent, I created an Excel workbook for the money flow to our network hard drive. The workbook contains 3 columns: training dates and our names. Here’s how it works:
- If you come to the gym, you’ll get an X mark in your column.
- If you’re sick or have some other bullet-proof reason to skip training, you get an 0 (zero).
- If you’re lazy and don’t show up, you get the number 5 in your column.
- At the end of the columns I added the SUM function, so it calculates the amount of money the person needs to pay to the other.
Meeting requests and Excels might sound a bit… geeky… but if it works, I don’t mind
Rinse And Repeat Until It’s A Habit!
We’re just starting to use this system, but I can imagine this to be succesfull. If it works the way we wanted (to get us train more), I think we’ll continue the same train-or-pay system. This could also be transferred to other areas, e.g. eat junk only on Saturday or pay 5 euros a piece. I hope that over time the money steps aside and working out twice a week turns into a habit.
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…
Lose Fat, Not Weight
This may sound obvious, but the key is to lose fat, not weight. Tom points out many times how the dieting industry is marketing weight loss, but what people should be concerned about is the amount of fat they’re carrying on their waist.
When you are losing weight by dieting, you’re losing muscles and body fluids.
Weight loss by dieting (= starving) seems to be effective if you just look at the reading your scale is giving. But if we look dieting from an exercising point of view (there’s 90 km to ski ) dieting is not even close to be thought as a good solution.
- The muscles go first. When our body doesn’t get enough fuel, it starts saving energy by cutting out the unnecessary energy eaters. Unfortunately muscles are in the ‘unnecessary’ category.
- Human body is 70 % water. Its easy to lose fluids with moderate exercising and if you don’t fill up your reserves, you lose weight. But if you’re body dries up, it can cause severe damages during an extreme sports activity.
- Recovering slows down or stops. If the muscles don’t get the energy they need after exercising, the recovery stops and the exercise has a negative effect. Instead of gaining more strength you’re losing it, since your body takes the needed energy from other muscles.
When taken the fact that muscles weigh more than muscle, its easy to lose weight by dieting but the results are not the preferred ones. So instead of losing weight we need to be losing fat.
Now how do you lose fat?
The Simple Tricks To Lose Fat
There are two simple tricks to lose fat. First, you need to do cardio and weight training. Second, you need to keep eating, not starving yourself. Thats all The beauty in these tricks are that
- They work for everybody.
- They’re the natural ways of losing fat.
- They produce results that will last longer.
The simple trick list doesn’t include magic pills you see on TV. That’s what the ‘weight loss’ industry is selling, because people like to have easy solutions and what could be easier than lying on the sofa, taking a pill every now and then?
But hey, don’t take my word for it, listen to the expert. There are lots of myths and mis-information going around in the weight loss market. Tom is the man to tackle each of these ‘ducks’. Go get the free Big Fat Lies report from his site.
I can say that the report cleared my head and now I’m a fat loser, not a weight loser
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”…
The Secret Of The Three Layers
As I was planning how to survive the 90km cross-country skiing trip, I wrote “buy a skiing outfit” in my plan. What I didn’t know at that time was that I already had a skiing outfit. The reason I didn’t know about it? My lovely wife had bought it for me as a birthday present and it was still wrapped in gift paper.
I was really happy about this gift! It was something I wanted and of course my wife had chosen just the perfect model for me. Now I’m proud owner of Craft outfit, the same the _Swedish_ national skiing team uses…
When it comes to sport accessories, I always read the printed information they deliver with them. My skiing outfit came with information about the Craft principle and that’s the thing I’m writing about here.
Craft Principle
Craft principle was explained like this:
The right clothing helps you create the optimal microclimate: heat and moisture conditions closest to your body.
And right below the principle, there were the instructions how to create this “optimal microclimate”. You need to have three layers of clothing.
- The first layer is the one closest to your body. This one is responsible for ventilation and keeping your body dry.
- The second layere is responsible for insulation. It retains body heat while it diverts the body moisture.
- The third layer is for protection. It keeps the wind, water and cold away from the inner layers. It also moves moisture to the outside.
So there you have it, the secret that will help you exercise in the cold. Yesterday I bought something they call “technical underwear”, so now I have layers one and three covered. Before Pirkan hiihto I will also get the second layer equipment. I think I can use the same gear for winter time jogging, so this information was very useful for me. Even though it came from the sponsor of the Swedish skiing team
BTW, here’s an interesting link for you home-cookers: how to peel an onion quickly.
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”.
List of exercises from the the L18-L21 period
- I spend Christmas with my family and parents in Yll??s. Cross-country skiing, outdoor activities and riding with snowmobile. It was fun and helped to get some of those Xmas calories burned!
- The funny (or awkward) thing at the moment is that there is no snow in Finland, except in Lapland. It was quite a contrast to be skiing on the last day at Yll??s, since next day I went for a run in a non-snow, +5 C weather at home. I’d like to see more snow before my 90 km skiing challenge, just to get more training kilometers before the actual competition.
- Two rink ball games! I’m not that keen about the sports itself, but I play with my old friends from the university. It’s fun to see everybody, since after going to the corporate life I haven’t seem them that much. Anyways, we had a tight match, which we lost 5-6 but the second game we won 10-6. These games have been good exercises: 30-60 secs of high heart rate exercise followed by couple of minutes of rest. Do this for one hour and feel the difference!
Last but not least, I went to play floorball with my kids. It had been raining all Sunday and the kids were climbing up the walls. Then I figured I could take the kids with me to the training center in Yl??j??rvi. There’s a big hall which has two floorball courts, plenty of space for running that is. So I called the center and they had free time in their schedule. It was amazing how much fun the kids had there! Imagine 4 and 1 year old kids with little floorball sticks running and screaming for two hours! I couldn’t believe they have that much energy, but they kept running. The older one even didn’t want to leave, he said two hours is not enough… Of course the kids were exhausted and they past out an hour before their actual bedtime But this was by far the best exercise I’ve had for years! Its like a dream come true when you get to play with your kids on the same court.
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.
Give The Man Statistics And He Will Enjoy It
I’m an engineer, so some part of me is crazy for statistics. When it comes to training my favorite statistics are those which tell about the progress of my training. How many repeats I’m doing more, how much lower my heart rate is now than six months ago, how many kilos more I have on the bar and so on. Now as I’m training to ski 90 km, I was very interested to know how fit I was at the moment.
I’m a fan of Polar heart rate monitors and there’s a fit test on my Polar S410 that I can use to get one observation of my current fitness level. This one is done by relaxing and laying on the bed for 5 minutes. I have done it for couple of times, but I wanted to test myself in a different way. I wanted to use an exercise bike and do a “pedal-until-you-drop” test. In this kind of test you keep pedaling as long as you can. The resistance increases as the time goes by and the test ends when you can’t pedal anymore. After your breathing normalizes the trainer fills your head with all sorts of statistics about your fitness level. There would be now reason to take this crazy test without the statistics
Disappointment Leads To Discovery
The gym I go to has these LifeFitness bikes which have fit test on their program sets. Or so I thought. I had taken my Polar HRM’s chest strap with me so I could take the test. The Polar strap sends your heart rate information to the LifeFitness bike and it uses the HR information with the bike’s data (resistance, watts, pedaling speed, etc). You are also asked to type in your age, weight and sex. After the test you are given a number that presents your fitness level. OK, this was what I was expecting to get and I was really anxious to take test when I came to the gym.
So I went to bike and started pedaling. I started pressing the button which changes the exercise program but there was something wrong. I couldn’t choose the fit test! I wasn’t believing it! The fit test option is written on the main unit but you couldn’t choose it. I kept pressing the button for several times until I had to give up.
I was walking around the gym trying to figure what to do instead. Somehow I took a quick look of the stepper’s main unit which was also made by LifeFitness. The board looked the same and it had the fit test option. Like I wrote in the beginning, I don’t like steppers but I climbed on it just to see if the fit test was enabled.
I started climbing (oh the pain) and powered up the main unit. I pressed the program chooser and voila - fit test option could be chosen! I thought to myself that would I be ready to use the stepper for 3 minutes and get my dose of statistics? Hell yeah, said the statistics junkie in my head.
Choose Your Level
The fit test asks for the user’s information before the test. I typed my weight, age, sex and finally chose the resistance level. Everything set, ready to go. I’ve been using the exercise bike every time I go to the gym, so I started looking for the similarities in the stepper’s main unit. The display is quite the same and there are also the watts, calories and distance information covered. But there was a small piece of information that wet my appetite.
There was a small display which showed the target stepping rate. I think it is calculated based on the user given info. My target stepping rate was 14,3. Below that display was another display showing the current stepping rate. I was hooked in an instant!
Think about it. You give a guy some value that he has to reach. The guy will go nuts and try to reach that value no matter what. This is like the purest element in sports, call it an achievement, call it a goal, whatever, but still this the thing that makes sports… sports!
So How Fit I Am?
The cruel part was to keep the stepping rate above the target rate throughout the test. I tried to keep my HR on decent levels so I kept stepping just above the target rate. At the end I was given one single number… 43. Forty-three. What does it mean??? Is it good or bad? I tried to look for the value from LifeFitness site, but then I figured the information could be on Polar site too. After googleing a bit I found that value given is somewhat comperable to VOmax. During my 3000m Cooper test challenge I was able to run 2650 meters which gives VOmax result 47,7. Ouch! I was in better shape during the autumn…
As a conclusion, this test changed my mind when it comes to steppers. They don’t seem so bad anymore. Would I do the test again? You bet. Would I use the stepper for something else, for example warm ups? No way