Sporty thoughts by Sporty Smek

This is a kind of warm-up post for the world championship games in track and field to be held in Berlin. Yes, it's Smek, the couch potate in action again. But this time exercising himself as well. Great?

To start with, I like numbers. I also like Numb3rs. Although I'm not convinced that anyone could actually calculate and solve crimes using those never-really-shown-completed formulas. I don't buy it, but otherwise it's splendid waste of time for me. Anyway, we have some old, doping-smelling Finnish records existing. They date from the 70's and early 80's. One of the oldest, if not the oldest, Finnish record in track and field is in 3000-meter steeple chase. The holder of the record is semi-legendary Tapio Kantanen. Today we have a good contender for the record, Jukka Keskisalo. He's in good shape right now. Two weeks ago he tried to challenge the old record. It was exactly 33 years ago when Kantanen's record was set. On the dot. The run was progressing as planned, almost. When Keskisalo reached the finish line, his time was..... 33 hundredths of a second over the record time! It must have made him frustrated. As far as I'm concerned, I was delighted. See the play with number 33. I must admit that it would have been even greater a joy if Jukka had managed to improve the record 33 hundredths. On the other hand, it's good to leave him a bit hungry for the big games. He's missed two major events in a row due to injury, let's hope he'll be in shape this time.

Our kid has been attending to a track and field training this Summer. They practise in Nokia's athletic field. Stadium, if you will. That's a good place to exercise. In my childhood, I would have done anything to get there, but those days it wasn't possible. At least for us in our family. They get instructed while jumping and running. They also throw javelin, discus and shot. Sometimes they measure times and lengths, but it's basically more like a play. The young adult girls do the instructing, and to me it looks quite sloppy. Every once in a while there is a male instructer who usually gets more done. A little bit of army style but it works neverthesame.

One time our family was there by ourselves, simply having fun. I tried to inspire our daughter by exercising myself on the side. We had a watch and a measure with us, so it sounded more "official". I also wanted to see how I'd do today. I hadn't done anything like this in 25 years, at least. I remember my top score in long jump was something like 5,10 meters. I promised myself to jump at least 3 meters. And what happened: When I reached the plank, my feet kept on running! I tried again, and the same result. My head says "jump!" but my feets say "hell no!" I couldn't trust that I wouldn't hurt myself in landing or something. I was both confused and disappointed in my performance.

I also tried to run 60 meters. I figured that 100 meters in full speed might give me a heart attack, so I settled with this indoors sprint race. I ran it twice, both times in 10,2 seconds. The result was pretty good. While running, I felt like falling forward most of the time. My mind wanted to speed it up while my legs had a hard time coping with it. My wife stopped me from trying another time, and after a while I agreed with her. In my pre-teens, when I ran my 60 meters record, the clock stopped at 9,8. Never under that. Later, we changed the 60 meters to 100 at school, so I have no better time measurement for 60 meters during my most sportly active period. By the time I got to high school, I had dropped all exercise. That's something I regret today, but those days I just wanted to concentrate on music, music, music.

It will be interesting to see Michael Schumacher does, if he gets to race in F1 once more. In case he will be positioned amongst the top 10, I think it would be almost scandalous. I mean, how could it be possible that someone who hasn't raced seriously in three years could do such an impressive result? And how bad is the level of the other racers then? Of course, Schumi is a legend who won't ever give up, but Ferrari hasn't had good cars this year. But, like I said, it will be interesting.