Having it good at home.

At first, for once I do have shitloads to write about. Don't panic though. Grab a cup of coffee or whatever you wish and have a read. At the moment I'm spending the last night of my home stay, but more about that later. Let's go back to Manchester first...

So I went to Manc for my first world cups. We had three days of official training and then on Friday I had my race. The training went really well, considering that I haven't been on track too much. I was quite confident to hit my target and that feeling got just stronger as the Friday came closer. It wasn't wrong. The near catastrophical times in arctic Kaarst were behind and, for everyrone's luck, the drome in Manc was nice smooth and warm. The official hotel was lush in terms of the rooms, but as we went for dinner – it wasn't quite so pleasant. Organizing dinner and lunches for athletes; and they give each rider one piece of salmon or whatever. What the hell was that all about? The best bit of the food happened to be the canned yoghurt, they couldn't destroy it. More about the training, I felt good and managed to do my efforts, so happy days.

Race day baby! I had a good chat with my father/coach/chauffeur/chef/soigneur/physio (the problem with being such a small cycling country) about the days schedule and warm up. To the track we went well before the race, to grab our lunch bags and have chill time gettin' ready for the race. Sad but true, the lunch bags were better than the actual lunch in the hotel. Some areas for improvement, ha? At the track center it was cool and I warmed up well, went to the bike check, checked the position and 5-4-3-2-1-beep! The race was on.

Well, I had a good schedule. But what if I don't follow it? The planning has been real waste of time. And I made sure of that at the very first lap. At 1k split I was three seconds ahead of the planned pace. Mitä junnuhöntyilyä, hä? That somehow caused quite a struggle for the remaining three kilos. The good news was that I wasn't doing badly after setting 70s kilo for the first one. FYI: my kilo record is 67 seconds. But at least my pair didn't overtake me at the very start, and I was in Top-3 for a quick while at 500m mark. So I've been in Top-3 at world cup level for a while... Yippikayey. I didn't end up high though by placing on the bottom side, which really wasn't a surprise. Tough guys are tough, I'll be there one day. Despite that I managed to keep the ride together quite well. I ended up recording my PB's for 2k, 3k and also for the full distance 4k. I ended up with 4.49,526 and I gotta say I'm pleased. There are some easy seconds to cut from the time and then there are the hard ones. There's always next time and we are on the track now.

After that we just enjoyed the experience and had quality time watching the races and eating the crappy food. Or if you can call couching badly for all night quality time, I don't know then. One day off and then some floorball. Not many guys go for world cups and national championship tournaments at the same weekend. I did that, but I also was dead tired at the end.

Now I've been home for a good week. I played some hockey and I'm fair bit disappointed with my parents (not really). I'm sure I could be in NHL now if they had let me play as I was a kid. But no. My mom would have the Porsche I promised, but no. I was about to go for some xc-skiing, but successfully killed those thougths for some reason. I've also eaten whatever I like. Also my father seems to have successed with me, I've began to like red wines as well. Anyway, it's been good times and now it is back to basics.

P.S. Some pics will follow later on.