micke-midlife on January 17th, 2010

15012010048Met Ari Monday this week while he was running bare footed on the 400m track at the Esport Arena. First thought, did he read the book “Born to Run”? Did he perhaps read the review of it? (The book praises barefoot running as a cure to a majority of physical inhibitors to running.) Well, as it turned out, no and no. But still he saw me doing it the week earlier and thought that must be a good idea. Great when people think that stuff I do is a good idea. The little princess does this as well when I do stomach workouts or lick the desert bowl - the latter to some not quite approving looks from the other family member.

So Ari also runs barefooted and I joined up with him. After a couple of laps we agreed that we should also run some good intervals together. That seems a better alternative than torturing ourselves individually, hence we said to meet up this Friday to do a couple of 1000m runs.The preparation for the Hamburg Marathon is drawing upon gradually, it’s just another 2 weeks until the start of the 12 week preparation time. Hence it’s not bad to get some pre-taste of those bloody rough interval training sessions again. Friday came and there we were with a 8 x 1000m ahead. Ari, as a basketballer/footballer-turned-long-distance-runner, toned it down a bit “yeah, 3:40 - 4:00 min is what I think would work for those intervals”. Jepp, jepp, two three runs into the session, he headed the run with me 5-10m behind. And we did good ones, all somewhere between 3:23 and 3:28 mins.

Hm, I was thinking, this guy is not running too badly. He did the Helsinki City Run (half-marathon) in 1:25h and he likes the long run, in addition his base speed is good (with some more training) for 3:20 intervals. Just looked it up on the McMillan race calulator. Ari should be all set to go for a sub-3h marathon. Well, I’m going to suggest this to him tomorrow, we’re set to head out for the long one.

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