Category: Running

40k march

Rounded off a busy week with an organized 40k walk: kesäyön marssi. Walking is obviously not as stressful on the legs and fitness as running, but the script on a 40k walk is pretty much the same: if you are reasonably prepared you will make it until around 25k or 32k without much trouble, and after that it requires some work and determination to finish those last kilometers.

So as not to make it all too easy I cycled 7.3k to work, then 15.5k to the start of the march, and finally 25.9k (at 3am in the morning!) home from the event for a total of ~48k on the bike 🙂

HCR2011 statistics

Using the same scraping scripts I wrote after last years marathon, it was fairly easy to scrape the HCR website and produce some histograms.

There are two python scripts, one that crawls the web (urllib) and finds the time-data (BeautifulSoup and re) and writes to a file (cPickle), and another that reads the files and plots (matplotlib) histograms: hcr2011_scrape

 

2011 Helsinki City Run

My fourth half-marathon. Not quite a personal best, and my excuse is that the course is a bit up-down hilly and has a lot of turns that slows you down.

Otherwise a solid run with no major problems. A lot warmer than last year, so I ran in shorts and T-shirt. I could put in some work on the uphills which made the HR go >170 and still recover to a reasonable HR 165 or so on the downhills or the flat bits.

My own garmin said 1:53:00, the chip time on the results website seems to be 1:52:57, and the time from the gun was 1:54:14.

The 5k times were: zero to 5k in 28:24, five to 10k in 26:30, ten to 15k in 26:09, fifteen to 20k in 26:25. In other words first 10k in 54:54 and the second 10k in 52:34.

Update: here's the GPS-trace.

Thursday Ten

Long time no run. But apparently skiing and cycling does work as a substitute for keeping up a bit of fitness.

I went and signed up for the Helsinki city run half-marathon. The best I did last year on that distance was about 1h 51min, so it would be nice to improve on that with a 1:4x time. That requires a steady pace of about 5:00/km. Yikes!

Apparently my kind of blogging about skiing, cycling, and running is very old fashioned and I should be doing at heiaheia instead with the cool people...

What's that peak in the HR at <5min ??

First time I crossed the new "Crusell" bridge (see also here) in ruoholahti. It appears to have a concrete surface which is very hard on the feet.

Winter running

When the going gets tough... ...the tough go running in icebugs

I've done a few 10k runs and some 1k repeats indoors on the treadmill at the gym, but for the long-slow-distance type of runs it's really much nicer to go outside. These shoes with spikes (Icebug ATTLA) provide added grip on harder snow and ice surfaces, although they are pretty slippery on an indoor stone floor. They are warm and waterproof although towards the end of today's 14k it felt a bit like running in rubber boots (there is a trade-off between waterproof and breathability I guess).

Running in loose snow is a bit  like running in loose sand on the beach. You spend a lot of effort and go almost nowhere! Today's pace was a minute or more slower per km than usual.

It's not unusual for us to have this much snow, but it is maybe a month or more earlier than normal.

Lanzarote (half) marathon

The plan was to run at a nice and even 5:40/km pace to finish in 4 hours, but after feeling OKish for the first two laps out of four, suddenly I felt overheated and dehydrated and stepped off after 22km.
The pace on laps 1 and 2 was exactly as planned, 27:30 for the first 5k (5:30/km), 28:25 for 5-10km (5:41/km), 28:10 for the third 5k from 10 to 15k (5:38/km) and 28:53 for 15-20k (5:47/km). I was on track to run that four hour marathon, but somehow in the warm and windy weather wasn't getting enough water, energy or, something else. Oh well, there's always next year...

1000 km

The running log shows 1005 km this weekend!

I've run actively this year from week 13, which means 34 weeks of running/jogging so far. Or an average of 29.56km per week. Weeks 15, 19, and 37 were the low points with only 5-6 km completed (week 37 I had a fever). Week 29 (55k total) is one of the most active with a 24k long run(in central park, IIRC) in the beginning of the week, some short runs in the middle, and the Jakob half-marathon on the weekend.

At 30km/week the total should land on roughly 1200 km for this year.

There's some peer pressure on signing up for the Finlandia langlauf in February... we'll see if that happens or not.