Rovaniemi Halfmarathon 2013 – Race Report

After my quick visit in Tokyo, I only had a short time to unpack and repack my clothes and running gear. Fortunately I’m getting quite good in packing my little suitcase so that this wasn’t too much of a problem.

Friday morning it was then off to the airport again to fly to Rovaniemiemi. It was kind of fun to fly domestic in Finland. In Switzerland I would have never considered taking the plane to go to Geneva. This just shows once again how much bigger Finland is.

Arriving on Friday I quickly found the airport shuttle which took me straight to my hotel. After checking in and dropping my stuff in my room I went then on looking for the Santa Claus hotel where everyone was supposed to pick up their race bibs. Yep, everything in Rovaniemi is about Santa and his reindeers.

The race itself went extremely well. I followed my own pace trying not to start too quickly. The goal as always was to end with a time under two hours, but with all the traveling to Tokyo and back I was not too confident that I would achieve that. With the sun out it was incredibly hot and there were only a few spots along the track where we could run in the shadow. It was funny to see how people ignored the official marked lanes and just ran wherever they could find some protection from the sun. After 15km I started to feel exhausted, wasn’t really sure if it was the sun, the jetlag or then maybe the combination of it all together. Nevertheless I continued, passing other runners who stopped, obviously suffering as well. Closing in to the final line, I was quite surprised to see that I managed to keep my pace which meant that I was still good on track for my 2 hour time. Motivated by that thought, I pushed myself a bit further and finally reached the end at 1hr 57mins! A new personal best, and this time confirmed by the official time keeping of the race organizers.

The next day I still had some time before my flight left and decided to use the bike from the hotel to ride to Santa Claus village. Obviously middle of the summer is not the ideal time to visit there, but having read that they marked the polar circle on the ground, I had to go and see it (yep, crazy surveyor). It wasn’t too far away, but somewhere after half-way it just started raining heavily. Obviously I wasn’t prepared for that and ended up soaked wet by the time I was back at the hotel. Anyways, I managed to take a quick peek around at Santa Claus village and saw the polar circle – Yeyy! :-)