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

5 maratons in 5 Days !

So… the week of Truth has arrived… am I just a spineless worm or am I an enduring, strong and motivated athlete… or just plain nuts ?  😉 Well, case is that this is the week for my challenge of five marathons in 96 hours, starting Wednesday in Skövde, Sweden. The weather forecast looks great, not a bad thing at all !

Tor Rønnow (Foto: Bjarne Andersen, Marathon Travel)

I am glad to be amongst friends… the brave Danes Mogens Pedersen, Vagn Kirkelund, Peter Bøgevig and Anders Munch Madsen will participate as well… and so will my Swedish master and friend Lennart Skoog… and in toto it seems that around 30 runners are up to the quest of hunting down these five races in one streak.

UPDATE: WE DID IT !!!

Paris marathon 2008

It is amazing what you can experience during just one weekend !

Fly down to Paris, collect the bib number, see parts of the city and do some shopping, eat, sleep and then up and run Paris marathon 2008 Sunday. Run, run, run… then a shower, jump to the Metro, race to Le Louvre… and walk back to the bus to the airport… fly, fly, fly… train.. and back in your own bed Sunday evening. Great !!!

The marathon ? Just awesome !!! See the picures and video here !

Paris marathon 2008

Transaction Analysis… for Runners also ?

Recently, I attended a very good and interesting course on ‘Communication’ … yes, the kind of stuff we all fail to deal with every day at some level or in some situation. Part of the course material was a short introduction to Transaction Analysis (TA) which I found to be a very useful tool for the processing and evaluation of the everyday communication, be it professionally, as a parent, a partner or whatever.

Basically, TA is about considering ego-states and analyzing communication patterns on that premise. The basic model is shown on the illustration below.

Ego states

So, what is the deal here ? The deal is that when we communicate transactions should be complementary (parallel) rather than crossed… that is,  problems and poor comminication outcomes are more likely to occur in the latter case.

A crossed transaction

So… as one says ‘it takes two to communicate’ … well yes, and TA is about analyzing from which ego-states the two persons are ‘acting’ from. For business and professional purposes the ideal is to have a parallel transaction on the adult (=objective) level.

Now as  a Runner… can this be useful ? Well… when you blend in the ideas of personality parts from Psychosynthesis I believe you can ! I’ll have to think more about this and will elaborate in a future article. But for sure I think it will be meaningful to analyze one’s inner communication and self-talk inspired by the above model and concepts, especially when it comes to either quiting something or holding on forcefully.

‘Who’ are your inner actors and how do they communicate ? What does it mean to your motivation and to your results ?

Brutal Stuff !

My next marathon coming up this eastern is the very tough ‘Brutalis marathon’ in Aalborg, Denmark… for sure one of the toughest marathons in Denmark ! The route comprises three extreme hills, one being very long and two being very steep … and all this must be managed six times !

[gmap name=’mymap’ lat=’57.037554′ lng=’9.89233′ zoom=’12’ width=’400′ height=’400′]

See the route here ! And see you there !!  😉

Regards…. Tor 😉