Thursday 25 February 2016

conquering new lands, meeting the guru and then SHIT


Here we go: fucking photos of my food. Look there is my healthy porridge breakfast and there are my nutritious and oh so photogenic spinach, cheese and avocado lunch sandwiches! Look my life and training is under control and it looks good too...


Or it's not all that great after all. I am ill. My throat has endless amounts of lumpy snot stuck inside. Well at least I am giving my body all this beautiful nutritious food to help fight the germs. I am also giving it biscuits and wine (not in the picture). 

Last weekend I was rolling. Everything was going amazingly and my superpowers were definitely growing. On Saturday I planned my run beforehand on the map and then conquered Victoria Park. I can not believe how close it actually is! I've been an ignorant fool thinking it's somehow far away. Running alongside cycling are activities that indeed shrink your world. It started raining on my way home but I felt like a winner and decided to love the rain as well. Later on that evening I went to Niina's house and tried to help her swap the inner tubes and tyres on her bike. We were not totally successful but the evening was more of a hero evening than your usual Saturday night in a pub. Sunday was a busy day too. We went to see the exciting Cosmonauts exhibition in the Science Museum and straight from there I travelled to a very special karate class. Shihan (translates into something like a super duper extreme martial arts guru boss person) Stacey Karetsian had travelled from the other side of the world to teach us some of his karate magic. I imagined it being bit like meeting Jackie Chan or Master Shifu from Kungfu Panda. It wasn't exactly like that. I think the problem was the location. We were not on the top of a mountain in China but in a sports hall of a school in North London. I wasn't meeting my guru alone but there were LOTS other people too. It was all very good in any case and when I finally got home just before ten I was knackered but energised at the same time. I felt so good about myself but it was all about to change within an hour! After I managed to finish eating my late dinner, on the very moment of stopping to chew, my throat started to hurt. The pain came FROM NOWHERE. The illness came all of the sudden from NOWHERE!!!! What the actual fuck? What is the point of being all healthy and sporty over the weekend when partying hard leaves you feel better? ANGER

Tuesday 16 February 2016

run like there would be an explosion behind you!


I realise that few weeks has passed and I haven't updated anything about my excruciating training routine in here. This may be because the training has not been that excruciating or because I haven't come up with any enlightening realisations about my training. The smartest moment I had was when I decided to start jumping on and over everything whilst running. I can run. I can run long distances. Running is pretty much like meditation. No, running IS meditation. After roughly 20 minutes I start getting into a blissful zone. It's just me, myself and I and the ever changing surroundings. I don't need to think about what my body is doing too much. It just keeps on rolling. This is why I love running. When not running I am a nervous wreck kind of person. I feel strongly, I stress out about everything, I'm passionate, excitable, easily annoyed…I'm everything exhausting. I do not know how to relax properly unless running(or swimming to be fair). Now this may seem like madness to someone who does not run but I swear it makes perfect sense to me. So long distance running is my meditation and my shrink. BUT Tough Mudder is not just about running a distance. It's about everything else on the way. It's basically bit like running in an action film with your heart bounding from fear and excitement and exhaustion. It will be opposite to my meditative runs. I need to be alerted. I need to incorporate extra action and challenges to my run. I can't forget my body and just let it roll. My body needs to be ready to do zillion different things. That's why I started disrupting my runs by jumping on and over things. I also try to do all the "rides" on kids playgrounds, hang from anywhere possible etc. Basically I try to do parkour. To make my training even more Tough Mudder like I should probably roll on all the mud. I haven't done that yet. I might not ever do that.

Oh and above, that's me ready for my Valentines Day solo run. It was very romantic with me, myself and I.

Monday 1 February 2016

storm? I go swimming then!

Storm Henry has been rampaging through Britain. To be fair London probably only had the baby Henry but it has been very windy indeed. Cycling has been either stupidly easy or nearly an impossible task depending on the direction of this wind in relation to the direction of your journey. Sudden side way gusts do make any journey through traffic a rather dangerous activity. So on a day like this I decided to cycle a bit more on my way home. I cycled to London Fields lido to swim OUTDOORS! Since I don't really understand how to train for the Tough Mudder, I thought better to do a great variety of sports. Also I love swimming. I especially love swimming outdoors. Last year I got to know an amazing group of kick ass women who do outdoors swimming. I was lucky enough to go for a swimming trip to Thames with them last summer and meet them lots of times at my favourite spot in London: the Ladies' Bathing Pond. These super ladies swim in a pond all year round. Last time I went with them was in October when the water temperature was +12.5 C. Us Finnish people do swim all year round as well and even in much colder conditions than here in the UK but we go to sauna before and after. That makes a massive difference and makes these Brits pretty much super human. But back to todays swim. The lido is heated up. It's actually really lovely to swim in the middle of the winter. It's especially cool to swim in a stormy weather. There were even waves in the pool! I did 20 laps which is 1 km! I am not that good swimmer technique wise and really would love to learn better. Might go to some swimming classes at some point.