A fine Swedish road......
Check out the skates (the neck thing are ice picks just in case you fall through the ice)
It will make more sense when you read below : )
I didn't want to rub it in his face, but well done Andy Murray, haha. No seriously, kudos to Mr. Federer, it's nice to have watched the career of the best in their field. Almost unquestionably the best tennis player ever, may be the Swedes have an arguement about that one!
Not to bring it back to a real sport, but the Swedish (squash) open is this weekend, where again some of the world's best are going to be. I shall be heading down to Linköping to see how to play real squash.
There was another first for me last weekend. The first was a Torvill and Dean impersonation of the highest quality. Well kind of. You see Sweden is similar to England in one sense- they invent things only they play/do to appear good at something. Take England for example, we have darts, snooker and the most pointless sport ever created, cricket, and bar the later, we are truelly awesome. If you don't know who Phil 'the Power' Taylor is, then you should. Sweden do this to a certain extent, but we will let them off.
For starters, they only have 9 million or so ex-vikings, who have to indulge in sports such as bandy, innebandy, handball etc. The one thing we did on the weekend was similar to ice skating, well a different version infact (yes it will make sense I promise). It's called långfärdsskridskor, or long-journey-ice-skates. There are a number of different styles of this too. We had an army boot/original ski boot setup with a fixed heel. The other type is a cross country ski heel release type thing. The things are then about as long as speed skates (yes another pointless 'sport') but these things are surprisingly stable.
Despite the weirdness of it all, the whole experience was rather pleasant. To be out on a frozen lake, only months before we swam in, out in -10, with 30 cm of untouched snow to gaze across, in the glorious sunshine, was not a bad way to spend a couple of hours. No falls either, but one thing I have to mention, which I thought (again) was hysterical, was a poor young women, on the ice, in a remote part of one of the ice tracks, selling hot dogs from a cart, hahaha. Of course Johanna thought this was normal and the joke was apparently on me (also again).
Well this whole thing set us up nicely for our Sunday run. For those who don't know, we are glutton for punishment and have entered the Stockholm marathon again. This time though we are actually going to do some proper running training. We decided to start as of Sunday it seems: a nice casual jog for 2 hours, covering 20 km in -11, running in the snow, whilst snowing. I was impressed for a couple of reasons. The main one being the furthest we'd actually ran before the marathon, was based on time, for 1 hr and 15 mins. You can do the maths, but lets just say a marathon is going to last around 4 hoursish, and we ran for just over an hour, once. Hmmm, so to run basically a half marathon in these conditions was actually a pride filling moment.
I did do something incredibly retarded afterwards though. I ate food, no problem, but this was to give me energy for what I did next. Yes, I'm a nob I know, but I decided to play squash for 1.5 hrs, with a mixture of drills and conditioned matches. In a couple of words, complete penis comes to mind. So guess how my legs feel now? Well remember my teeth? If you take that pain and put it below my waist, that's pretty much where they are now.
So the fact that I punished my groin (through skating, not anything else) on Saturday, ran 20 km in the morning only to push myself in a concrete box, really has done wonders for my body. The fact that I'm still alive is a bonus. More incredibly, I can still walk. Just awesome. I'm not old, not yet.......
Not to bring it back to a real sport, but the Swedish (squash) open is this weekend, where again some of the world's best are going to be. I shall be heading down to Linköping to see how to play real squash.
There was another first for me last weekend. The first was a Torvill and Dean impersonation of the highest quality. Well kind of. You see Sweden is similar to England in one sense- they invent things only they play/do to appear good at something. Take England for example, we have darts, snooker and the most pointless sport ever created, cricket, and bar the later, we are truelly awesome. If you don't know who Phil 'the Power' Taylor is, then you should. Sweden do this to a certain extent, but we will let them off.
For starters, they only have 9 million or so ex-vikings, who have to indulge in sports such as bandy, innebandy, handball etc. The one thing we did on the weekend was similar to ice skating, well a different version infact (yes it will make sense I promise). It's called långfärdsskridskor, or long-journey-ice-skates. There are a number of different styles of this too. We had an army boot/original ski boot setup with a fixed heel. The other type is a cross country ski heel release type thing. The things are then about as long as speed skates (yes another pointless 'sport') but these things are surprisingly stable.
Despite the weirdness of it all, the whole experience was rather pleasant. To be out on a frozen lake, only months before we swam in, out in -10, with 30 cm of untouched snow to gaze across, in the glorious sunshine, was not a bad way to spend a couple of hours. No falls either, but one thing I have to mention, which I thought (again) was hysterical, was a poor young women, on the ice, in a remote part of one of the ice tracks, selling hot dogs from a cart, hahaha. Of course Johanna thought this was normal and the joke was apparently on me (also again).
Well this whole thing set us up nicely for our Sunday run. For those who don't know, we are glutton for punishment and have entered the Stockholm marathon again. This time though we are actually going to do some proper running training. We decided to start as of Sunday it seems: a nice casual jog for 2 hours, covering 20 km in -11, running in the snow, whilst snowing. I was impressed for a couple of reasons. The main one being the furthest we'd actually ran before the marathon, was based on time, for 1 hr and 15 mins. You can do the maths, but lets just say a marathon is going to last around 4 hoursish, and we ran for just over an hour, once. Hmmm, so to run basically a half marathon in these conditions was actually a pride filling moment.
I did do something incredibly retarded afterwards though. I ate food, no problem, but this was to give me energy for what I did next. Yes, I'm a nob I know, but I decided to play squash for 1.5 hrs, with a mixture of drills and conditioned matches. In a couple of words, complete penis comes to mind. So guess how my legs feel now? Well remember my teeth? If you take that pain and put it below my waist, that's pretty much where they are now.
So the fact that I punished my groin (through skating, not anything else) on Saturday, ran 20 km in the morning only to push myself in a concrete box, really has done wonders for my body. The fact that I'm still alive is a bonus. More incredibly, I can still walk. Just awesome. I'm not old, not yet.......
