Half Marathon In 59 Minutes

I thought I was pushed to the limit five weeks ago when I went to Saarikylät tour skating track with Timpa the Extraweight. We skated 20.64 k's in one hour and I really felt that there is no way I could do better at least in this season. After all the ice track was an excellent condition, the weather was all right and we're using skiing poles to get more speed. Of course, there were some cons, as always. My speed slowed down at the corners and it took a lot of effort to accelerate to normal cruise speed.

As you already may know, Rautahumppa's last blog post went viral with the great help of Hiking Travel Hit and Saarikylät Ice Track Facebook sites. During two last weeks there has been 800 views, which is a lot more than the blog normally gets. In the post, which is actually a test, I wrote that my favourite ice track is the Sorsapuisto field, mainly for its quietness and well-maintained ice. Today, I got yet another prove for that. Even though I experienced some heavy wind from the direction of Sorsapuisto pond, I managed to skate kilometres in 2:50 pace. After 11 k's I realized that there are some possibilities to reach 21 k's in one hour.

Since the head wind slowed down my speed, I tried to bend my upper body forward as I have seen speed skaters do on TV. Actually, when I put my wrist against my lower back I found a really good position which helped a lot. So, a managed to skate every k's under three minutes and eight of them under 2:50. That makes my record 21.18 k's in one hour and 59 mins 44 secs for the half marathon. My record on rollerblade is 23 k's in one hour, however I believe I could go faster than that on the ice. Let's see.

Everybody loves dumbbells (Rautahumppa goes in English)

Now is the time to write something to our international readers. Since our multilingual abilities might be a little bit rusty at the moment, we are terribly sorry for this inconvenience, especially if you are our English teacher or native English-speaker.

So, there are two ex-musicians behind this blog. Some time ago we, Pete and Miksu, tried to do some workout without any clear vision. Then we got personal workout routines, made by real pro, personal trainer and our mentor Johanna. I really can't express what our goals for training are. Maybe some streamlined, swimmer-type-of body, more strength, better posture, you name it. But now, after 2 weeks of hard training, I have noticed that the main goal could be to have a good time together and enjoying the colorful atmosphere of the gym.

Writing in English, by the way, is quite a challenging, mostly because the very different gym terminology in Finnish language. For instance, running mat and hand weight (that we use) are straight translations for tread mill and dumbbell. There are no way to guess those terms, you just have to know.


About our blog terminology, rauta means iron and humppa is traditional Finnish dance (like fast foxtrot), music that Pete and I are always really keen on.