Matti Vesterinen

Ordered a road bicycle from Wiggle. My old bike dated back to around 1990 and was a Wheeler mountain bike. It would have been challenging to use that one in any kind of triathlon. Not knowing anything about road cycles, I googled a bit and as I still did not know anything I browsed Wiggle for cycles at around 800 €. This Wilier La Triestina Black from 2011 looked most promising, thus I ordered one. The bicycle came in two boxes yesterday, which was 15 days after the order. One box included the tires and the other one the actual bike. The bike was relatively easy to assemble although all the needed tools were not included (I bet Ikea would use only one size bolts). I will need to still tune the derailleurs etc. Before that I already went for a test drive finally today. Bike felt rather shaky at first but after the first 100 m I already wanted to increase the speed. Top speed over 53 km/h, average 27 km/h on a 16 km workout; so, looking good I bought quite a lot of extra equipment already from France but I still need to buy at least a new helmet (otherwise, the old one will get me neck pain).

As we know the European Championships will be held this year in Helsinki. Theme videos are shot today and tomorrow at the Helsinki Olympic stadium for the games and I was called to help. I proposed to look for someone else; maybe, a person who would still be an active (dec)athlete, but they could not find one so I got to do couple of the events. Instruction was to take all the spikes and shoes with me so that I can do whatever events they did not have yet athletes for. I ended up doing long jump, javelin, short hurdles and pole vault. I enjoyed doing again sports in the Helsinki Olympic stadium in the best weather we have had yet this spring. The filmed slow motion (25% speed) videos will be used to create a theme video for the games and short presentation videos for each event. You get to judge once they are published…

Monday runs moved outdoors and we went to Herttoniemi to run uphills and stairs. Once is enough to give needed impulse to the body, especially to the lugns. We have certain two uphills which we run; first a gentle one (today 48 & 45s) and then a steep one (56,6 & 58,9s). On top of those we run long stairs, first on every step (47,7s) and then on every other (30s). At the top of the stairs, one can enjoy the scene over Helsinki; which works as a natural pain killer.

We had more luck with the weather in our second competition in France on April 28. Around 28 Celsius although the wind was still rather strong; only this time headwind on the long jump. There were 43 of us in the long jump and the two hour competition started 30 minutes late. I was second to last jumper so the wait was long before the first jump. I placed my foot on the board too well on the second jump (644) and hurt my heel. I still jumped all the six jumps and improved to 653 (-1,1) on the last attempt. It felt great to do long jump again. Luckily it is now easier to do a proper jump with less speed on the board. I also improved the 400m time to 52,95. Hoping that would be sufficient to get on one of our relay teams.

Spent two weeks in France in a training camp. The first ten days were exceptionally cold and rainy. Season opening was done in Bourg-en-Bresse on April 21. I was lucky to get to do all my three events before the rain. I did five rounds of long jump in a nice tailwind: 625 (-1,0) 618 (-0,3) 610 (+1,1) 638 (+0,6) and 580 (+2,4). Then 100m 12,29 (-0,7) and straight after it 400m 54,53. Wind felt pretty strong which is not evident from the measurements since it came mostly from the side. I hoped for better times even though running did not feel that great on that day.

Participated yesterday in to my first road running 10 km competition. I had run every day during the Easter holidays so my muscles were sore already before the race. Running felt pretty difficult from the very beginning. My plan was to start with 4 min / km pace and see how it goes. It went fairly well the first six km but then I lost too much and was 12 seconds behind the 40 min time at eight km. I tried to speed up but still was 11 seconds behind on nine km, which was too much. Time 40.03 is still far better than what I expected with those muscles. This morning’s massage will hopefully improve the recovery. We are soon off to France where I plan to start the outdoor track competition season.

Finally tested what benefits can an iPad bring to coaching. I have previously used small digital cameras, such as Canon IXUS series, to film perfomances. In those, the downside is the really small screen size for replaying the perfomances at the track. iPad brings a huge improvement to that. However, the out of the box iPad cannot replay videos in slow motion or frame by frame. Luckily there are plenty of coaching apps, which do that and plenty of more. So far I have tested only an app called Excelade. It offers a powerful set of features. The only bad thing is that it takes quite a long time for Excelade to process a video and that is needed in order to view the video in slow motion etc. Usually an athlete has time to do another try before the video is ready to be viewed, so the feedback is not immediate. Otherwise, I am very pleased with the application and the iPad. The only issue is now that we might need to buy another iPad to be kept at home…

As I wrote earlier, I abandoned the traditional jogging warm-up when I quit my decathlon career. In the absence of excess time, I try to make the most out of the time spent on the track, including the warm-up. I have tried to come up with a set of different warm-ups, from which I choose based on what is the main content of the training session. The main function of warm-up is naturally to prepare the body for the training at hand. Especially for a combined event athlete it is also a way to get enough of running included in to the training program.

Here are examples of warm-ups that I use (amounts and distances vary quite a bit):
- Drills 12 x 80m continuously, all sorts of drills
- Drill & jog 10x(2x)100m, on a 400m track, drill on the straights, jog the curves
- Run & drills 6x(2x)80m, running one way and a drill back
- Run 8x80m, jog back
- Run 8x100m, back and forth, turn and run back from the 100m line
- Run 800-1000m, start by jogging and accelerate throughout the run
- Run 5x100m + 1x200m, walk 100m in between each run, each run faster than the previous
- Run 100m+200m+300m+400m+500m, walk 100m in between each run
- Run on a football field: run fast the long sides and one short side of the field, jog the other short side, continue till you do not recover during jogging
- Run 10x300m (10 or till you do not recover) (on sand or grass fields), jog 300m in between each run
- Run 5x2min + 5x1min on a soft surface, walk 1min in between each run
- Warm-up with weight lifts and / or medicine balls

I use all sorts of drills. YouTube helps when I run out of fresh ideas of my own. Gymnastics drills work well in between running drills.

Hospital was an uncommon place to follow the Finnish indoor championships. The live result service worked nicely and I got to follow as my athlete made a new PB in long jump and took silver. I tend to comment quite a bit on the spot, especially in the beginning of a coach – athlete relationship. Competitions are the thing you train for so I think it is a must that you follow the same principles in the competition as you do in training. At least I get frustrated when I see my athletes do things totally differently in competitions. When that happens you cannot tell whether the changes you did in the training were positive. Consequently, I try to get my athletes repeat the trained things in competitions. When they do that they also learn how a certain performance feels like and eventually learn to judge for themselves and make themselves less dependent on the coach.

We will see if I get to coach this guy one day.