10. Kettuhölkkä in Kinnula(FIN): 13km – 44:41min (1st place)

May 23, 2009

Today I wrote history at least some part of my own history in Finland. For the first time I could defend a title in a Finnish running competition and also I set my first course record on Finnish soil.

Last year I competed in the “Kettuhölkkä” as the race is called three weeks after I ran my first marathon. Last year I won with a time of 45:28min, so this year I improved my own time by 47seconds and broke the previous course record by 4seconds. I actually didn’t knew the course record so I was pretty surprised when the speaker announced it at the finish. At least the previous record holder was a 2:22h-marathoner, so not too bad.

Conditions were great, even if it was a bit warm at the end, because the sun came out again in the second half of the race and temperatures almost reached 20 degrees. Overall the feeling was better than in the competition two days ago. Even though the freshness in the legs was again missing I could stay calm all the time and controlled myself, not to brake anything or to cramp. So the mental focus was much better and relaxed. The pace was again between 3:20 and 3:30 for most of the time and given that the course was more challenging than the one I ran two days ago the performance was at least not worse than in that last race. Anyway, 3:20 would be marathon pace and there is still a lot of work to do until I am ready to go this pace for 42,2km.

Now I hope that I will have more opponents in the next competition, because this time I had a lead of 3minutes again and was not pushed at all. Most likely the next race will be the 10.000m track championships of my German home federal state of Saxony and there I hope that someone will kick my butt