At the eastern tip of the vuosaari harbor there's a cool vista-point called 'horisontti'. A slight minus is that on the final 1-2 km before the vista point the road is sand and gravel which isn't ideal for 25mm wide roadbike tyres.
In other news, the latest 64bit-deb install of google earth on a reasonably fresh Ubuntu 11.04 results in monospaced fonts which look less than great:
This is a once a month bike-ride through the city centre to raise awareness for bikers. It is nice to ride in the middle of the street with police escort and all other traffic just standing by 🙂
Pics from one month earlier on 10 May.
After physical exercise one must take care of re-hydration:
Update: here's some more detail on the navigation (or lack thereof):
Trying to follow the ring-road around Helsinki for most of the route, but took a shortcut home towards the end...
It's been possible to run over the Crusell-bridge (just before 3 km) for some time now, but yesterday I found a new walk/bike path under the lauttasaari bridge (just after 4 km), east along the motorway (4-5 km) connecting to the usual lap around the old cemetary and the hietsu-beach. Did 11 km at a pace just under 6 min/km.
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 🙂
Some of the ~10500 Helsinki city run finishers on Saturday 7.5.2011 at Helsinki olympic stadium:
Ubuntu now seems to ship with hugin panorama creator which did a good job of merging these four C7shots.
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
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.
After all the skiing and cycling I should try to get into some kind of running shape before the half-marathon on 7.5. Instead of a personal best of 1:4x it now seems more likely to aim for something sub 2h and be happy with that...
First longer ride with the new road bike.
Ride details: 110km, 6h 29min (includes ca 52 min of breaks), avg speed 16.9 km/h, avg HR 123, 2124 kcal.
Bike details: Sabbath September frame with SRAM Rival groupset, 25mm wide 700c Continental tyres. I changed the saddle to a Brooks B17 and fitted a shorter 90mm Easton stem. The saddlebag is a Carradice SQR slim and the bar bag is an Ortlieb classic. Garmin Edge 800 GPS/computer. Shimano A-530 pedals.
