Sarvsalö-"åttan" (or S8 for short) is a half-marathon that is run on Sarvsalö in Lovisa county in Finland.
Sarvsalö-"åttan" (the Sarvsalö-"eight") has got its name from the route (look at the route map and you'll get it...). The main idea of the competition is to have a reason for training instead of falling back to the most common Finnish pastime hobby; drinking beer and eating sausages.
The competition has three series:
- Men's half-marathon
- Women's half-marathon
- Half-marathon relay
The half marathon relay is run by a pair. The first relay leg is about 14 km and the second leg is about 7 km.
All series start at the same time.
For a more detailed description of the route go here.
The first ever Sarvsalö-"åttan" was held on Friday the 24th of July 2003. The competition was an instant success that gathered participants and spectators from near and far. The weather was as hot as it can get in Finland, but almost all of the starting 27 competitors made it to the finish line.
The first years the event was aranged at the local Café Oddas (no longer in business) to then move "next door" to Ljungars. For ten years the instigators of the event stood for the arrangements and after that the event was handed over to Sarfsalö Ungdomsförening (SUF) who had alrady been involved in the arrangements since the event moved to Ljungars.
The event grew steadily over the years and the current participant record was set 2013 when 141 runners were on the starting line.
The event has been blessed with good weather throghout the years - to date it has only rained once during the actual race.
In 2016 chip-based (RFID) was tried to replace the manual (and sometimes challenging) timekeeping.
The global COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to the competition in 2020 and 2021. A few hardcore runners still went ahead and ran the route on their own on the 25th of July (keeping appropriate social distancing, of course!), but no official results were recorded.
In 2023 a new shorter distance (mixed class) of 7 km was introduced. The route for this class follows the "lower half" of the full route.
On these pages you can find pictures, results, statistics, route details and other information about Sarvsalö-"åttan".
