Tor Rønnow

6 Star Finisher 7 Continents Finisher 75 Marathon countries Author of best-seller running book Mountain hiker Off-piste alpine skier Chess player

Virgin Money London Marathon 2015

Virgin Money London Marathon 2015 - Tor Rønnow

Just two weeks after running Marathon de Paris I had the fortune to participate in yet another truly great marathon, the World Major Virgin Money London Marathon featuring in here in year 2015 the strongest field ever in the history of marathon running. Despite tons of rain in the forecasted weather charts the race day came out dry during the hours of the event, it was even close to optimal conditions. But hey, let’s start by looking at some of the major tourist attractions in London.

British Museum

It is often beneficial to be reminded of an historical perspective on one’s life and doings and you get that – for free – in surplus at the British Museum in London. If you walk through the exhibition halls in the right sequence you’ll basically learn or get brush up of the entire history of the important parts of the civilization for the last 3000 years ! In the times of selfies, media and “me me me” it’s good to remember the skills, struggles and troublesome life conditions of the past.

Virgin Money London Marathon 2015 - Tor Rønnow

The collection contains several astonishing pieces of art from both the ancient Egyptian, Greek, Etruscian and Roman epoques / empires, notably the Parthenon Frieze and the Rosetta Stone.

National Gallery
Another free and absolutely mind-blowing museum is the National Gallery at the “top” of Trafalgar Square. It’s just a 15 minutes pleseant walk from the British Museum and you may choose to pass popular areas such as Soho, China Town, Covent Garden or the theatre district on your way. The National Gallery displays work of three of the four NINJA TURTLES, notably two pieces by Leonardo da Vinci. Other works are signed by painters such as Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Monet and Turner as one of the “latest”. Just insanely awesome stuff !!!

Virgin Money London Marathon 2015 - Tor Rønnow

Interestingly, the National Gallery displays the alternate version of “Virgin of the Rocks” by Leonardo da Vinci, the “first” one being at the Louvre in Paris. Thus, we hereby invent the marathon doublet “Virgin of the Rocks”: The Paris and London marathons !

Virgin Money London Marathon 2015
As in Paris, it was my third participation here in London too and it turned out to be the fastest. I tried to maintain a 5.30 pace as long as I could, this lasted until around km 26 and at that point I decided to go for a “secure sub-4” instead of the otherwise planned negative split.

One word sums up the entire race experience: AWESOME !!!
I don’t think I have ever seen so many spectators at any marathon before – the atmosphere was just electric !

Virgin Money London Marathon 2015 - Tor Rønnow

Of the 6 Marathon Majors London for sure has a special flavor to it !

See or relive Virgin Money London Marathon 2015 here:

Virgin Money London Marathon 2015 – billeder/fotos af Tor Rønnow (Danish)

Virgin Money London Marathon 2015 – pictures by Tor Rønnow (English)

Virgin Money London Marathon 2015 – photos de Tor Rønnow (Français)

Virgin Money London Marathon 2015 – bilder von Tor Rønnow (Deutsch)

Virgin Money London Marathon 2015 – foto di Tor Rønnow (Italiano)

Virgin Money London Marathon 2015 – fotos del Tor Rønnow (Español)

Marathon de Paris 2015

Sunday April 12th 2015 was an incredibly nice and sunny day in Paris (France) and it was also the very day for this year’s Marathon de Paris. Whoaa ! Speak about getting lucky ! In fact, the whole weekend was blessed with warm and sunny weather and it was a pleasure to walk around between the many shops and attractions of this mega-metropol.

Marathon de Paris - Tor Rønnow

Paris City

Paris is the most popular tourist city in the world and for good reasons: the atmosphere and charming sights, the cuisine, the museums, the Louvre and Mona Lisa, the Champs-Élysée and – oh, did I forget – the Eiffel Tower.

Marathon de Paris 2015
This was my third participation in Paris and even though I had to struggle a bit for it, I took home the full point. So did my friend Mikael and for his maiden marathon, it was a real privilege to accompany him towards his first finish line.

Marathon de Paris - Tor Rønnow

In toto Paris could not have displayed itself prettier than this race day, the support from the crowds was good and the overall race organisation impeccable. Next year is the 40th anniversary of Marathon de Paris, guess who is already signed up.

See or relive Marathon de Paris 2015 here:

Marathon de Paris 2015 – billeder/fotos af Tor Rønnow (Danish)

Marathon de Paris 2015 – pictures by Tor Rønnow (English)

Marathon de Paris 2015 – photos de Tor Rønnow (Français)

Marathon de Paris 2015 – bilder von Tor Rønnow (Deutsch)

Marathon de Paris 2015 – foto di Tor Rønnow (Italiano)

Marathon de Paris 2015 – fotos del Tor Rønnow (Español)

Amsterdam Marathon 2014

Sunday October 19th I completed the Amsterdam Marathon for the fourth time. It turned out to be a record  warm and humid Sunday in Holland and these factors made me struggle quite a bit, a little more than I had hoped for. However, it is always nice to visit cities like Amsterdam and with lasting impressions.

Amsterdam Marathon starts and ends at the old Olympic Stadion – a spectacular scene for a race lift-off indeed.

Below you find a series of the best pictures of the day and the full story is in the links. Enjoy.

See or relive the unique and spectacular Amsterdam Marathon 2014 here:

Amsterdam Marathon 2014 – billeder/fotos af Tor Rønnow (Danish)

Amsterdam Marathon 2014 – pictures by Tor Rønnow (English)

Amsterdam Marathon 2014 – bilder von Tor Rønnow (Deutsch)

Amsterdam Marathon 2014 – foto di Tor Rønnow (Italiano)

Amsterdam Marathon 2014 – fotos del Tor Rønnow (Español)

Brain Work: How Internet Chess improved my Running !

Ok, so maybe you read my October post on how to improve and reprogramme your Brain ? You pursuit in this could be many things such as working smarter and better, becoming more at ease, more loving or, like me, wanting to improve your running. Let me give you my personal breakthrough on a very surprising piece of Brain Work: how playing chess on the Internet improved my running technique !

Firstly, let me explain two concepts of Internet Chess that might be unfamiliar to you:

A) Bullet Chess Games
You typically have 1 minute for the whole game !

B) Premove
Due to the very limited amount of time, one tries (especially in the opening game) to move “before it’s time”, that is move whilst the other players time is actually counting. These premoves are often successful and save time, but can of course lead to major blunders and direct losses in a single move. The premoves are all about saving time.

Watch the first three minutes of the video below and notice how many moves that are made literally within 1 second ! This is only doable due to the premoves, ie. (intuitively/instrictively) thinking and thus acting ahead.


Premoves in Bullet Chess: thinking and moving “before time” (notice the clocks versus number of moves)

My Achilles heel in Running: Cadence
My awesome coach Aleksandar Sørensen-Markovic of OOB Coaching early spotted that in running, my cadence was way to low. I knew this myself, obviously, but it came as a surprise that it was way too low even when running “fast” (for my running form), and the general importance of keeping a high cadence at all times was also an eye-opener to me.


Cadence explained. Note in the video: “muscle memory” equals neuron memory equals a Brain Pattern

My Achilles heel in Chess: Losing on time
Well, knowledge is one thing, skills  to change the situation are another matter and to put it short, I struggled with this through months (through years, actually). Until I remembered my Achilles heel in Chess too: I HATE LOSING – and especially on time in a won position. I REALLY REALLY hate it. And this is a VERY familiar pattern for my Brain: to premove in those bullet games to avoid these disgusting defeats. You may sense the motivation here is very high.

The Solution: Improving my Running Cadence by tricking my Brain
So now we have the Lego pieces all together: The Premove concept, the runner with a pathetic cadence, the childish chess player hating to lose on time (in 1 minute games, sigh) and the Brain groupie wanting to utilize the hindsight of modern Brain research as intuitively “sensed”. So what emerges of all this ?

Well, I have “tricked” my Brain to “believe” that my legs are playing bullet chess ! One leg, one color. Ground contact time equals time spend on the chess clock. Therefore, my running cadence is forced to become high – ie. using as little time as possible – as the opposite is leading to defeat.  My feet, my legs, my entire body, actually, is premoving those Running Strides and thus utilizing an indeed very trained Brain Pattern for me. The result has been a vastly improved Running Form and Cadence for me and I am now doing split times I only dreamed of in the past.

Obviously, and luckily, the common denominator to Bullet Chess and Running Cadence is: Time. Applied differently but installed in me as a very strong Brain Pattern and with a Physical Component in each area: In Chess moving the pieces, in Running moving my legs. Surely, this “trick” repeatedly uses a sort of Visualization of my Running Cadence, thus implementing one of the recommended tools from the modern Brain research.

Learning Points: Identify Your Successful Skillset and Tranfer it
I believe my story here could be inspirational.  I firmly believe that Brain Work will be a central theme in many things in the years to come,  and that we are only beginning to hear about all the things modern Brain research can do for us. Or rather, how we all have the opportunity to learn, study and apply these things.

Doing so I believe that the fastest results may come by the re-utilization or transfer of skillsets (= Brain Patterns) already well installed in each of us, and, alternatively, by mimicking  Patterns observed / learned in others.

Every Human Being is the Master of something, or becoming so.

Power of Tens and the Big Data of Love and Loneliness

One of the current hypes in the media and IT is the concept of “Big Data”. We have never had access to so much information and so many data to correlate as we have now, and we do indeed see very interesting articles on many different aspects of the Human lives and Civilizations, not to mention Businesses. It seems almost for certain that the “Big Data revolution” is and will become yet another driver for the further evolution of our societies and ways of living. So we better get used to the Term.

Thinking about Numbers – which you could call a sub-task of analyzing Big Data – is not a new discipline at all.  Indeed, the ancient Greek Philosopher Pythagoras is famous for the quote “Everyting is Numbers!”, and we have all struggled with Mathematics in School and the concept of “Powers of Tens”.  In case you forgot: 1*10^3 means 10*10*10 = 1000, and likewise 1*10^-2 means 0.1 *0.1 = 0.01. You will appreciate that once you get it, the Powers of Tens is a pretty neat and simple concept.

So the question of this Post is: did you really ever think about the Powers of Tens ? Let me elaborate: In the metric system, entities measured in 1 meters (1*10^0) are in the same scale as yourself, your kids, your car. Entities in 1*10^1 are like two rooms in your house, entities in 1*10^2 like the houses in your street or the distance of a 5 minutes walk, ie. hundreds of meters. Entities in 1*10^3 (1000 meters) is like the numbers of kilometers to your work not to long away (“a few kilometers”) and entities in 1*10^4  (10.000 meters) is like the distance your are sitting in when up flying in an air plane in it’s normal flight height. So think about this: there are only four (4) Powers of Tens difference to your normal life (1*10^0) looking down from that airplane (1*10^4) ! When you do sit in the airplane and look down, you will have a hard time to grasp that the “dimension” of single meters (1*10^0) even exist ! You can merely glimpse the houses and to imagine that they are actually filled with stuff like kitchenware, shoes and chairs seems kind of unreal from the distance of 10 kilometers. Try it the next time you fly !


Looking a 3-fold Power of Tens down !

Ok, this was just the preparation for the bigger data: think about the distances around the globe, the distances in the Solar System, or, in the World of Chemistry, the Number of molecules in your body or in the food you eat. Example: 18 gram of water contain approx.  6.022 * 10^23 molecules (= 1 mole of H2O). It is completely out of our hands, say heads, to comprehend numbers of this magnitude. This is yet, however, elementary chemistry taught to everyone in school. We can round the number of to 1*10^23, ie.
6 * 100000000000000000000000 water molecules – in 18 ml of water !

The Number of People in an Persons Life
Ok, enough of the nerdy stuff, let’s move on to the most important: the significant persons in your life. Average Numbers could be:

* we estimate the world population to 7 billion (7* 10^9) human beings
* you have 7 close relatives in your family – meaning there are 1 billion (1* 10^9) people per close relative you have !
* you have 7 very close friends – again, 1 billion (1* 10^9) people for each important friend in your life
* you have 70 close friends, most important colleagues, and other significant persons in you life – ratio is now 1:(1* 10^8)
* you have 700 odd persons in your “network”, colleagues, and other people you connect with from time to time – ratio is now 1:(1* 10^7)

I guess you get the pattern in the ciphers by now. Let’s look on the last two situations:  say you have 70 “really important” persons in your life, well then there are 100 million people on the Earth for each. 100 million people equals the entire populations of Germany, The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries all together ! We Humans tend to care a lot about “what the others think”, but when you inspect the data here, it’s hard not to think: Why ? Why is it important what 70 odd people might think about you, when you for each have 100 million (1* 10^8) people that never have and probably never will know or hear or care about you at all. Why ? Well, I guess the answer is that we Humans in fact relate emotionally, including our Vanity, to the Small Numbers. Our feelings steer around our few loved ones (most importantly, our children and our parents), around the one partner we either have or not have, around our few very close friends, our one childhood, our one career, our one appearance, our one relegion, one sexuality etc. Yes, our Hearts are controlled by the Small Numbers and thus we easily feel lonely here in the Modern World where we are confronted by these immense amounts of the Big Data (=many strangers) including the superficial nature of the Social Networks. My take is that we Humans are not build for the Big Data as beings. And thus we feel lonely.


Do you feel alone in the World ? We all are ! By the Numbers.

So we are in a dilemma here.  We are Maze Runners in our own neurotic psychology  trying to balance the emotions of the Small Numbers with the ever increasing potential opportunities of the Big Data. The key is balance, or with another word: temperance, one of the cardinal Virtues in the Greek Philosophy. We have to understand what the Numbers imply to all Humans: no one get’s anything for free ! We all have the Numbers against us ! And we can all have them on our side. It is a Brain thing, it is an emotional challenge, it is the very mastery called Life ! So run into your Maze and increase your odds !


A Marathon is made up by so many individuals, so many personal stories, so many spirits and faiths, yet poeple bring themselves out there, they struggle, they take decisions, they experience things, alone and together at the same time. Indeed, the Marathon is a wonderful Metaphor for Life itself.

My practical suggestions are:

A) Be yourself, be genuine and uphold and defend your own integrity. (Billions of people don’t care if  you fake it anyways)
B) Understand that “everybody” are strangers. We are all lonely. So adjust your feelings to this core fundamental
C) Safekeep and maintain your close relationships. Friends come, as you may realize, in Small Numbers for most of us.
D) Be open and friendly to all Humans. The Big Numbers imply that your next new friend, lover or spouse is out there !
E) Welcome criticism and resistance ! Be happy that someone actually spend their time on you – billions don’t.
F) Get into the game ! For all we know, Life comes as a one-off thing, so get the most out of it ! Exploit yourself. Act !