Sports

Good morning. Today I want to talk again about sports. We are almost at the end of the year so I can make a review of the 2008.

Running

Well, in 2008 I run for 1820km (and I still need to count the 150km that I will run this month). Compared with the 810km I run last year we can easily say that I made some progress. Even speed increased, now the minimum pace is 5min/km that, translated for people not so much into running, it means that I never run 10k in more than 50minutes (even for slow training). This year I took part to a 10k competition and two half marathon (all in Finland).
2009 goals: go under 40min for the 10k (5minutes better than my record) and run the half marathon in 1hour and 40minutes. If I reach this goal I could think about running the Helsinki Marathon 2009 (but I am not a big fan of marathons).
I am learning to train better, avoiding stupid injuries because of the over-training. Too many times last year and in the beginning of this year I had to stop because of over training injuries.
I am waiting the seasonal discounts to buy a new pair of running shoes (the 4th pair of my running career)

Basketball

I finally found a basketball team. We train twice a week. I still haven’t play any official game but I love to train trying to improve my shooting from the field.
Thanks to Marco S, he is also driving me to Espoo all the time.

Football

Well…if you told me few months ago that I would be playing in a football team I would have said you were crazy. But here I am….the goalkeeper of the MagniFiga, an italian football team in a finnish championship. Till now we won one game, twice we manage to make it same score (how do you say in english when no one win hehe) and we lost one game. Friday is training, Sunday is game day.

Cycling

ok….I don’t do any serious cycling but I bike at least for 5km everyday. I use it to move around the city here in Helsinki: rain, snow and wind included in the price. The only problem is that when temperature goes under 0°C everything starts to freeze and bike…starts not working. Gears don’t work, breaks don’t work and you can imagine…it’s extremely cold to bike with -10°C.

Tennis Table

I am not playing as often as I used to in the beginning of the year but for 6months I used to play twice a week with the best player here in Helsinki (and with people from Uzbekistan, China, Brazil, England). Let’s say that I managed to improve my service but my forehand still sucks.

Ultimate (Frisbee)

During the summer I played Ultimate with friends here in Helsinki. The all point of the game is running trying to catch the Frisbee. If a friend throw is….catch it…if someone of the other team did it…intercept or try not to let them catch it. A very sweaty game. There are official rules, federation and championship…in the US. But as a game is very popular here in Finland.

That’s all?

I don’t think I am practicing more sports at the moment. Ok, I do some muscular training home and in the forest where I found some equipment, but that’s all.
So in the next post I could talk about my dancing course…and then I am almost done with the sweating activities.

In italian – in finnish