Helsinki Half Marathon — May 2024

Up down, left-right, and so on 🙂

Helsinki was my last spring race this year, and after my poor performance in Prague, I had no expectations for this race. I went to Helsinki just to run, regardless of the result.

I had never been to Finland before, but from my arrival at the Helsinki airport, I noticed how green the country is. The airport is basically in a forest. The landing was bumpy, but I was too busy watching the surroundings to be bothered by the turbulence.

I flew with Lufthansa, and the ticket was affordable. I bought it in advance, so I remember the price was around 200 euros. The hotel we chose, Crowne Plaza Helsinki, was also great and located about 500m from the start. The quality was very good. I would say it was the best of my three half marathons this spring.

The City

Helsinki is a nice city to visit; it wasn’t crowded. I was surprised by how few people were on the street and the number of cars. It seems to be a city with a very relaxed way of living. The weather was cold (12C/53F) but sunny, which was also unexpected. If you were in the sun, you’d want to take your jacket off, but in the shade, you’d want to put a hat on. This made it challenging to decide on race gear: long sleeve or short sleeve, cap or no cap?

The city itself is very nice, and you can spend 2–3 days visiting. Since we came for the race, we didn’t see much, but we did visit the top 5 attractions listed on TripAdvisor. We visited the Sea Fortress Suomenlinna, the Temppeliaukio Church (which I highly recommend; I’m not usually a churchgoer, nor am I religious, but this church really impressed me), Helsinki Cathedral, the Old Market Hall (where I also had a traditional dessert), and Uspenskin Cathedral, an Orthodox cathedral.

The Race

The race kit was pretty standard: a t-shirt and multiple snacks. Access to the race kit and the expo was really easy for us, as we stayed just 500m away. It wasn’t crowded at all, and they printed my number on the spot. I didn’t know they could change the name on the number; they gave me the 666 starting number. I would have asked them to change it to “The Carpathian Beast.”

The reason for doing the Helsinki Half Marathon was that the finish was at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium which was a real attraction for us. The first race in an Olympic stadium. Helsinki hosted the Summer Olympiad in 1952.

Since I had a big dilemma on how to dress for the race, I went in the morning to watch the finish of the Marathon race, and I noticed that few runners were wearing long sleeves, almost half of them were wearing a cap, a big number of them were wearing even a singlet. So I decided to go in a t-shirt and a cap, I said that because of the wind, the singlet was not a good choice. During the race, I realized that a singlet would have been a better choice,

The start and the race itself were very well organized, there were 7577 finishers, I never felt that it was too crowded, maybe just the first 1–2 kilometers but after that the faster runners had plenty of room to go in front. The wind was also good, cooling you along the way from start to finish.

The course was the one below. The organizers said they changed it to be faster, but my impression is that it was too uphill and downhill. I can’t imagine how it was before the change because I can’t imagine worse than this.

As you notice in the picture, there are blue parts where Garmin says I was slow and green parts where Garmin says I was faster. Those are actually uphill and downhill areas, and as you can see in the picture, there are plenty of them on the entire course.

At some point, we got into a forest and the pavement was actually made of little pebbles, and as expected one of the got into my shoe. I tried to run with it but I realized that it was impossible. I made an effort and stayed with the little pebble in my shoe till we got out of the forest and stopped to get it out. That cost me approximately 40s, the official finish time was 1:47:08 but Garmin says “moving time” 1:46:21 which would have been my season best so far.

Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this race and especially the fact that the finish was at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium. I ignore the fact that they tried to ripoff people by charging 50 euros for the race photos because one of them was actually pretty good and worth 50 euros 🙂

I highly recommend the Helsinki Half Marathon, the one with a finish in the Olympic Stadium. It will become a great memory for you.