It has been over a year since I’ve last written here. Do not worry, I’m still running and doing other sports. This post is a recap of what has happened and why I’m going to run an ultra marathon. Year 2020 in review 2020 has been a tough one for everyone. Not so much for me. I’ve managed to avoid Covid and have been working remotely at home since March. What comes to running, I did have a small running injury at the beginning of the year, but nothing major. I managed to r

It has been a long time since my last blog post. Don’t get alarmed, I’m still here. I’ve been struggling with sports motivation and with that comes the lack of will to write new blog posts. Now I’m back to review the year 2019.

The relative effort is nowadays my primary measure to track progress. How does the progress compare to more traditional measures or am I even making progress? Relative effort As you may remember, I’m currently training based on the relative effort in Strava. Strava gives me a range of effort levels for each week and I’ll try to hit the upper limit to build up fitness. I’ve been doing this more or less for three months and as November started, I wanted to take a look and see how

What is this Volumetrics Diet everyone keeps talking about? Is it any better than the last hot diet and where is it based on? Let’s find out. Volumetrics Diet gets started well. It tries to make you stop trying with on-and-off diets and start a healthy lifestyle instead. The diet is developed by Dr. Barbara Rolls. She’s a professor of nutrition and head of nutritional sciences at Pennsylvania State University. She has written more than 200 scientific articles and has a lot of science

Everyone knows that you need to take small steps when ramping up your fitness. There are several ways to keep track of your running and to keep the trend rising. Here’s how I ramp up my fitness and keep track of it. What am I supposed to keep track of? The more traditional way to keep track of your running volume is to track your weekly time and mileage. How long you are running each week or how far you are running each week. Trail runners track more often the time than the mileage as the

My track record in running has not been a great one. I’ve injured myself twice. I’m still going for it the third time. What makes this time any different? History of running My first attempt at running in 2018 ended up me hurting my leg. I never did get any real diagnosis of it, but a good guess is a bursitis. This happened just when I was getting in good shape for a half-marathon in late spring 2018. As I recovered from bursitis, I started to get back in running slowly at the

I’m not dead yet. I haven’t been posting for some time. The last post was almost a month ago and I’m sorry about that. That’s all due to busy work schedule as well as catching a flu. I’m still here and here’s a status update of my current training. First, I got the flu. I’m not the only one and almost all of my friends have had the flu. Fortunate enough, it was not a bad one. I had a minor fever for about 3 days and after that I took few extra days befor

Spring flu is a thing in the past and I’m back on normal training mode. Last weekend featured a long run and fast intervals of 2 km and 1 km. The pain was guaranteed so let’s go through the workouts. My first week of April totaled 34.6 km which is very high for me. Maybe it was too fast after the flu, but I managed to work it out and maybe get away with it. The workout that we are talking about here, is long intervals workout. This means a fast workout where you run 1, 2 or 3 km long

It’s all fun and games until you get injured. Even a short recovery can be hard when you get to watch others still having fun and training without a single worry in their minds. If I’m injured and can’t run, either should you! Training is easy when everything goes well. You are healthy and you get results from all your hard training. This all changes when you get injured. As you might be aware, I injured my right ankle last week. It’s probably nothing more than a strain i

I ran my most recent race last Saturday. I had my doubts before the race about my leg. On the 5 km mark, my worst fear became true and I retired from the race. Here’s the race analysis of the 2019 Aurajoen yöjuoksu in Turku. The race was a 10 km race on a 5 km loop. 10 km runners ran the loop two times as the 5 km runners ran only one loop. As I walked across the finish line with the 5 km runners, I felt almost ashamed. I’m not even sure why. It was like the race number on my chest s

My last run was on April 27 and after that, I decided to take a break from running and let my leg heal properly. On May 16, I took the first recovery test run to see how the leg feels. It was 19 days since the last run. I didn’t have a diagnosis of the injury and I didn’t know how long I should keep on resting. The doctor said I could go and try running after a week. The leg was still hurting while walking so I didn’t want to risk it before last week. The recovery test run Ther

My leg is still keeping me away from running so I returned to the gym. I haven’t been really lifting at all this year so starting a new powerlifting program took some planning. Here’s a guide on how to get started with 5/3/1. What is 5/3/1? 5/3/1 is a very popular powerlifting program by Jim Wendler. The program focuses on the basic lifts. Your main lifts are bench press, military press, squat, and deadlift. That’s it. The main lifts have a very specific program which tells you

Intermittent fasting was and still is, a trendy way to lose weight. I have used it successfully before, but this time I went with the 5:2 method. Here’s my experience with the 5:2 after a few months. The end of last year was not kind to me. I gained extra weight without even realizing it. It all hit me this spring when I didn’t fit anymore into my motorcycle racing suit. This gave me enough motivation to actually get started with losing weight. Choosing the diet I have been dieting s

It has been two months since my last test run. The leg was not ok back then. I’ve had a feeling for a few weeks that maybe it could be time for another try to see how the leg feels about running again. It has been a while since the leg has been hurting. I was away on a holiday trip for the past few weeks so now it is time to start thinking about running again. I wanted to test the leg before the holiday trip but didn’t want to risk it. Being on a holiday trip with a hurting leg would

Going on a holiday usually means something other than training. Holidays are for relaxing and seeing new places. I’m telling that you can combine your holiday with sports activities and not feel bad about neglecting either one. This is how I spent the week during my last holiday trip. Holiday trips are special. Usually, you want to see as much as possible of the holiday destination. Going to the gym may not be the best choice in this case. There are plenty of other activities that you can