Helsinki Half Marathon 2014 – race report

Since I moved to Finland, I did my fair amount of races of various distances here… Some being short events like the Viikin Vitonen (5km), Helsinki Midnight Run (10km) but others being a bit longer like the Länsiväyläjuoksu (17.3km) all the way to different Halfmarathons like the Pääkaupunkijuoksu and the Rovaniemi Halfmarathon…

As it goes with yearly race schedules the same races keep on coming back year after year and it is therefore very seldom that new big events pop up. Organised by the team behind the “runners high hattrick” (another thing I should try to achieve), the race looked especially interesting to me as it would lead trough the neighborhoods of my earlier time in Finland.

Knowing how nice the stretch between Arabienranta to Viikki was, I therefore decided a while ago to sign up and add this event to my race schedule for this year.

With the usual mid-year low motivation, I only managed to excercise a few times in May – definitely not the best preparation for this race (or at least that’s what I thought). The weekend before the halfmarathon I then decided to go for a longrun around Laajalahti (which is nowadays fairly convenient) and extended the usual 16km-round with an extra loop towards the east. I was quite surprised when I approached home that I ended up doing an exact halfmarathon distance, and even more that I did it in a pretty good time as well (even though I just went “casually”). In the end it turned out that my end time was faster then my last official personal best time from Rovaniemi Halfmarathon last year! So maybe I wasn’t in that bad shape after all??

Trying to recover a bit until raceday I only went for some orienteering and rested for the remaining week.

Before the race, already sweating due to the high humidity…

Compared to other running events in Finland it was nice to see that this time there were starting sectors for the participants to line up. Ambitiously motivated from last weekend’s result I classified myself into the 1:45-2:00 group and hoped that I wouldn’t regret this later. The start itself wasn’t very spectacular and was followed by some narrowing as we had to run on the sidewalk of the street. After only a few hundred meters I could already feel that even though the weather was overcast and temperatures were around 16 degrees, the humidity made me sweat a lot… and by looking around I could see that I wasn’t the only one… After a quick check on my heart rate I decided to slow down a bit and saw how the pace runner (or “rabbit” – or jänis in Finnish) for 1:45 disappeared ahead of me… I assumed that this would happen at some point and decided to just check my pace using the virtual partner on my Garmin watch (which was set to the pace of last weekend’s run).

After some kilometers, people started to spread out and eventually we reached Arabienranta and the part of the race I had been waiting for. Already when I studied the map I saw that they marked the tunnel under the highway as “discotunneli” – which sounded promising… Sadly though the tunnel was a huge disappointment :-( no fancy disco lights or anything and the speaker they had set up to play some music – yes, you guessed it – wasn’t playing any music… Judging by the comments I heard in the tunnel, I wasn’t the only one who would have expected more – something to improve on for next year… :-)

On the returning stretch along the railway I then realized how much I had underestimated the few ups and downs which waited there for us. I tried to maintain my heartrate in order to survive until the end – unfortunately this meant slowing down uphill and after a quick check on my watch I saw that I was running behind my average pace I aimed at. Knowing that it would be fairly embarassing to be slower than on my casual weekend run, I increased my pace even though this meant going beyond my heartrate threshold and pushed through to the end.

The end result was a new personal best time (yes – faster than my previous weekend run) of 1hr 54mins. Happy with this achievement I went home for a quick change and then to the mökki to recover a bit for the rest of the weekend!