Training Log Archive: W

Sunday *phew*, long day of standing. Went for a nice easy cruise to the Ladun Maja and back. It was super busy, there's a little cabin partway along that seems to have activities on the ice and you can go in and have coffee and whatnot. Seems nice. I'm always a fan of seeing lots of people out. Nice to see so many people participating.

Unfortunately I didn't have a ton of time because I had to turn around and get home to change into warmer ski clothes to go help out teaching lessons to absolute beginners at Laajavuori. I have definitely never taught lessons to people who have barely even seen snow before. I really have no idea what the first things to learn are, especially after step 1: how to get up after falling down ("turtling"). After that I just tried to get them to walk around on skis and hope no one ended up with a concussion. I think, as could be expected, some people had fun, some people hated it. Some people also crashed.

There's only so many times you can say "bend your knees, keep your weight forward" and them not listening before you think "right, well, you deserved to crash that time".

Skate ski around the Laajavuori, to see how easy it was to get there from home. Just a bit of walking required.

I stopped my watch when I had to walk a bit, and stupidly forgot to turn it on again. As I was skiing, my Polar kept buzzing at me, and I thought it was some 1km split I had accidentally set, but it turns out it was just repeatedly reminding me "hey stupid, you paused me and forgot to start again", but I didn't realize that was what it was saying until I was mostly done my ski.

This watch is clearly TOO smart for me.

So... next weekend I've signed up for a ski race. No, two ski races. Its the Neljan Vuoren Hiihto race on Saturday, and... some other race whose name I can't pronounce on Sunday. 50k classic, then 25k skate. I've always wanted to do a double, so this is pretty close. Anyway, with an impending 50k classic, I felt I should go out and at least do a little double poling, so I headed up to kotalampi, and did about 40 minutes of double poling with my skate poles, because I haven't scraped any of my classic skis yet. My arms are in no way in 50k shape. This could be a suffer fest.

Evening shake-out run, and I definitely needed the shakeout. It took a solid 30 minutes before my legs felt significantly better. Glad I got out, and then hit the Sauna for a good hard sweat. And then two other people showed up in my sauna! THE OUTRAGE!!

Jumped on the treadmill at university. It was quite cold, so I sort of figured that the evening's sprint training would be cancelled. I got on there, and probably 15 minutes in, I noticed that there was someone sitting literally right behind the treadmill, apparently waiting to use it. There's no sign-up list for the treadmills, or any limit from what I can tell, so it was really, REALLY weird having her stand there. The girl beside me had been there for 20 minutes longer than I, but didn't seem to have any plans on getting off. I stopped at 30 minutes because it was so wildly uncomfortable for me. I felt like her eyes were burning a hole in the back of my head. Really weird.

Fortunately, the evening's sprinting didn't get cancelled! So, a few hours later I headed out for the other side of the lake for some Finnish style sprint training. By Finnish style, I mean this new proliferation of putting arbitrary fences everywhere. It was a small map, but we did multiple loops where the walls changed each time. Pretty tricky to try to plan the correct route with out self-disqualification. Good practice!

Tempo run with Samppa around the entire Jyvasjarvi. This was tempo from the word GO, too, no messin' around. I'm glad we did the whole thing, though. I'd never done the other part of the loop, and fully would have gotten lost. The entire lake loop is just about 13k. Very lightly rolling, but for the most part pretty flat. Averaged around 4:10/km, which was pretty comfortable for the heart, but got tough on the legs by the end. That was a pretty long tempo run, I'd almost prefer to run down to the lake as warm-up and then begin from there.

But, when you're finally getting to do some workouts with other people, you have to be a bit flexible. I think if I'm smart about it the length of that workout will be okay, and will really help my fitness over the next few months. There seems to be some enthusiasm to make it Tempo Tuesday. Sweet!

I forgot my headlamp tonight. You'd think that would be obvious once I start running and notice that, well, it was still dark out. But, I had lots of things on my mind and apparently being able to see was not one of them.

Its quite intriguing to see what thoughts affect the pace I'm unconsciously running at. If I were clever I'd start noticing and remember what topic I was on at that particular time and compare it to both my pace and my heart rate. Perhaps there could be some sort of strategy there. But how could I use that to my advantage? Maybe someone could be standing on the side of the road with different signs.

If I were running too fast, something like "Consonant change of the different verb types in Finnish!", which would presumably get me thinking so hard about when to go weak --> strong that I'd slow way down, almost to the point where I stop moving.

Or, if I were running too slow, something like "Remember that time you made the sprint final?", and all of a sudden I get a wave of happy-adrenaline and surge to victory. Angry-adrenaline would also work. I've got plenty of that.

Those are going to need to be big signs.