Category: Marathon

Stockholm Marathon

It was cold, wet, and windy!

Despite lack of proper preparation, a personal best with 4h 0min 34s. My long slow runs have consisted of only one 17k in April and one 22k in May. All the orienteering seems to help however, with the up/down hills giving more strength in the legs. Counting running+orienteering kilometers, I've done around 403k this year. Perhaps the four 60-100k bike rides I've done party give the training effect of a long run?

Splits for the first and second half:
0-21k: 1:57:53
22-42k: 1:59:18

Or broken down into 10ks:
1-10k: 56:49
11-20k: 55:18
21-30k: 56:19
31-40k: 57:49

Or broken down into 5ks: (compared to Rautavesi in 2011 and Helsinki in 2010)
1-5k:  28:54 (Rautavesi 27:13, Helsinki  29m)
6-10k: 27:55 (Rautavesi 27:46, Helsinki  30m)
11-15k: 27:37 (Rautavesi 27:29, Helsinki  30m)
16-20k: 27:41 (Rautavesi 27:23 , Helsinki  31m)
21-25k: 28:40 (Rautavesi 28:57 , Helsinki  33m)
26-30k: 27:39 (Rautavesi 31:09, Helsinki  34m)
31-35k: 29:51 (Rautavesi 31:27, Helsinki  36m)
36-40k: 27:58 (Rautavesi 35:17, Helsinki  40m)

Here's a video that shows what the weather was like:

Rautaveden maraton


Rautaveden marathon, the last 'big' marathon in the Finnish running calendar, loops around lake rautavesi around 50km west of Tampere. Rogaining and biking earlier in the fall together with a week of flu meant that it was either this event, or possibly Åland a week earlier (but that would have been more of a hassle travel-wise).

The first 9k of the route is quite flat and takes us out of the city and onto the big Tampere road. Almost the whole 9-10 km interval is a big uphill which resulted in a slowish 5m:50s kilometer-time. After that it's a bit of downhill and varied terrain until around 19k (after ski-resort Ellivuori) where there is a big downhill. For me a fast kilometer-time of 5:02 - but as I haven't practiced running downhill much I think my legs got beat in that downhill pretty bad. After that it's more flat/varied until the turn at the top of the map around 26k. This is where my legs were about finished 🙂 I then walked most of the steeper uphills, and some flat-bits too during each kilometer between maybe 32k and 39k. At the end after the last drinking-station at 40k I ran again all the way to the finish for a time of 4h 12min 40s - a new personal best, but not the sub-4h I had maybe hoped for...

Splits for the first and second 20k:
1-20k: 1:49:51 (5:30/km)
21-40k: 2:06:50 (6:21/km)

Or broken down into 10ks: 59min, 2nd 62min, 3rd 67min, and 4th 76min.
1-10k: 54:59 (5:30/km) (HCM: 59m)
11-20k: 54:52 (5:29/km) (HCM: 62m)
21-30k: 1:00:06 (6:01/km) (HCM: 67m)
31-40k: 1:06:44 (6:40/km) (HCM: 76m)

Or broken down into 5ks, and compared to last year's Helsinki City Marathon:
1-5k: 27:13 (5:27/km) (HCM: 29m)
6-10k: 27:46 (5:33/km) (HCM: 30m)
11-15k: 27:29 (5:30/km) (HCM: 30m)
16-20k: 27:23 (5:29/km) (HCM: 31m)
21-25k: 28:57 (5:47/km) (HCM: 33m)
26-30k: 31:09 (6:14/km) (HCM: 34m)
31-35k: 31:27 (6:17/km) (HCM: 36m)
36-40k: 35:17 (7:03/km) (HCM: 40m)

Finally the all important medal:

A comparison of the elevation-graph from the organizers website with data from my garmin 405cx. The heart-rate graph clearly shows how hitting "the wall" at 32k results on walking-breaks and a lower heart rate.

Helsinki City Marathon

Been there, done that, have the medal, have the T-shirt!

It was hot and it was humid. I also had a strange ache in both my knees and my ankles which towards the end made each step forward painful. I was doing OKish through 30km and a bit further, but after that the walks at the drinking stations became longer, and I walked the uphills towards the end. Finished in 4h 42min. The breakup into 20k/10k/5k times shows how I got more tired towards the end:

The first 20k took 2h1min and the second 2h 23min.

The first 10k took 59min, 2nd 62min, 3rd 67min, and 4th 76min.

5k times: 29min, 30min, 30min, 31min, 33min, 34min, 36min, 40min

Temp(left) and humidity(right) data from FMI for around 15-19 o'clock shows T=23-25 C and RH=70-80% at least.

In colder weather, with a bit more training, and without the knee-ache, the next goal must be to break 4h!

Update: the finishing times are distributed like this:

This histogram was produced by scraping the results website with one python script and the plotting the results with another.

Download the scripts hcm_scrape.tar (works on Ubuntu 10.04LTS) hcm_scrape.tar

A whole series of histograms are on picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/anders.e.e.wallin/HCM2010Statistics#