Marathon?! What!?

I'll start my postings here with a brief introduction. I'm a 20-year old first year HSE student and I've always loved all kinds of sports. In addition to running I play football, floorball and go to the gym more or less regularly. In the summertime I also like to reminisce over my old favourite hobby and go roll around with a skateboard. So for me running is just one sport amongst many.

I'm not sure why I even decided to take part in the KY-RUN marathon trip in the first place, but I just somehow ended up in the list. I'm also taking part in the infamous KY-TRIPPI excursion to Germany only 6 (or 4) days before the Stockholm Marathon. And the KY-Trippi events have traditionally involved heavy Russian Standard Vodka drinking and visits to the most dangerous nightclubs and other locations. So there's not too much time to recover between running away from German pub brawls and running the Stockholm Marathon.

My marathon preparation-camp!

Oh, and I've never ran a marathon. But I've been surprisingly close to the competitive level on shorter distances. I finished fifth in the last year's Teboil Half Marathon after a preparation that mostly consisted of eating like a horse and training at the gym in order to gain more and more muscle mass! I still was faster than most of the FAT GUYS and "I don't even run in a team"! The time could've been a bit better, but on the other hand the circuit was a cross-country skiing and running circuit and the weather was extremely hot! That's actually the only official running event I've ever taken part in - or actually I finished second on the Santahamina Military Cross Country Running competition a few years ago and got a few extra vacation-days for it! In the army I also managed to run 3460m in the Cooper running test, which is probably my biggest running achievement so far - it's not even my personal record though.

This year I've been a bit of a nightrunner in many ways. Like many first year students I like to enjoy the freedom of student life in most of it's forms and therefore I've honestly been drunk often enough to give the healthiest doctor a heart-attack. And after drinking usually comes a cracking hangover! And that beautiful state of mind and body doesn't really support heavy training. This has lead to less training than what I've been used to - and even now that I've been increasing the amount of training again I still rarely say no to a top notch night out with the lads. I've also been working as a substitute teacher and at a grocery store quite a lot so most of the training I've been doing has literally been done at night. But still I personally think that it's pretty cool to go out for a run in the middle of the night - and even if I was really tired at times it still felt that what I managed to do was better than not doing anything.

The way I do running is also pretty far from what they recommend in the Health Education -textbooks. I never use a heart-rate monitor and never will. In most training sessions I just run as fast as I can and try to enjoy it. I usually don't even carry a watch. I feel that I've made enough progress as a runner training like this so I'm not going to change that too much.

Even though I hate to have anything extra on me when running I still have to start using Nike+Ipod running data system pretty soon. If everything goes according to current plans and agreements I'm starting to work at Nike Finland's marketing department later this year and some of my work will involve the Nike+ system. Therefore - like all the other Nike Finland employees - I have to know how the system works and preferably be an experienced user. And of course they gave me the system for free so why not try it out! I might post some comments on the system itself and maybe even running data gathered by it later on.

Some readers might be wondering why I chose to write in English. As a native Finnish speaker I could write in Finnish just as well, but when writing to some other blogs I've noticed that I can express myself in at least a bit more entertaining way when I write in English. And at least in my postings the main idea will be trying to entertain the readers and maybe show a bit about a different way to prepare for a marathon on the side.

Greetings from the floorball field!

- Jason