Helsinki City marathon

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I also wanna know

I will be there too but might not arrive until after the "people's" marathon which is to be held on August 5th at 3 pm. See

www.helsinkicitymarathon.com

.

By the way, does anyone know what airline has reduced fare plane tickets fom the US to Helsinki for the 5th of August?

I have done the HCM. The route is quite slow, possibility for headwind in some palces and a few hills. It is also quite beautiful and scenic route, decent organisation and frequent aidstations.

I've not run the race but have run in Helsinki and parts of the course. I'd agree with what Finn said, the course is not flat and it can be quite windy. Also, it starts at 3pm which means it can be pretty hot at that time in August. I don't think it's a course people should plan to run a PR on, but it is beautiful and should be very well organised.

One amusing statistic is that more Finns will probably be running Stockholm marathon than the Helsinki one. Out of 17000 registered runners for Stockholm, 5300 are Finns, compared with 5500 runners total for Helsinki last year!

I will be at the WC too and decided not to run the marathon, but did get tickets recently, through Priceline, with a combo of SAS and United. Flies us through Chicago, to Stockholm, then Helsinki, for around $1100, there are cheaper flights but much longer, this is a 13.5 hour one for us.

Man, that is expensive. I just came from Boston back to Finland and paid 375€ for my roundtrip.

Thanks for the information Mike.

Finn, we are finding it difficult to find cheap plane tickets because it is the peak of the tourist season. Also, at that time, this year the city will be full of track and field nuts.

OK, I understand. I can´t miss this WC, when I live 3 miles from the stadium.

I am coming from KC, so that adds to the cost. By the way, I am 1/2 Swedish, so am looking forward to touching Swedish earth for a brief moment or two. What should be my memorable moment while there, if I can get away from the airline terminal?

I ran the HCM and had a blast. at one point we were running on cobble stones through this massive crowd that was screaming. two odd bits were there were no mile markers, the splits were given out and the course was marked every thousand meters. also around 38 kilometers they were handing out pickles. my time was average for me.

the next day we linked up with the Helsinki Hash House Harriers who boast of having the only coed sauna after every hash.

Ran Helsinki marathon in 83. Course is different now. It used to go out toward Espoo and Tapiola. Now they run laps in the city. Not perfectly flat, and the streets are incredibly hard. Not like the USA, where they pave with asphalt, which has some give. These are mean streets- no give. I ran well for 16-17 miles, then cramped. 1 hr. 12 for last 5 mi. OUCH!! Race well run- splits every kilometer.

It goes towards Espoo and Tapiola. I am not talking about the World Championship course, which is laps in the city. There are no mile marks, because we use the metric system.

Mike: If you speak swedish, you can talk that in many parts of Helsinki. About 10% of people in Helsinki speak swedish as their first language and it is an official language in Finland.