I just got done with my first bike ride in several days. The weather has been rainy and cold—deeply overcast and dark. The days off from exercise have been getting to me. I don’t know if it’s just the rainy overcast, or the fact I haven’t been moving, but I made myself go today even though it’s still not wonderful outside. It warmed up to 54˚F though. It was a sign. So, I got out and started to climb up to Halssila, and by the time I was on the ridge, I was a different person. I was getting tired when I was biking the days before the stretch of bad weather, and could feel it in my legs. The time off was good because today I was “back.” I rode the ski trails through the woods to Vaajakoski, rode the 5k course from the 2014 Finnish National Ski Championships, then rode back to the apartment. The sauna is on. Life is good.
It’s a Wednesday morning and the number of people I encountered between here and Vaajakoski kind of blew me away. I basically covered about 20km of trail, and I encountered at least 50 people on the trails. Actually, probably more like 75. I saw runners, dog walkers, other bikers, and lots of Nordic walkers. I saw a few people bent over in the woods, probably picking mushrooms.
The trails aren’t way out in the boonies. At least not all of them. They wind through neighborhoods, then into what are known as “kangas”es—sort of a high, pine forest with no under brush—we don’t have a specific name for kangas in English. The trail alternates between high points in the kangas then dips down into swamps, and back up again. There are two trail heads between here and Vaajakoski, so between those and the adjoining neighborhoods, you can see how the trails get populated fast. In an hour and 20 minute ride, I came to a stop 3 times because of proximity to others.
This is life in Jyväskylä, the self-proclaimed sports capital of Finland.
Jyväskylä has a long history of driving Finnish Olympic high performance, for better or worse, especially in endurance sports. My first real coach went to school here in the 1980s and the exercise science being done here was cutting edge in the free world at the time. Arguably only the Soviet Union and East Germany could probably claim to know as much or more about how the human body reacts to training stressors. The exercise science sport performance program continues to be a key global player in that capacity, despite a rise in similar focus in Norway and Sweden in recent decades. It is a Finnish Olympic Committee training and testing center. One of my top skiers at St. Scholastica graduated from the exercise science masters program here a few years ago.
The influence of all this is felt too. Jyväskylä is a university town, and its research wing for exercise is robust and active. First Beat Systems is a company I’ve been aware of as a friend in the United States sells their impressive systems that has grown out of this setting and is contributing tech to the modern fitness boom. You'll find these systems in NHL practice rinks. They have a whole methodology to keeping the different lines stimulated and recovered just right depending on their output. A first line player might get a day off based on the system's analysis, whereas a fourth line player might get a hard effort after a game or the next day, depending on the fitness intent. It's amazing stuff. The systems aren’t cheap, as you might imagine, but they are cool to a guy like me. Using devices to measure vital signs against personal attributes tested in the athletes, First Beat gives coaches and trainers an incredible amount of accurate personal data from which to ascertain optimal training and subsequent recovery models based on specific and general athlete testing, research, and algorithms derived therefrom. The day after we moved into my apartment, I discovered First Beat world headquarters around the corner from our front door. Small world. They were acquired by Garmin in June. Based on my rudimentary experience with both companies, this seems like an acquisition that will dial in some applications for Garmin that they are already trying, but probably with less accuracy for the general consumer. First Beat should make Garmin’s tech toolkit for training loads and recovery a lot better.
The reach of sports science is amazing in this town. The first week Iita was on the JYP U10 hockey team, we got an info packet and waiver request through the club from the university research wing to see if Iita would wear a monitor on her wrist and around her waist for a week. Um, yeah! Sign us up! They wanted to see how a 9-year-old active kid practicing hockey two times a week reacts to that level of exercise, their sleep and bio rhythms, heart stress, etc... Pretty cool. Some of the data that will probably go into creating an algorithm that will likely end up on your Garmin in 2025, and maybe in your corporate wellness plan too.
The facilities around Jyväskylä for sports are impressive. Besides trails and biking as a lifestyle here, you can do just about any sport. Basketball is on the rise due to Lauri Markkanen playing for the Chicago Bulls. I saw a brand new outdoor court in the university athletics complex today. Public clay tennis courts abound. Two golf courses and Frisbee golf courses everywhere. Archery? Just a few blocks from us. Outdoor adventure park, lift service mountain biking, skate parks, pickle ball, kayaking, fishing, windsurfing, mechanical waterskiing. alpine and Nordic skiing, ski jumping, and of course, ice hockey AND bandy. Finnish baseball (pesapallo) is big too as their women’s team just won their 3rd straight national title. I was between Taavi’s team’s floorball (floor hockey) games last weekend and wandered into an amazing indoor track and field facility with elegant banked corners on its 200 meter track. It was the most spacious indoor track space I’ve been in. It’s all here.
Mechanical water skiing on Jyväsjärvi
Pesapallo, Finnish baseball. Jyväskylä women just won their 4th straight Finnish Championship; a kids practice field at the sports high school
Hipposhalli indoor track facility
Mimmu joined a Wednesday workout hockey/lunch combo at Buugi, the new health, tennis, and hockey center on the outskirts of town where Iita practices. She gets an hour of on-ice scrimmage with a random rotation of guys, use of the locker rooms and sauna, and lunch, for just €12. They make it easy, don’t they?
And all that still isn’t good enough. Hippos 2020 is a delayed-by-Covid-19 initiative that leverages €220-250M in joint publicly- and privately-funded sports facility infrastructure. Touted as an urban center for sport, exercise, and well-being, with the motto “Move, enjoy, and be well,” that will take Jyväskylä to the next level. That sounds like a lot of money to spend on getting people active and healthy, but I can’t help but contrast it to the $1B Minnesota spent on a Vikings football stadium that really just encourages its citizens to spend even more of their money, sitting down, drinking really expensive beer, and eat really expensive, unhealthy food, leading to a quicker, more expensive trip through our healthcare system, to the cemetery. I won’t stand to hear a single Minnesotan say “but what about the TAXES?!” when the cost of living in Finland comes up. US Bank Stadium forfeits that argument right out of the blocks. It’s all relative.
I’ve never really been all that into personal fitness. I have always liked being fit to do the sports I like to do, but fitness has never been a goal in and of itself for me. I know that might seem odd from a guy who has busied himself most of his adult life figuring out optimal ways to exercise for the greatest performance effects. But most of that time has been spent doing it for and with others.
Since I quit competing 20 years ago and really quit caring how I did 22 years ago, the spare tire that I’ve never seemed to be able to shake, still sits there above my waist band like it always has. To say I don’t care about it is an overstatement. To say I don’t care enough to take action against it specifically, would be accurate.
I’ve always liked to ride my bike, for example. Not to get fit or look fit. Just like the Queen song, I simply want to ride. I love how when my hips and quads and core are strong, they just rotate like a big machine and churn power to the wheels through the drive train. The feel of a fit, powerful acceleration at will is euphoric. I certainly don’t have the kind of power I did in my 20’s, but as I type this out after my morning ride, being in relatively decent biking fitness for a mostly-unfit 48 year old with Parkinson’s Disease slowly setting in, there’s something immensely satisfying about even the power I have been able to find this summer right down to today. But when I’m not bike fit, it is equally discouraging to be obliterated by any and every incline—a sensation I’ve probably experienced more than not in the last 20 years. We all need to get over the hump, and stay there for it to be fun.
The relative fitness is not lost on my wife though, thank goodness. She told me after sauna yesterday that she doesn’t ever think she’s seen me this fit looking (I stress the relativity again, and I think she’s wrong. I was fitter in 2008), and she’s remarked a few times this fall how lean and strong my legs look. Hey, approaching 50 with a neurodegenerative disease, anything that makes your wife think you’re still hot is probably advisable to continue with.
For the most part, I’ve always liked cross country skiing too, though I actually loathed it as a little kid. I hated how my 75mm bindings pinched the tips of my ski boots and my already-freezing toes. I hated the first climb up Lookout Mountain outside of Virginia, MN, when my older brother would herringbone effortlessly up the narrow trail, while I’d get my tip caught on a sapling, start sliding backwards, fall to my knees to stop the backwards slide, and grunt out a 10 year-old’s frustration as it was happening. I wanted to be back on the couch in our living room watching reruns of The Munsters and eating Cheeto’s on our 12 inch black and white Sony, not sliding backwards in the snow with freezing pinched toes in the woods. It’s a touch ironic, how my life turned out, isn’t it?
For a spell, I loved sea kayaking too. So much so, that some friends and my brother and sister in law opened a store that sold really nice sea kayaks and took people on tours of Lake Superior in them, which in short time, ruined my love of sea kayaking. At the height of my active kayaking, I could set out and just paddle and paddle and paddle, for miles. I loved how Lake Superior shared its moods under my hips; how my ass became one with the lake. I loved how my core fired and stabilized me and my boat on the shifting lake as my arms gripped the water with paddle blades and we’d juke and jive each together for a couple of hours in a gale force wind or dance a tranquil waltz together at dusk.
In all those activities, fitness matters. It really matters when you want to go to the Olympics too. For the Olympic thing, I got very, very fit. I was also probably very determined, believed in myself more than I probably had the good sense to for my ability, and soaked up info and culture on how I could become that person, and from that, moved into coaching. But the fitness was just a side effect. Fitness has always been a means to an end for me. So, when I haven’t had much of a clear end, the means has suffered.
My end now, is stable, calm muscles that I am in control of. I don’t discuss my Parkinson’s Disease much. I’m not sure why, but I think I might feel like speaking its name gives it more power over me. That doesn’t mean I’m in denial either. I just want to be in the driver’s seat.
To be clear, PD still takes up very little of my conscious and emotional energy. I like it that way. I have a pill regimen that I work periodically with my doctor to adjust. That regimen will continue to evolve and at some point require a new, perhaps more drastic solution. But for now, it’s working. Sort of. I can feel the drug’s snails-paced diminishment in its effect over time, and while I try to ignore it, it’s still there, and strategies will still need to evolve as I continue to live. But regular exercise helps.
A few things about our life here in Jyväskylä compared to that in Duluth have probably changed my life for the better on that front. First and foremost, I am a workaholic. Let me rephrase that; I am a coachaholic. I actually hate work, which is why I chose to go down the lucrative career path of coaching endurance sports. Being able to talk about sports in a quick, sometimes emphatic and analytical way has turned out to subsidize my coaching affliction quite nicely too. I allow coaching to consume me if I let it, because coaching doesn’t feel like work to me. At least not always.
While most of America is sound asleep, I’m still churning out some impressive days of recruiting work over here—which if you have ever been, or know any college coaches intimately, you know one could spend every waking hour recruiting and it’s still never going to feel like “enough.” In reality, it might not end up being enough in the end even if my effort is Herculean. I feel that while 2020 has been rubbish overall for all of us, it has been the year Chad (maybe) got a hold of a recruiting system that’s going to work the way he wants it to. At least I hope so. Jury is still out. Regardless, despite the recruiting churn, I have been able to create a life rhythm here that is probably healthier for me and my particular life challenges compared to the groove I was in pre-Covid. It’s one of those silver linings I keep telling my athletes to watch out for in disappointing times.
With Covid shutting down my team’s season and opening some space for me to work remotely from here, it changed my outlook in ways I could never have done otherwise. I’m seeing my behavior change, and in some cases, like exercising regularly, it’s for the better. Maybe it’s the fact that after most bike rides, my PD symptoms disappear entirely for at least a portion of the day, or maybe it's just a better way to live? But I actually crave a ride now more than at any time recently, and that’s even without the sexy flowy single track that spans Duluth. I also am 8 hours ahead of everyone at home so my day rhythm carves out exercise time much more easily. And finally, Jyväskylä’s access to exercise is readily evident as is the culture—like the 75ish people I ran into exercising at 10 am this morning.
I’ve been asked many times where I’d most want to live if I lived in Finland. I have to admit I haven’t been fair to Jyväskylä. When we’ve been here in the past, we have essentially been on vacation. I’ve always said Tampere feels right to me. Tampere is the Vienna of Finland; historic, classy, old European architecture, theaters, cafes and restaurants, bridges, and flowing rivers through town make Tampere feel like the classic cultural vacationer’s choice. It speaks to those parts of me I don't live daily but aspire to be more often—the opera or art gallery or symphony guy. Helsinki is chic by comparison too, which has always come to the forefront on that question. Helsinki feels cosmopolitan; like a place I'd like to feel right in, but I’m probably honestly not ready for as a home.
As we arrived in Jyväskylä after a recent overnight in Tampere, I told Mimmu, I’m seeing Jyväskylä in a different light. I still like Tampere and Helsinki, don’t get me wrong. But Jyväskylä is a manifestation of my life’s sensibilities in the form of a city, much like Duluth. They should be sister cities. Never in my life have my family and me needed to "move, enjoy, and be well," quite like we do now. I admit it. This is a place for us.