Category: Running

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#

Jakob halvmaraton 1:50:37

This week the plan was to do the last 20+ km run before the Helsinki marathon, which is in three weeks on 14 Aug 2010. But since I was in the region and there was a race, I did the Jakob half-marathon instead. Results and info at http://jakob-marathon.net/

This is a small event with 4-500 runners, so less walking, pushing, and passing in the beginning than at HCR or Forssa. I didn't really set a time-goal, just ran in the beginning at a pace that felt right, which today was around 5:11 to 5:20/km. There were four drinking stations at a little after 4, 8, 12, and 16 km which show up as slightly slower kilometers in the data. Towards the end a few faster kilometers would have maybe allowed a sub 1:50 time.

The grey background shows roughly the level of detail which google earth/maps provides in this part of the country...

"He de maraton e noo flaka beta!"

By popular demand, an openstreetmap rendering. Fiddled around with the openstreetmap.org website but could not get it to display my GPS trace on top of the map. When searching for "gps" ubuntu suggests tangoGPS, but that doesn't reder gpx-traces either. Then downloaded and installed Merkaartor, which does show gpx-traces after clicking around for a bit to learn how it works. At a zoom level which shows the whole route Merkaartor doesn't show individual streets, so I zoomed in a bit, exported two bitmaps (top/bottom) from Merkaartor, and manually stitched them together in GIMP.

Sunday Ten

On average this is 4-hour marathon pace, or 5:40/km, but accelerating towards the end - once the motor warms up it feels quite easy run at 5:30-5:20 pace, at least for 10k at a time...

No long run (which now is defined as ~20k) last week then. Rest is good too...