Workout Tuesday

6:30 AM, track, extreme cold (65F) added with a nice sunrise. Legs were stiffer than week ago, but I managed to run 5x1000m'400m with rather rendo (=relaxed) feeling. However, both hamstrings are pretty tight which means that once again I really have to stretch more. But it's so boring. I had scheduled a core workout for yesterday, but instead I found myself at the M&T Stadium among 60.000+ people watching Ravens vs. Jets. Maybe I do some core exercises today. Or maybe not.

In addition Nate Jenkins's after-the-marathon interview (he had pretty tough race), one other interesting interview was Matt Tegenkamp's where he shortly talks about the tv coverage of distance races here in the US. And I thought that the scarce visibility of distance running is only a problem in Finland. Teg is a professional athlete, who gets paid in his work and still he is worried about the future. All in all, US distance runners had a wide participation in Berlin, which as such already indicates the future potential embedded in their work.

Even if Finns have Jukka Keskisalo (8th in steeples in Berlin) and had Janne Holmén (he ended his great marathon running career two moths ago), we have clearly lost our competitive edge in general - even at the European level. We really respect those national top-level Finnish guys who put a lot of effort in their training, but in general I think that in Finland we are still watching too much backwards (1970s) without accepting the enourmous work load still laying ahead. Where is the much needed knowledge spillover to get more and more potential runners on the road and track? Old geezers are buzzing behind the corner, of course, but do they have any wisdom that could be provided to make distance running popular again... Many concentrate on blaiming other sports for taking away the potential runners, but that's not the solution. Blaiming others... To me the team-based approach - partly due to college running and very supportive pro-teams - has been one of the visible secrets enabling the current upswing in the US distance running. That kind of approach (excluding the college part) should also be applied in Finland, right? Most likely yes...

Ok. Now back to work.